A scroll is the decoratively carved beginning of the neck of certain

stringed instruments String instruments, stringed instruments, or chordophones are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer plays or sounds the strings in some manner. Musicians play some string instruments by plucking the st ...

, mainly members of the

violin family The violin family of musical instruments was developed in Italy in the 16th century. At the time the name of this family of instruments was viole da braccio which was used to distinguish them from the viol family (viole ''da gamba''). The standa ...

. The scroll is typically carved in the shape of a

volute A volute is a spiral, scroll-like ornament that forms the basis of the Ionic order, found in the capital of the Ionic column. It was later incorporated into Corinthian order and Composite column capitals. Four are normally to be found on an Ion ...

(a rolled-up spiral) according to a canonical pattern, although some violins are adorned with carved heads, human and animal. The quality of a scroll is one of the things used to judge the

luthier A luthier ( ; AmE also ) is a craftsperson who builds or repairs string instruments that have a neck and a sound box. The word "luthier" is originally French and comes from the French word for lute. The term was originally used for makers o ...

's skill. Instrument scrolls usually approximate a

logarithmic spiral A logarithmic spiral, equiangular spiral, or growth spiral is a self-similar spiral curve that often appears in nature. The first to describe a logarithmic spiral was Albrecht Dürer (1525) who called it an "eternal line" ("ewige Linie"). Mor ...

. Although many references assert that the instrument scroll closely follows the

golden spiral In geometry, a golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is , the golden ratio. That is, a golden spiral gets wider (or further from its origin) by a factor of for every quarter turn it makes. Approximations of the golden spira ...

(a specific form of the logarithmic spiral) this assertion is demonstrably false.

Scrollwork The scroll in art is an element of ornament and graphic design featuring spirals and rolling incomplete circle motifs, some of which resemble the edge-on view of a book or document in scroll form, though many types are plant-scrolls, which l ...

is a common feature of

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

ornament, the period when string instrument design became essentially fixed. Below the scroll is a hollowed-out compartment (the

pegbox A variety of methods are used to tune different stringed instruments. Most change the pitch produced when the string is played by adjusting the tension of the strings. A tuning peg in a pegbox is perhaps the most common system. A peg has a g ...

) through which the tuning pegs pass. The instrument's strings are wound around these pegs. The scroll and pegbox are almost always carved out of one piece of wood. In addition, the scroll aids in tuning solely with the pegs by providing leverage to push the peg in as it is being wound, preventing it from slipping out.

References

{{Violin family String instrument construction