A musical instrument invented by Leonardo da Vinci ... maybe (updated)

A musical instrument invented by Leonardo da Vinci ... maybe (updated)

YouTube link.A bizarre instrument combining a piano and cello has finally been
played to an audience more than 500 years after it was dreamt up
Leonardo da Vinci.

Da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance genius who painted the Mona
Lisa, invented the viola organista - which looks like a baby grand
piano – but never built it, experts say. The viola organista has now come to life, thanks to a Polish
concert pianist with a flair for instrument-making and the patience and
passion to interpret da Vincis plans... This instrument has the characteristics of three we know: the harpsichord, the organ and the viola da gamba, Zubrzycki said as he debuted the instrument at the Academy of Music in the southern Polish city of Krakow...

Sixty-one gleaming steel strings run across it, similar to the inside of a baby grand.Each is connected to the keyboard, complete with smaller black keys for sharp and flat notes. But unlike a piano, it has no hammered dulcimers. Instead, there are four spinning wheels wrapped in horse-tail hair, like violin bows.To turn them, Zubrzycki pumps a pedal below the keyboard connected to a crankshaft. As he tinkles the keys, they press the strings down onto the wheels, emitting rich, sonorous tones reminiscent of a cello, an organ and even an accordion.
More details at The Age, with a hat tip to reader Shirin for the link.

Addendum: Some doubts have been raised as to the historical relevance of this instrument:Basically, it
appears that the instrument built by Slawomir Zubrzycki is not so much a
realization of a design by Leonardo da Vinci as it is a reconstruction of
the instrument described as a “Geigenwerk/GeigenInstrument, oder
GeigenClavicymbel” in the second volume of Michael Praetoriuss Syntagma
Musicum...

Now its certainly true that da Vinci made some sketches of a
continuously-bowed keyboard instrument (which he dubbed the “viola
organista”) , but the sketches are pretty rough, and most of them show an
action thats quite different from the one in Zubrzyckis instrument (which
uses the same rosin-coated wheels as Haidens geigenwerk). In short,
Zubrzyckis instrument seems to me to be a nice reconstruction of a
16th-century German instrument that just happens to share some of the
characteristics of da Vincis imagined “viola organista” (which Haiden
almost certainly knew nothing about).
More at the link, found by reader Pam!