Show Instrument
There are a couple of known claviorgans that were ‘show’ instruments. One surviving example is an automatic claviorgan by Matteus Rungell which is now in a museum in Dresden combining an organ and a spinet.
However, a more famous example is the ‘Galleria armonico’ assembled by Michelle Todini in Rome in the seventeenth century, and which ended its days in the palace of the Verospi marquises, now the Palazzo del Credito Italiano. This consisted of two rooms, one of which contained seven keyboard instruments all of which were said to be controlled from the keyboard of a harpsichord. This included an organ, three types of spinets, a violin, and another bowed string instrument. There are also several illustrations of the instrument, although it is not known how accurate any of them are. The harpsichord and its accompanying statues may now be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as well as a clay model surviving from its inception. No part of the composite instrument is known to survive.
Another example of a claviorgan playing stringed instruments is described in a letter from Henry Oldenburg in 1664.
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