Clock

CLOCK. - Since antiquity there have been reports of instruments for measuring time applied to buildings; nevertheless the clock understood as an element, even a decorative one, of an architecture is a rather late creation.

In the Middle Ages, even before the need for a clock in public buildings for the use of citizens, the need had been felt for an exact division of time in religious communities in order to regulate the life of the monks and for the hour of the Office. It therefore seems established that this is the reason why the first medieval clocks were installed inside rather than outside churches; only later were they provided with a bell and an external dial, thus also serving as public clocks. Not only that, but they gradually became ever more complex in their internal mechanism and in their dials adorned with astronomical or allegorical figures and animated by automatic figures, which at the striking of the hours perform specific gestures.

The most important examples of medieval clocks of interest to art are found in France and Germany. The cathedral of Beauvais possesses an internal clock of which the original mechanism is still preserved, which is dated back to the earliest times of that church; very ancient is
also that of the cathedral of Bourges (late 14th century-early 15th century) and of Notre-Dame of Dijon, transported there from Courtrai in 1382. Particularly worthy of mention is the clock of the cathedral of Strasbourg, provided with an astronomical dial and a complicated system of automata; finished in 1354, but reworked and modified over the course of the centuries (the present clock is from 1374), it remains the prototype not only of the preceding ones, but also of the German clock, whose oldest example is found inside the church of St. Mary of Danzig (1464-70), inasmuch as others, although existing in situ, were redone later (Lübeck, Münster etc.). Alongside this type there develops in the German countries, more than elsewhere, the public clock on the facade of the town hall; generally these are less complex organisms in which even the automata, when there are any, have simpler mechanisms (Ulm c. 1500, Esslingen 1588, Heilbronn late 16th century).

While the Swiss clock approaches the French and German prototype (Bern, Sion, Solothurn, Zurich, Zug), the English clock stands apart from it, being generally less complicated and monumental, with a not large dial surmounted by a few automatic figures: cathedral of Exeter of c. 1317, restored later; cathedral of Wells, already recorded in 1394 with an external and internal dial surmounted by a few automatic figures; Saint-Dunstan in London with automata (1671), cathedral of York (1750).

Even the primitive type of Italian public clock is rather simple and animated by few figures: at Orvieto that of the Torre Maurizio, named after the bronze statue that strikes the hours on the bell, and at Udine that of the Torre dell'orologio, built by Giovanni and Bernardo da Udine around 1530, but bearing a clock that already existed in 1397 on a previous building, are the oldest examples. To the 16th century belong the clocks of the Confraternita of Arezzo, with an astronomical dial; of the Torre dei Matti of Brescia, with automatic figures; of the Torrazzo of Cremona; of the Torre dell'orologio of Padua, which repeats in simplified form the type of Venice. It is this one of Venice that is the Italian clock closest to the transalpine one: the building, erected by Mauro Coducci in 1496-99, houses a large astronomical dial surmounted by a small loggia in which, at the striking of the hours, the Magi appear to pay homage to the Virgin with the Child, and the whole is finally surmounted by a bell on which two bronze figures strike the hours with a long hammer. Numerous, naturally, in the 16th century and in the following centuries, are the clocks on bell towers and on facades or towers of palaces, but generally they are of little interest from the artistic point of view, if we except the Baroque ones that form part, as a decorative-scenographic element, of the complex architecture of the time (Rome, S. Agnese in Piazza Navona, Collegio dei Filippini, S. Pietro; Superga, sanctuary etc.), or some from the last century, such as that of the Parliament of London of 1859. - See pl. XXII.

Maria Donati