Often depicted in carvings c. 800 AD, the Norse hero Gunther (also known as Gunnar), played a lute with his toes as he lay dying in a snake-pit, in the legend of Siegfried. By 1200 AD, the four string "guitar" had evolved into two types: the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, wide fingerboard and distinct soundholes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which resembled the modern guitar with one soundhole and a narrower neck.

They were added often nearly new as tempo instruments in ensembles than as solo instruments, and can often be seen in that role in ancient music performances. (Gaspar Sanz' Instrucción de Música sobre la Guitarra Española of 1674 constitutes the majority of the surviving solo corpus for the era.) Fender Guitars Renaissance and Baroque guitars are easily distinguished because the Renaissance guitar is very plain and the Baroque guitar is model ornate, with ivory or grove inlays all over the neck and body, and a paper-cutout inverted "wedding cake" inside the hole.