When Was the Violin Invented? A Brief History of the Violin

The violin took its modern shape in northern Italy in the first half of the 16th century, somewhere between about 1520 and 1550. No single person invented it. Andrea Amati of Cremona is the maker most often credited, though he settled the instrument’s proportions rather than dreamed it up, and makers in nearby Brescia were building violini at the same time. The oldest violin that still survives with a date on it was made by Amati in 1564.

That is the short answer. The longer one is more interesting, and it corrects a few things you will find repeated confidently across the internet.

Who invented the violin?

Nobody, in the sense the question usually means. There is no inventor’s name in the record and no moment when a first violin appeared.

Andrea Amati (c. 1505–1577) gets the credit because his workshop in Cremona produced the earliest instruments that look and behave like violins as we know them. What survives of his life is civil paperwork rather than anything about the instruments themselves. A Cremona census in 1526 lists him as a liutaro, a lute maker. In 1539 he rented the property that became known as Amati’s Stall. His son Antonio is recorded working alongside him by 1556. A payment record from 1572 mentions a violin of his going to the French court. He died in 1577 at seventy-two.

You will often read that Amati built his first three-string violins in 1542 and 1546. Treat that carefully. Neither instrument is authenticated, and when Count Cozio di Salabue examined one in 1861 he criticized its workmanship and said the label merely “looks like it was written in the sixteenth century.” He was hedging, and so should we.

The competing claim belongs to Gasparo da Salò of Brescia, who a handful of 19th-century writers credited with inventing the violin outright. The dates rule it out. Gasparo was born in 1540 and first appears in Brescia in 1563, by which time Amati had been running his own shop for more than twenty years.

The more serious challenge comes from Brescia generally, where guild records name makers producing violini as early as 1524. That is earlier than anything documented for Amati. The problem is that no Brescian maker of that era dated a label, and the surviving Brescian instruments have been cut and remodeled so heavily that their original form is hard to read.

Britannica puts it about as well as it can be put: the earliest makers, among them Gasparo da Salò and Andrea Amati, had settled the violin’s average proportions before the end of the 16th century. Plural. No inventor.

When and where was the violin invented?

Northern Italy, across roughly three decades in the early 1500s. The anchor points, in order of how solid they are:

• 1523. A Savoy treasury record dated 17 December pays for “trompettes et vyollons de Verceil,” from Vercelli. One of the earliest written uses of the word.
• 1524 and 1527. Brescian guild and tax records naming makers of violini.
• 1529 to 1536. The paintings of Gaudenzio Ferrari, which give us the first unambiguous pictures. His Madonna of the Orange Tree in Vercelli dates to 1529 or 1530. The cupola he painted at Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno between 1534 and 1536 shows violin, viola and cello shapes among fifty-six instruments.

Scholars still argue about whether Ferrari’s instruments have three strings or four. The standard reading is three, with a counter-argument that a fourth peg sits hidden behind the pegbox in the Saronno fresco.

As for Cremona against Brescia, both cities have a case and neither wins it outright. Brescia has the earlier documents. Cremona has the surviving instruments, because Brescian makers never dated their labels. It is worth noticing that Ferrari’s paintings are in Vercelli and Saronno, which are neither city. The violin looks less like one town’s invention than like something the whole of Lombardy arrived at together.

The oldest violin that still exists

It lives in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: an Andrea Amati dated 1564, known as the “Charles IX.” The label carries the year in Roman numerals and is now almost illegible. W.E. Hill & Sons gave it to the museum in 1939.

It belongs to a set made for the French court, and the instruments carry the motto Pietate et Justitia painted on their ribs. Sources differ on how many survive, generally putting it at eight or nine. You can find them at the Ashmolean, at Tullie House in Carlisle (England, not Scotland, whatever half the internet says), at the Museo del Violino in Cremona, at the Musée de la musique in Paris, and at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, which holds the “King” cello, the oldest surviving cello in the world.

One complication worth knowing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns an Amati violin it dates to about 1560 and calls the earliest surviving example. Tarisio’s archive dates the same instrument to 1570. Because it carries no date on its label, the argument cannot be settled, which is why the Ashmolean instrument keeps the title of oldest dated violin rather than oldest violin outright.

While we are correcting things: you will read that Charles IX took delivery of thirty-eight Amati instruments in 1534. He was born in 1550. The figure comes from a French writer in 1780, more than two centuries after the fact, and only one contemporary payment document survives, for a single violin in 1572.

What came before the violin

The violin descends from the medieval fiddle, or vielle, by way of the lira da braccio, an Italian instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries. The lira is the closest ancestor. It was held on the arm the same way and its body was traveling in the same direction.

The rebec is better understood as a cousin than a parent. It gave the violin its tuning in fifths but not its construction, since a rebec is carved from a single block with the body and neck continuous.

The rabāb sits further back still. Bowing itself reached Europe from Central Asia and the Islamic world sometime before the 10th century, through instruments of that family. But the rabāb is not the violin’s ancestor in any structural sense, and it is Persian rather than Arab in origin. Arab writers themselves said they had it from the Persians.

The violin’s own contributions arrived in Lombardy in the early 1500s and have no single precedent: four strings tuned in fifths, f-holes, overhanging edges with purfling, a scroll and a lateral pegbox, and arched plates carved separately from the ribs.

How has the violin changed over time?

Enormously, and here is the part most people find surprising: almost every surviving Cremonese violin has been rebuilt. Stradivari’s and Guarneri’s included. The instrument a soloist plays today is not the instrument that left the workshop.

• The neck was lengthened by around 30 millimeters and angled back, then mortised into the body rather than nailed on. Nearly every violin made before about 1830 has had a neck graft, keeping the original scroll and splicing on a new neck below it.
• The bridge grew taller and more arched, which follows from the tilted neck and gives the player clearance on each string.
• The fingerboard lengthened and became solid ebony, extending the upper register.
• The bass bar roughly doubled, from about 120 millimeters to somewhere between 175 and 280, to carry the higher string tension.
• The strings changed twice over. Everything was gut at first. From the late 1600s the G was overspun with silver or copper wire, and by the 1730s wound gut had taken over the lower strings. Steel E strings arrived in the early 1900s and became near-universal during the gut shortages of the First World War. Synthetic cores followed in 1970, when Thomastik-Infeld launched Dominant.
• The chin rest did not exist at all until the violinist Louis Spohr invented it around 1820. It was not for the player’s comfort. It was a block meant to keep chin pressure from cracking the tailpiece. Comfort was the reason later violinists took it up, and it was not standard equipment until close to 1900.

What drove all this was music itself. Concerts moved out of courts and into large public halls, concert pitch crept upward, composers wrote further up the fingerboard, and around 1785 the Tourte bow arrived with its concave stick and higher tension. Violins had to be louder. The wholesale conversion happened around 1800, much of it carried out in French workshops.

Stradivari, Guarneri, and the secret that isn’t

Antonio Stradivari worked in Cremona from about 1644 to 1737 and made roughly 1,100 instruments, of which around 650 survive. His “golden period” runs from about 1700 to 1720.

Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, known as del Gesù for the sacred monogram he began putting on his labels in 1731, lived from 1698 to 1744 and was the last maker in his family. Only about 150 of his instruments survive. His final years produced his most admired work, bolder and less regular than a Stradivari and darker in tone, which is why Paganini played a Guarneri of 1743 and called it his cannon.

Now the myth. The idea that Stradivari guarded a secret varnish is not supported by the evidence. Jean-Philippe Echard and colleagues at the Musée de la musique in Paris spent seven years analysing five Stradivari instruments and published the results in 2010. The varnish turned out to be an ordinary oil-resin system with common colorants, made from materials used broadly across 18th-century decorative arts. There was nothing proprietary in it.

A separate hypothesis from Joseph Nagyvary at Texas A&M holds that the wood was chemically treated, probably against woodworm and fungus, with acoustic effects as a side benefit. The minerals are genuinely there. Whether they were deliberate is still argued over, so it is a hypothesis rather than a finding.

The most striking evidence comes from blind listening tests run by the acoustician Claudia Fritz and the violin maker Joseph Curtin, published across three papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2014 they gave ten professional soloists six Old Italian violins, five of them Stradivari, and six new ones, in a rehearsal room and a 300-seat hall. Six of the ten chose a new violin as their favorite. New instruments outscored old by roughly six to one, and the players could not tell which was which above chance. A 2017 study extended the test to audiences in Paris and New York, who also preferred the new violins and judged them to project better.

This does not mean old Italian instruments are bad. It means the mystique around them is harder to defend than the price tags suggest, and that a very good modern violin is a genuinely competitive instrument. For a student, that is encouraging news.

Common questions

When was the violin invented?

There is no single date. The four-string violin emerged in northern Italy between roughly 1520 and 1550, and its proportions were settled by makers working between about 1540 and 1580. The earliest written reference is a Savoy treasury record from 1523.

Who invented the violin?

No individual is documented as the inventor. Andrea Amati of Cremona is usually credited with giving the violin family its lasting form, working alongside makers in Brescia who were building similar instruments at the same time.

Where was the violin invented?

Northern Italy, in Lombardy. Cremona and Brescia both have a claim, and the earliest surviving pictures of violins come from Vercelli and Saronno.

When was the first violin made?

Unknown. The oldest violin that survives with a date on it was made by Andrea Amati in 1564 and is held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Who made the first violin?

No maker can be identified. Records of makers producing violini in Brescia go back to 1524, three years before the earliest surviving reference to Andrea Amati as a maker of bowed instruments.

How has the violin changed over time?

The neck was lengthened and angled back, the bridge raised, the fingerboard extended, the bass bar strengthened, and gut strings gave way to wound gut, then steel and synthetic cores. The chin rest was added around 1820. Almost every surviving violin from before 1830 has been rebuilt along these lines.

Learning the violin

Five hundred years of refinement have produced an instrument that is still, at the beginning, a piece of wood and four strings under a bow. That has not changed and it is part of the appeal.

The California Conservatory of Music has taught violin for fifteen years, to students starting as young as four and to adults picking the instrument up for the first time. You can find us in Sunnyvale, Fremont and Redwood City. If you have been curious, our violin lessons page explains how we teach and how to book a free introductory lesson.

Where this comes from

A good deal of what circulates online about the violin’s origins is repeated rather than checked, so it seems fair to show our working. The dates and attributions here come from museum collections and published research rather than from other websites.

• Tarisio’s Cozio Carteggio, for the Amati family records and John Dilworth’s account of the Brescian school
• The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and The Strad, on the 1564 “Charles IX” violin
• Britannica, on the violin and the rabāb
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on its own early Amati and the “King” cello
• Echard and colleagues, “Stradivari’s Varnish,” Angewandte Chemie, 2010
• Fritz, Curtin and colleagues, three studies of new and old violins in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012, 2014 and 2017
• Roger Hargrave, “Period of Adjustment,” on the conversion of baroque instruments
• Strings magazine, on Louis Spohr and the chin rest

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