A Florentine clock from 1546, showing hours, minutes and seconds

Marisa Addomine A Florentine clock from 1546, showing hours, minutes and seconds Antiquarian Horology, Volume 41, No. 3 (September 2020), pp. 396–399 The AHS (Antiquarian Horological Society) is a charity and learned society formed in 1953 . It exists to encourage the study of all matters relating to the art and history of time measurement, to foster and disseminate original research, and to encourage the preservation of examples of the horological and allied arts. To achieve its aims the AHS holds meetings and publishes books as well as its quarterly peer-reviewed journal Antiquarian Horology. The journal, printed to the highest standards fully in colour, contains a variety of articles and notes, the society’s programme, news, letters and high-quality advertising (both trade and private). A complete collection of the journals is an invaluable store of horological information, the articles covering diverse subjects including many makers from the famous to the obscure. The entire back catalogue of Antiquarian Horology, every single page published since 1953 (except the most recent volumes), is available on-line, fully searchable. It is accessible for AHS members only. For more information visit www.ahsoc.org Volume 41, No. 3 (September 2020) contains the following articles NUMBER THREE VOLUME FORTY-ONE SEPTEMBER 2020 Bahne Bonniksen, inventor and manufacturer of the karrusel watch. A biography of a famous Coventry watchmaker. Part 3. The success of the karrusel watch, continued, by Clare Woodward The earliest masters of the Paris Clockmakers’ Corporation: a new account based on archival sources and surviving works, by Catherine Cardinal Time on the dashboard. Car clocks from Germany by Johannes Graf Should Breguet’s box chronometer No. 2741 be run? The potential of decision-making protocols in horological conservation, by Peter Toot A miniature time ball from Synchronome by Norman Heckenberg and Anthony Roberts A chronometer watch, signed Sidney Better, rediscovered by Phillip Arnott A Florentine clock from 1546, showing hours, minutes and seconds, by Marisa Addomine 1 ANTIQUARIAN HOROLOGY A Florentine clock from 1546, showing hours, minutes and seconds Marisa Addomine* What may be considered the earliest known record for a clock showing seconds was discovered in one of the workshop notebooks written by members of the Della Volpaia family in Florence. The history of technology offers many examples of the same invention rediscovered, independently, in different places by different people. Sometimes, the barest information that someone somewhere had found a solution to a problem provided the necessary impetus for new research and trials by people who had never seen any earlier writings or — when talking about mechanics — the new contrivance. This short article brings to the attention of the readers the discovery of what may be considered the earliest known record for a clock showing seconds. The relevant reference appears on a page of one of the workshop notebooks written by members of the renowned Della Volpaia family: engineers, architects, clock- and instrument makers working in Florence across three generations, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. Lorenzo Della Volpaia the Elder (1446– 1512), son of Benvenuto, was a highly skilled clockmaker, living and working in Florence, where he was appreciated both for his moral virtues and his extraordinary talents in mechanics, praised by the most important poets and intellectuals of his age. His renown is mainly related to a complex planetary clock, probably made in two versions, whose descriptions are spread in a non-systematic way over several pages of some of his workshop notebooks. He was also a brilliant engineer and designed high performance hydraulic systems as well as other large-scale machines. A genuine Renaissance man, his interests — reflected in the activity of his workshop — spanned from horology to alchemy, and from astrology to text encryption methods. Lorenzo was not the near-illiterate craftsman or self-taught artisan portrayed in several biographical accounts: newly-found documents in various Italian archives demonstrate that his family included at least one chief engineer, working on important municipal sites about forty years before his birth, as well as other ancestors who had important roles in civic life and in Florentine institutions. Lorenzo had several children: among the sons who continued the activity of his workshop, the most significant were Camillo (1484–1560), Benvenuto (1486–1533), and Eufrosino (c.1495–1553). The family business went on for a third generation thanks to Camillo’s sons: Lorenzo (?–1566) and Girolamo (c.1525–1614). The workshop notebooks, now kept in libraries in Venice and Florence, were never intended as a systematic compendium of texts and drawings: they are very often mere collections of quasi-random notes, where different hands and subjects alternate across the pages of the same booklet, sometimes over the same page.1 Many notes were copied by his sons from Lorenzo the Elder’s original drawings, now lost; others were added by sons and grandsons, making the reading and the interpretation far from intuitive. In recent years, working on a complete transcription of *Dr Ing. Marisa Addomine ([email protected]) is an independent horological researcher, mainly interested in early clockmaking and public clocks. She is presently researching for a PhD at the Warburg Institute in London, focused on the Della Volpaia manuscripts. She is the President of the Registro Italiano Orologi da Torre (Italian Turret Clock Register). 1. A manuscript containing several pages drawn by Bernardo Della Volpaia, architect and son of Lorenzo the Elder, is held by the Sir John Soane’s Museum Library in London, and is classified as MS Coner. 396 SEPTEMBER 2020 all the Della Volpaia materials in preparation for a critical edition of the entire corpus, I first focused on horological references. This gave me the opportunity to read line by line, word by word, all the manuscripts and to become acquainted with the different hands who contributed to the hundreds of different passages, all written in vernacular Tuscan. To my surprise I found two notes describing two probably very similar domestic clocks, accompanied by rough mechanical sketches, both in the hand of Girolamo di Camillo, grandson of Lorenzo the Elder. The first passage is in MS Marciana 5363, f. 67r: in the upper right corner of the page, the central portion of the page being occupied by a sketch of a sundial, probably drawn by Eufrosino. Here, Girolamo, his nephew, added a short note: Alarm clock of Benedetto Busini showing hours minutes and seconds and one stroke every hour. Delivered finished today September 1546, worth 10 gold ducats They gave 3 gold ducats as downpayment and on the 26th I gave them a globe drawn and coloured to the whole Earth […] worth 30 gold ducats.2 The accompanying drawing is shown in Fig. 1. It only sketches the wheels of the time train: no indications are given about the escapement, nor is the striking system present. One might infer these elements were made to standard designs. Again in the hand of Girolamo, another short note appears in MS Laurentiana, Antinori 17, f. 6r, accompanied by a very similar sketch, using the same wheel ratios, accompanied by the text: This alarm clock shows hours and minutes and seconds and one stroke every hour. I gave it 01 9 6 10 6 19 4 54 60 Fig. 1. The sketch of the clock showing hours, minutes and seconds, from the original by Girolamo Della Volpaia, redrawn by Daniele Pons. finished to be sent to Genoa on September, 16th 1570 and he paid ten gold pieces.3 The first note is extremely interesting for two historical reasons: (i) the very early date (1546) probably makes it the oldest record for a clock showing seconds; (ii) we know the name of the buyer, Benedetto Busini. As far as the introduction of the second hand on dials is concerned, the literature is relatively vague. Most authors agree that clocks showing seconds appeared in the Germanspeaking area about the third quarter of the sixteenth century: the name of Jost Bürgi (1552–1632), the renowned Swiss maker, is obviously associated with this improvement in displaying precise time, even if his clocks were all probably made after 1575. The Italian archives may offer further surprises, but much remains to be explored. 2. MS Marciana It. IV, 41 (5363), Venice, Biblioteca Marciana. Destatoio di Benedetto Busini Mostra lhore minuti / et secondi e da un tocho per ora datogli finito addj /di settenbre 1546 vale ducati 10 d’oro / hanno dati ducati 3 doro a bon/conto e addi 26 detto li/ detti una palla disegn-/ata et colorita tutta la/terra […] vale ducati 30 doro. 3. MS Antinori 17, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Questo destatoio mostra lore et / i minuti et secondi et da / un tocho p[er] hora dettilo fini-/ to p[er] mandarlo a genova addi/ 16 di settembre 1570 e pagollo / dieci doro. The original Italian text states in the final line ‘ten of gold’. Ducats were still a standard currency, so we may infer that the ten gold pieces were, again, ten gold ducats. 397 ANTIQUARIAN HOROLOGY The classic literature on Italian horology, such as the work of Enrico Morpurgo and Antonio Simoni, offers no hints about examples of the early occurrence of second hands in the Italian area; Giuseppe Brusa’s L’Arte dell’Orologeria in Europa is also silent, save for an example of a German table clock displaying seconds, presumably made about 1560. Since the German horological context appears to be the obvious hunting ground for comparators, I asked Dr Günther Oestmann for advice. He kindly checked for me that the currently oldest known archival reference for a clock showing seconds in Germany is attributed to the Imperial mathematician and physician Paulus Fabricius, in 1557.4 It is interesting that in neither the note nor the sketch does Girolamo appear to attribute any special importance to the clock, nor is any emphasis shown when seconds are mentioned. The drawing has no dimensional indications: as far as we know, no mechanical clocks made in the Della Volpaias’ workshop survive. We know that they were active in making turret and domestic clocks, but there is no evidence of watchmaking. The presence of the alarm and the single stroke at the hour led me to the conclusion that the clock had to be for a domestic environment. There is no indication about the frame or its material: it would probably be iron, but brass remains a possibility. Across the notebooks, springs are sometimes mentioned, but not here; this leads to a reasonable inference a weight-driven clock was involved. Some research intended to learn more about Benedetto Busini, the named buyer, revealed some interesting elements. This gentleman, almost unknown to modern scholars until recent findings, was born in Rome in 1513, the son of a rich family of Florentine merchants and bankers who had several business interests in the Eternal City. Many papers are still to be explored to get a full understanding of Benedetto’s life, in Rome first and later in Florence, where he became Provveditore dell’Opera del Duomo, i.e. general manager of the Florence Cathedral works, after 1550. In a recent and well-documented article, Fig. 2. Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man with a Book, identified by Professor Eliana Carrara (see note 5) as a portrait as a young man of Messer Benedetto Busini, the buyer of the clock in 1546. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. Accession Number: 29.100.16. (CC0 1.0). Professor Eliana Carrara demonstrated, working with existing paintings, drawings and archive papers, that Benedetto is the elegant young man portrayed by Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572) in a famous painting now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.5 Fig. 2 shows an educated young heir of a powerful family, standing in front of the painter while holding a book, a clear allusion to his love for culture. The painting is known to art historians as Portrait of a Young Man with a Book. Probably more interested in art and culture than in the family business, Benedetto also bought from the workshop, as the note implies, a terrestrial globe worth thirty golden ducats.6 It is not easy to find an equivalence in modern currency, because the relative costs 4. See also Matthes, D. & Sánchez-Barrios, R., ‘Mechanical clocks and the advent of scientific astronomy’, Antiquarian Horology, vol. 38, no. 3, (September 2017), 339. 5. Eliana Carrara, ‘Una proposta di identificazione per il ritratto di giovane con libro di Agnolo Bronzino: Benedetto Busini’, Annali di Critica d’Arte, vol. 1, Milan (2017), 89–114. 6. The ducat was a golden coin used in Florence and in Venice since the thirteenth century, weight 3.46 grams. 398 SEPTEMBER 2020 of goods and manpower have changed so significantly; in any event, a good sum but not a huge one. Ten golden ducats could be considered equivalent to the rental for a semester of a goldsmith’s shop on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The second clock, sent to Genoa, confirms what I knew from the family manuscripts and from contemporary sources: Girolamo had business links in both Venice and Genoa, probably thanks to the introductions provided by a client and friend of his, the Florentine nobleman Giovan Vettore Soderini. Soderini accompanied Girolamo in some travels there to offer to local rulers the instruments available from the Della Volpaia workshop, including, for example, a new type of ‘anemoscope’, invented by Camillo, Girolamo’s father. It consisted of a clock-type dial with a rotating hand, powered by a vane through iron wheelwork, showing on the dial the name of the wind blowing. The anemoscope did not find favour with the prospective clients, as Soderini tells us in an interesting book about agronomy, written when he was in exile.7 One such instrument, carved in stone and flanked by two sundials, one for morning and one for afternoon hours, was in Soderini’s garden in Florence. Father Egnazio Danti (1536–1586), the Dominican astronomer, was Grand Ducal cosmographer and cartographer in Florence in the days of Cosimo I de Medici and professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna. After Cosimo’s death he left Florence and moved to Rome, where he was appointed astronomer to Pope Gregory XIII first and later to Sixtus V, who also ordained him Bishop of Alatri (Fig. 3). Father Egnazio claimed to be the sole inventor of a new contrivance, the anemoscope, even though he admitted, in another text, that he knew that one of the Della Volpaias had made one, but that he had not been able to see it. Returning to the 1546 clock, one could wonder about the need for a clock showing minutes and seconds. An immediate answer could be for astronomical purposes or for experimental scenarios in natural philosophy, to gauge time intervals with higher precision than was offered by normal timekeepers. It Fig. 3. Father Egnazio Danti, mathematician, astronomer, cartographer and instrument maker, portrayed by Bartolomeo Passarotti, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest, France. (Image in the public domain) would be interesting to understand whether Benedetto Busini was a forerunner of the Galilean scientists, or simply a rich amateur, who liked the idea of owning something rare, to be shown in his Wunderkammer. Perhaps the clock and the globes were simply intended to be intriguing gifts to important people, to obtain their benevolence towards the Businis’ business in their country. We can only hope that further archival research will cast new light on this subject. Acknowledgements The author wishes to express her gratitude to those whose help has been fundamental: Dr Günther Oestmann, Professor Eliana Carrara, Professor Ettore Pennestri, Chris McKay and the anonymous reviewers who helped to achieve the final shape of this article. Last, but not least, to Daniele Pons, who shares in my research day by day, supporting me with his competence in mechanics and computer graphics. 7. Giovan Vettore Soderini, Trattato dell’agricoltura, 2nd printed edition, Silvestri (Milan), no date, but nineteenth century. 399