page_title: Girolamo Zenti
section_title: Surviving instruments
hierarchical_section_title: Girolamo Zenti / Surviving instruments
caption_attribution_description: Keyboard instrument in the Musical Instrument Museum, Brussels, Belgium. Girolama de Zenti, Rome, 1637 - spinet.
context_page_description: Girolamo Zenti was an Italian harpsichord maker and organ builder in the 17th century. He is known as the probable inventor of the bentside spinet and for having traveled unusually extensively to practice his trade at the courts of Europe, including Rome, Florence, Paris, London and Stockholm.
context_section_description: No instruments from his time in northern Europe have been discovered, but around a dozen instruments from Italy have been attributed to him, although only two with certainty, a bentside spinet and a harpsichord.  The most famous is without doubt the 1631 bentside spinet now in Brussels. A true inner instrument of thinwalled cypress in an ornate outer box, single scale in brass.   A harpsichord, now preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, dated to the year of his death in 1666, is a single manual, 2x8', true inner-outer instrument, notbly restored by Cristofori's apprentice, Giovani Ferrini, bearing the inscription: "HIERONYMUS ZENTI FECIT ROMAE A.S. MDCLXVI/ JOANNES FERRINI FLORENTINVS RESTAVRAVIT MDCCLV"    The Metropolitan museum also houses an octave spinet probably by Zenti of unusually small size, possibly made for a child. In the Deutsches Museum in Munich there is an instrument traced through organological evidence to Zenti, that regrettably is a victim of Leopoldo Franciolini, a noted antiques fraudster in the late 19th century who ruined the instrument by installing two extra keyboards to pump up its price.
caption: Spinet by Zenti from 1637, now in the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels
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