or viols). These comprised instruments of different sizes, some as large as the famous violoni--as 'big as a man'--mentioned by Prospero Bernardino in 1493.

Pio also notes that the fifth string of the viola da gamba is uniquely called a ''bordone'' (drone)--both in the manuscript of the early 15th-century music theorist Antonius de Leno, and in the treatises of the Venetian Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego and . However, it is not a drone and