However, already as early as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, harpsichords or clavicembali, of a superior quality, manufactured by Hans Ruckers and his sons Jean and Andreas, were imported into England. The instruments of these celebrated Antwerp manufacturers were tastefully embellished, and the best Dutch painters not infrequently enriched them with devices. The consequence has been that after the invention of the pianoforte, many of these old harpsichords were taken to pieces in order to preserve the valuable panels. The price of a fine harpsichord by Ruckers about 1770, was £120. The old _clavicembalo_ by Antonio Baffo, of Venice (Fig. 66), has slips of prepared leather instead of the usual crowquills, which, if original, would show that the statement of some writers as to Pascal Taskin in Paris being the first to use leather is erroneous. Taskin, in constructing in the year 1768 the _Clavecin à peau de buffle_, may have revived an old invention, which, however, he seems to have much improved. He made a _clavecin_ with three keyboards, two of which were connected with actions constructed of crowquills, and the third with an action of leather. The modification in quality of sound thereby obtained was greatly admired. The illustration (Fig. 67) represents a clavecin made by Pascal Taskin in the year 1786. The case is highly ornamented with Japanese figures and gilding. The invention of the _clavicembalo_ as well as of the _clavicordo_, is by some old writers ascribed to Guido Aretinus (or Guido d’Arezzo), the famous monk who is recorded to have invented, in the year 1025, the Solmisation, and also to have first conceived the idea of employing lines and dots in the notation of musical sounds. Unauthentic though the tradition may be which assigns to Guido the invention of the stringed instruments with a keyboard, it appears very probable that some rude kind of clavichord was first constructed about his time, or soon after.