Clocks, Renaissance

Abstract

The reintroduction of time-keeping technology to the Latin West from the thirteenth century and its subsequent submission to new applications produced the appearance of both large and small-scale clocks in the Renaissance. The great bulk of these works often replicated principles preserved from Classical antiquity and Medieval Arabian sources, but major technological advances appeared intermittently in the Renaissance which propelled clock-making technology forward. Just as we would no sooner exchange the precision of an atomic clock today for a sand-glass, so too in the Renaissance did old ways of clock-making rapidly become obsolete with the invention of new systems: weights, spring-drivers, wheels, gears, and organ-barrels. A similar phenomenon comparable to modern trends also has been observed with the Renaissance explosion of technology; as it became more advanced, it became smaller and more compact. What had been housed in the monumental proportions of Medieval Cathedral clock-towers had by the late Renaissance been reduced at its most extreme to the size of a ring to be worn on an emperor’s finger. The Renaissance aim of mastering the natural world around, space as well as time, can be inferred in the increasingly masterful method devised to standardize and measure the passage of not only the sun but the moon, the planets, the zodiac, and other visible astronomical phenomena as well.