designboom_leonardo frigo spends nearly a month hand illustrating each of his sculptural violins. tomb stones, dead, faceless men, mythical creatures, battles and other stories take time and patience to paint thinly atop his curved, musical canvases.

each violin tells a different story. to understand what they are, to notice every hidden detail, you’d need to spend a lot of time studying them slowly — perhaps reading them for as long as the artist spent rendering them. ‘I like to think that my musical instruments can be read as books,’ says leonardo frigo.