Table clock

Germany, 1566
Bronze, steel; casting, carving

A clock depicting the deities of the planets from the collection of the Moscow Kremlin Museums deserves special attention because it represents the earliest form of a table clock – a copper cylinder.

It was made by a German craftsman in 1566. Such products are now called Dosenuhr in Germany – "a clock in the shape of a tin can".

The dial of such a clock is placed on top. As with the earliest clocks, there is only one hand – the hour hand (partially preserved). There are two hour markers on the dial - a fixed outer ring with Arabic numbers from 1 to 24 and a movable inner ring with Roman numerals (twice twelve, i.e. twelve night hours and the same number of day hours).

A remarkable detail: the clock has a special pointer in the form of three-dimensional spheres soldered closer to the convex rim, in strict accordance with the Arabic numerals. This makes it possible to tell the time by touch, for example at night, without a light source.

The decoration of the case is worthy of special notice. The walls of the cylinder are carved with images representing the seven days of the week and the seven planets. Curiously, there is no indication of the days of the week on the dial, but the engraved figures compensate for this, if only symbolically, since they cannot show the passage of time, but only certain segments of it. The figures follow one another, counting from the dial, but disarrange the course of the week: Moon (Monday), Mercury (Wednesday), Venus (Friday),
Sun (Sunday), Mars (Tuesday), Jupiter (Thursday) and Saturn (Saturday).

The author of the engravings is the famous German artist Hans Sebald Beham from Nuremberg, an apprentice of Albrecht Dürer and a lively representative of the Northern Renaissance. Similar clocks in the museums of London and Stuttgart depict the deities of the planets with great accuracy, basing on the most famous cycle of engravings, The Seven Planets, dating from 1539.

Not all the figures in this series are identified on the case of a clock in the collection of the Moscow Kremlin Museum. It is likely that the master who decorated the case had several models, perhaps even scattered sheets of different cycles, from which he chose the one that seemed most appropriate.