Viola da gamba Bass

Ventura di Francesco Linarolo (Venezia, 1585)

Without a doubt one of the most significant instruments of the collection, this magnificent and extremely rare bass viola da gamba was built by one of the salient lights of violin making in Renaissance Italy in the year 1585, that is, at the zenith of the musical creativity of the Serenissima Repubblica, that brilliant epoch, which brought forth the most sublime spirits, the Gabrielis, Merulo, Castello, Monteverdi and others, whose implant altered the course of Western music for generations to come. This viola da gamba lays testimony to the high art of instrument making in the Renaissance, which quite justly claims its place next to the astonishing achievements of the pictorial arts, sculpture, architecture and literature of the times.

This instrument most certainly was employed in a Venetian palace, richly decorated with paintings, tapestries, sculptures and ceramics or in a similarly magnificently ornamented church; since those masters, Gabrieli, Merulo, Monteverdi, worked for decades in the small city of Venice, it is indeed quite likely to imagine that this very instrument once performed music under the direction of one or more of those great masters. It is thus a particular privilege to be able to take this viol, tune it, and perform those masterpieces again, which it undoubtedly has already performed under the hands of innumerable artists.

A very similar instrument in painting:
Raffaello: Sancta Cecilia, ca. 1518

Another instrument of the same form, this time from a mass book
published in 1564 in Rome (Priv. collection Marc Strümper)
Note the similarity of the bridges in the two depictions

The dendrochronological investigations of the University of Hamburg  (Dr. Peter Klein and Dr. Micha Beuting) revealed that the annular rings of the wood of the top came from the 1352 to 1564, thus certifying the authenticity of the age of this instrument.

See also the treble viol by Giovanni Balla Bugger, which has a similar outline