History of the harpsichord  From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Harpsichord in the
Flemish style. The translations of the Latin mottos are "Without
skill art is nothing" and "While I lived I was silent—in death I
sweetly sing."  The harpsichord was an important keyboard
instrument in Europe from the 15th through the 18th centuries,
and as revived in the 20th, is widely played today. This article
gives a history of the harpsichord; for information on the
construction of this instrument, its variant forms, and the
music composed for it, see harpsichord.   The New Grove
summarizes the earliest historical traces of the harpsichord:
"The earliest known reference to a harpsichord dates from 1397,
when a jurist in Padua wrote that a certain Hermann Poll claimed
to have invented an instrument called the 'clavicembalum';[1]
and the earliest known representation of a harpsichord is a
sculpture (see below) in an altarpiece of 1425 from Minden in
north-west Germany."[2]  Psaltery of the 14th