It is one of the most famous violins in the world: Il Cannone, the favorite instrument of the great Italian composer Niccolo Paganini, underwent a full “medical” check-up at the weekend, using the most modern technology, at the Grenoble Synchrotron, in the southeast France, where he was scanned from all sides.

“A dream” or “fantastic experience”, according to the protagonists who hope to ascertain the condition of the instrument but also to understand what makes a violin “excellent”, mainly by analyzing the structure of its wood.

The “cannon”, as it was called because of the power of its “voice”, belonged for almost 40 years to the conductor who bequeathed it to his hometown of Genoa. It was made in 1743 by the famous Cremona string maker Giuseppe Bartolomeo Guarneri del Jesuo. Today it is considered priceless and is the most important exhibit of the museum of Genoa, from where it is rarely released and always under strict security measures. Among the lucky few who are allowed to touch and play with it are the winners of the international Paganini violin competition held every two years in Genoa.

This time, however, the violin made it all the way to Grenoble to undergo “non-destructive analysis” at the European Synchrotron (ESRF), a fourth-generation particle accelerator. This technique, called X-ray microtomography, had previously been tested on two other violins for safety reasons. It provides the ability to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the violin down to the molecular level of the wood. Analysts can zoom in locally to any point, no matter how small, explained the experts who undertook the project.

For this study, carried out at the request of the management of the Paganini competition, the instrument was placed inside a glass tube mounted on a machine, which in turn was enclosed in a glass frame, so that the temperature and humidity conditions be the ideal ones. This was also the biggest concern of the team of scientists.

The analysis consisted of “a full scan at 30 micrometers to create a map of potential defects, and in the end they found very few,” said Paul Taforo, the scientist in charge of the “BM18 beamline,” the large engine room where the experiment. A very low dose of X-rays was used so that the violin would not be in any danger, assured the palaeontologist, through whose hands many other valuable objects passed in recent years, such as the skull of Tomuai, the oldest known hominid, but also rare fossils of the winged dinosaur archeopteryx.

“The first goal is maintenance. If it ever needs any repairs, we’ll have all the details” to repair the violin, explained Taforo, who is also an amateur violinist. As he said, working with this violin “was like a dream”. The second goal is for scientists to better understand why this particular violin has such a sound quality.

It will take months for the scan results to be fully analyzed. Whatever it is, Alberto Giordano, conservator of the precious instrument in Genoa, reminded that it is important to handle it with great care so that it passes unchanged to the next generations. “I’m getting older but it’s still the same,” he joked. “It’s like The Picture of Dorian Gray, it stays fresh as a rose.”