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A professional lute ensemble, the Venere Lute Quartet performs Renaissance and early Baroque music on different sized lutes. In addition to research into the existing music for these instruments, the group is actively expanding the surviving lute ensemble repertoire by making historically-informed arrangements and recreating music that has been lost over the centuries. The Quartet is named after the Italian Renaissance luthier Vendelio Venere, who (like Stradivarius) was regarded among the finest luthiers of his age. Their exquisitely crafted "family" of Renaissance lutes are all strung in gut and are modeled after instruments from Venere's workshop.

Members of the Quartet are active lute professionals based in four center of early music activity in the United States (Boston, New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis).

Gail Gillispie (soprano lute), is a graduate of Oberlin College and the London Early Music Centre. She has performed with Andrew Lawrence-King, the Huelgas Ensemble, the Newberry Consort, the Milwaukee Medieval Players, the New York Ensemble for Early Music, and Jacob Heringman.

Douglas Freundlich (alto lute), launched his lute career in the 1970s with The Greenwood Consort, winning the Erwin Bodky Award and Musical America's "Young Artist of the Year." He has performed with the Boston Symphony, Boston Baroque, Swanne Alley, Emmanuel Music, Renaissonics, and others. He teaches lute at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA and he also cross-trains as a bebop bassist and catalogs music manuscripts at Harvard's Isham Library.

Christopher Morrongiello (tenor lute), a former British Marshall Scholar, is a graduate of the Mannes College of Music, the Royal College of Music, and has recently finished his PhD at Oxford. In 1996 the Marco Fodella Foundation awarded him a scholarship for studies at the Scuola Civica di Musica of Milan, and in 2006 the Lute Society of America chose him as the first Patrick O'Brien LSA Seminar Lecturer. An expert on Elizabethan and Jacobean music, Chris has relased a CD with soprano Emily Van Evera.

Phillip Rukavina (bass lute) studied lute with Hopkinson Smith in Basel, Switzerland. He was the Director of the Lute Society of America's summer program at the Amherst Early Music Festival in 2005, and regularly serves on the faculty of the Lute Society of America's Seminars. Phil has been a frequent guest instrumentalist with the Rose Ensemble and also has performed with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the New World Symphony.

The Venere Lute Quartet has performed throughout the United States and in Europe including appearances at the Lute Society of America seminars and festivals, and concerts for the Seattle Early Music Guild, La Guitarra California, Amherst Early Music Festival, Cambridge Society for Early Music, and the Fodella Foundation Series in Milan, Italy.