Viola Organista: da Vinci's Instrument That Defies Time

More than five hundred years had to pass for another of Master Leonardo's designs to materialize. Beyond his paintings and engineering works, Leonardo da Vinci was no stranger to music, and among his many creations appears the “viola organista.” The pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki built a replica with his own hands in 2013 and also gave a concert with it.

What Makes It Unique?

You hear strings, but where are the violinists? All you see is a person sitting in front of what appears to be a piano. Although a piano has strings (officially classified as a “struck-string instrument” or “chordophone”), there is no bow in sight. The point is that the instrument is not a piano, and the player is not a violinist. Its name is “viola organista,” and the essence of its design is more than 500 years old. Who is responsible? None other than Leonardo da Vinci

The Modern Recreation

The most recent version of the viola organista was built by Polish pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki in 2013, who also has extensive experience constructing instruments. Zubrzycki invested more than five thousand hours of work and faced many problems, since no previous example exists. How does this mysterious instrument sound? Here are two videos to check it out (the second has English subtitles).

Tracing Its Origins

It is truly impressive, but our curiosity demands that we try to confirm whether the viola organista is truly something from the mind of Leonardo. We are dealing with information five centuries old, so precision becomes a luxury. However, the definitive answer comes from Zubrzycki himself in the second video. His “search” for the viola began with Jan Jarmusiewicz, a Polish designer of the nineteenth century. One undeniable thing is that the concept of the viola organista appears in several Leonardo drawings made between 1488 and 1489, as well as in the Codex Atlanticus, with twelve volumes dating from 1478 to 1519.

But da Vinci never built the instrument: the first physical creation based on the original design arrived almost a hundred years later under the name Geigenwerk, thanks to the skill of German inventor Hans Haiden. So we can conclude that the idea is from da Vinci, but the first prototype is German. Either way, I think it sounds very, very good. A beautiful curiosity.