Discovered in 1890 amid claims — never proven — that it once belonged to Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), the cembalo is notably plain. There is no painted lid, no gilded moulding, no mythological scene of the kind that ornaments so many Flemish, Italian, and French instruments of the period.
Whether or not Bach ever touched it, the instrument belongs to a world in which he would have been at home. Lutheran worship treated music not as embellishment but as a form of theological work — a means by which the word of God was made audible and intelligible to a congregation. Bach himself wrote that the aim of music should be the glory of God and the recreation of the mind, and he composed accordingly: with immense rigour, and with a seriousness of purpose that admitted very little that was gratuitous, however elaborate the result. A cembalo built to that conviction would look very much like this one — restrained, serious, and concerned entirely with what it sounds like rather than what it looks like.
References
Wolff, C. (2000) Johann Sebastian Bach: the learned musician. New York: W.W. Norton