![]() The hours on the dials of the watches, however, are not subdivided to register intervals of less than thirty minutes, although fifteen-minute intervals could be estimated. 1580–1615), has additional refinements: the dial displays the day of the month, the moon’s phases, its age in its monthly cycle, and its astrological aspects, as well as the time of day. Like Vallin, he was probably a refugee from the political and religious strife that destroyed traditional clockmaking in the Low Countries in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.Īnother watch ( 17.190.1607), this one by the Parisian Nicolas Forfaict (ca. A watch ( 17.190.1549) with a movement signed by Michael Nouwen (died 1613) strikes the hours (1–12) on a bell fitted to the interior of the case, and the movement is constructed in such a way that the train of wheels for driving the hand can be separately accessed from the train of wheels for activating the striking. Nouwen was a member of a Flemish family of clockmakers that originally lived in ‘s Hertogenbosch in Brabant, now a part of the Netherlands. The goldsmith who made the exquisite case and dial of the Museum’s version of the Lesser George remains unknown the movement is signed by Nicholas Vallin, a London watchmaker of Flemish origin who died in the plague of 1603.Īt about the same period, more serious timekeepers were being made, in both London and Paris. To the first category belongs an enameled gold watch formed as the Lesser George ( 17.190.1475), the jewel which the knights of the English Order of the Garter were obliged to wear as part of their daily dress. Neither variety, however, was a very accurate timekeeper, and the absence of the minute hand on all but the costliest watches of the period is indicative of their limitations. South Germans, too, contributed greatly to the diffusion of the invention, although the long-held notion that the Nuremberg clockmaker Peter Henlein (master in 1509, died 1542) was the inventor of the watch has been thoroughly exploded.īy 1600, two varieties of watches were well established in western Europe: the watch that was primarily a piece of jewelry that incidentally told the time, and the watch that was primarily a source of information about the time of day, the day of the month, or even the phase of the moon. For example, the Renaissance scholar Giglio Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552) wrote in 1541: “I myself have often seen a watch, which admirably, showed the hours, placed in the handle of an eyeglass of Pope Leo X of which he availed himself while hunting and traveling.” Twenty years later, the publication in Lyon of a book of designs for rings by the French artist Pierre II Woeiriot (1532–1599) included one finger ring ( 26.57.50) in which a watch is incorporated, a design that perhaps recorded a product of one of the early French watchmaking centers in Paris, Blois, and Lyon, or more likely in Italy. By about 1520, the device had been developed to such an extent that a tiny watch movement could be incorporated into a jewel or some other small precious object. ![]() Its ancestry probably can be traced to the type of small portable spring-driven clock that had become available by 1450 and that continued to be made throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century. The watch, a device for timekeeping made to be carried or worn on the person, was probably developed in Italy around 1500 or a few years earlier.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |