Guitar Rosettes

I was showing my guitar to a friend who is not very knowledgeable about music the other day and she looked at the rosette and said "is that painted on?" I realized that a lot of people probably don't know about guitar rosettes. Here is a photo of my guitar:

Click to enlarge

That is a close-up of the soundhole and surrounding rosette. A rosette is any round, stylized flower design, but as you can see, the flower motif is no longer necessary or even common. This design, by Robert Holroyd of Vancouver, BC, uses a traditional Haida motif. No, it is not painted. It is instead, a very precise and meticulous kind of marquetry, a very ancient art. What you have to do is assemble little wooden sticks of different colors in a cylinder around a form the exact size of the outer diameter of the soundhole. For example, the inner circle here is, I believe, a thin sheet of ebony, as is the very outermost circle. Inside those are other sheets of light colored wood and darker brown wood. I think the lighter colored is probably spruce, but the darker one I am unsure of--Honduras mahogany possibly? In any case, what you do is assemble these around the form and carefully--very carefully!--glue them in place. Then when the whole assemblage is dry, you simply saw off thin sections for each guitar needing a rosette. Here is a website that describes a rather more high-tech process.

Historically, the rosette was far more ornate than it is today and an opportunity for the luthier to show the limits of his art. Here are some examples from lutes and Baroque guitars:

As you can see, the rosette was a carved wood insert in the soundhole rather than a design around it. They could be even more elaborate as this Baroque guitar illustrates:

The origins of this kind of intricate design came from the Arabic 'oud, the predecessor to the European lute.