Inventor of the Piano. He was recruited to work for Prince Ferdinand de Medici, his father the Grand Duke of Tuscany and later the Medici family to take care of the family’s many musical instruments, to restore valuable harpsichords and also as an inventor of musical instruments. Under the Medici patronage and from 1690 to 1700 he invented two keyboard instruments - the multi choired spinet and oval spinet, both of which were documented in the Medici family’s inventory. An entry in this same inventory in 1700 referred to Cristofori’s piano - an “Arpicembalo”. By 1711, Cristofori had built 3 pianos, one of which was given to Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome and the other 2 were sold. The King of Portugal also bought one of his pianos. Cristofori was certainly admired and respected in his own lifetime for his work on the piano. Knowledge of how Cristofori's invention of the piano was initially received comes in part from the article published in 1711 by Scipione Maffei, an influential literary figure, in the “Giornale de'letterati d'Italia” of Venice. Further, an 18th-century music dictionary says of him: “Christofori Bartolomeo of Padua died in Florence [...] was the famous harpsichord maker, a distinguished restorer rendering even better good instruments made by other past masters and he was also the inventor of harpsichords with hammers." In the second half of the 20th century the early-instrument scholar, Grant O’Brien wrote that, "The workmanship and inventiveness displayed by the instruments of Cristofori are of the highest order and his genius has probably never been surpassed by any other keyboard maker of the historical period ... I place Cristofori shoulder to shoulder with Antonio Stradivarius” [Stradivarius was the famous maker of string instruments including the violin]. Only 3 of Cristofori’s pianos have survived. One piano dated from 1720 is housed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the second from 1722 is in the National Museum of Musical Instruments in Rome, and the third one made in 1726 is in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum of Leipzig University.