Is the “colascioncino” the eighteenth-century ancestor of “Cremonese” or “Bresciano” mandolin?

A new iconographic source, a new hypothesis of philological reconstruction

About “colascione” it has been written so much, but less we know certainly concerning to executive procedure; equally less known is the use of “colascioncino” – the smallest instrument of the family – and “Cremonese” or “Bresciano” mandolin, of which few written music has come there only, to forehead of reliable historical traces, about a very diffused use between the XVIII and the beginning of the XIX century.