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Timbre in the timber: how I date ancient violins

Forest ecologist Paolo Cherubini once helped to settle a legal dispute involving a viola supposedly made in the sixteenth century.
  1. Nic Fleming
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Paolo Cherubini inspects an old violin in his lab in Switzerland

Paolo Cherubini is a senior scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Zurich, Switzerland. Credit: Elisabetta Zavoli for Nature

Stringed instruments can be worth millions of dollars, particularly those made in northern Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are also many copies and forgeries.

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Nature 605, 782 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01394-8

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