Leonardo da Vinci’s viola organista was a keyboard instrument intended to sound bowed strings.
Leonardo developed the idea in the late 15th century and recorded several versions in his notebooks. Pressing keys would select notes, while a rotating mechanism would bring a continuously moving wheel or bowing surface into contact with strings. This allowed one player to control pitch through a keyboard while producing a sustained, string-like tone.
The instrument was never documented as a completed Renaissance performance instrument. Its design changed across Leonardo’s sketches, and later makers created reconstructions based on different interpretations of those drawings. The name “viola organista” is modern and reflects the instrument’s mixture of bowed-string and organ-like keyboard features.
It should not be confused with a normal viola, which is played with a handheld bow, or with a pipe organ, which produces sound through air in pipes. Leonardo’s concept belongs to his wider experiments with music, automation, friction, and mechanisms that could reproduce controlled motion.