Watch

During the late Middle Ages and the period that immediately followed, the Low Countries were a patchwork of independent territories. As early as the fourteenth century, turret clocks, or large, iron-framed structures created for use in churches and public buildings, are recorded to have existed in the southern parts of the Low Countries (modern Belgium and the southern Netherlands).[1] Small clocks for domestic use were also made there, but relatively little is known about watchmaking in this region before the late sixteenth century. During the sixteenth century, as part of the Habsburg Empire, the region enjoyed great prosperity under the regencies of two successive Habsburg archduchesses: Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy and regent of the Netherlands (1480–1530), whose court, famed for its luxury, was centered at Mechelen (Malines), a town halfway between Brussels and Antwerp; and Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands (1505–1558), whose palace was in Binche, the ancient fortified town that was located south of Brussels but later destroyed by the French. Under the rule of these two archduchesses, the city of Antwerp, located on the Schelde River and easily navigable to the North Sea and to the Atlantic beyond, permitted a thriving maritime trade with the New World, as well as with the traditional ports of the Old World. Trade required adequate provisions for credit and for other financial arrangements,[2] and while Antwerp’s Nieuwe Beurs (new exchange) opened in 1531, the Fuggers of Augsburg had already set up a branch of their banking system in Antwerp in 1510, helping to finance the city as a major center of commerce and the arts. Brugge and Ghent, prosperous throughout the late Middle Ages, continued to flourish as well. Ghent, especially, is believed to have rivaled Antwerp in its remarkable number of resident clockmakers, followed at some distance by Brussels and Louvain (Leuven).[3]



The increasing spread of Protestantism and Catholic reaction was followed by the Protestant revolt against the Spanish Habsburg King Philip II (1527–1598) and the so-called Iconoclastic Fury. Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Third Duke of Alba (1507–1582) and King Philip’s representative in the Low Countries after 1566, instituted a veritable reign of terror, and the Flemish region was not wholly pacified until the appointment of Alexander Farnese, the Duke of Parma (1545– 1592) in 1578, who took control of Ghent and later Antwerp in 1585. As a result, many Protestants fled to England, the Dutch United Provinces, and Germany during this period. Among those who immigrated to England were John and Nicholas Vallin, makers of some of the more remarkable clocks and watches of the late sixteenth century (see entry 6 in this volume).[4] By the early seventeenth century, the Low Countries again became a battleground, pitting the Spanish Habsburgs against the French, the English, and the Dutch United Provinces. The devastation left by the revolt, war, and the periodic destruction of the Flemish economy probably accounts for the fact that so little sixteenth-century Flemish horology has survived. Records of clockmakers and watchmakers, too, have vanished,[5] but something of their reputation can be recovered from remarks by contemporaneous authors. For example, the Englishman William Cunningham recommended in 1559 the usefulness for navigation of “watches such as are brought from Flanders” that could be bought in London outside the Temple Bar;[6] and the Italian Lodovico Guicciardini authored a guide to the Low Countries in 1581 that cited the Flemish region as famed for the production of sea compasses and horological items.[7]



Little is known about the maker whose mark was “WA,” except what is inferred from the surviving timepieces he produced, which are limited to two: a weight-driven chamber clock with an alarm mechanism that was formerly in the Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois (fig. 18),[8] and the spring-driven watch that appears in this entry. Both lack town marks and are signed with only the maker’s initials. The case of the chamber clock does, however, bear a number of inscriptions in Flemish, as well as engravings of the biblical scenes of David with the Head of Goliath and Judith with the Head of Holofernes on its sides. The dial of the watch is engraved with the year 1571.



In a Sotheby’s sale of 2002, the chamber clock was described as “probably Flemish.”[9] Two of the most recent publications by historians of Belgian and Flemish horology have accepted Antwerp as the probable place of its origin.[10] Neither author apparently knew of the existence of the Metropolitan Museum’s watch, which, after all, had been published in the 1912 catalogue of J. Pierpont Morgan’s watches as the work of the English clockmaker William Anthony, who was active about 1525.[11] One of these publications included a list of names of clockmakers and scientific instrument makers, but the only entry in the list that could reasonably refer to a “WA” was one for Walter (Gualterus) Arsenius (recorded 1554–80),[12] a member of a prominent family of astrolabe makers working in Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century. Arsenius is a most improbable maker of the Museum’s watch, but the attribution of the clock, and by extension the watch, to Antwerp seems likely to be correct.



The watch is oval, as are most of the surviving watches of this period made either in the Low Countries or by Flemish émigrés working elsewhere. Despite several features that tie it to sixteenth century watchmaking practices, however, it is remarkably more forward looking than the iron-plated, drum-shaped watches and the spherical cased watches made by the Germans and French about the middle of the century.[13] It is, in fact, quite early for an oval watch to have been made anywhere.[14]



The movement consists of two oval plates of gilded brass that are held apart by three cylindrical pillars decorated with tiny floral designs at the ends, which are pinned to the back plate. It contains three polished-steel wheels that end in a verge escapement with a polished steel escape wheel and a balance wheel regulated by a hog’s-bristle device with a decorative pointer for adjustments to the regulation. The large mainspring is encased in a brass barrel with steel caps and set up by a steel bow-and-arrow ratchet system located on the interior side of the top plate of the watch. The mainspring is connected by a gut line (now missing) to a fusee made of ten turns, which gives a duration of around twelve hours before needing to be rewound.



The back plate is chased with double circles within double ovals and with a central rosette. Openwork tripartite designs decorate the opening for the balance staff. The cock of the balance is a primitive shaft that is pinned to a stud on the back plate at one end. At the other end, a blued-steel fleur-de-lis secures the end of the balance staff. The tail of the cock ends in a flourish of scrolls made of chiseled steel, and at the top and bottom of the plate, revolving latches of chiseled and blued steel secure the movement inside the case. Like the Vallin watch also in the Museum’s collection (see 17.190.1475), the winding square of the mainspring of this watch is finished on the end by a tiny ornamental cross. The initials “WA” appear below and to the right of the top latch, and ornamental scrolls accompany both the maker’s initials and the scale for adjusting the hog’s bristle.



The dial, a separate plate of cast and gilded brass, is attached to the top plate of the watch by means of three pinned-on feet. It has a central chapter of hours (I–XII) with star markings for the half hours and touch pins for telling the time in darkness. An armorial shield representing that of the original owner appears above the chapter, and the year 1571 and a decorative human head appear below. All these elements are framed by strapwork that also encloses areas of arabesque ornament. Inside the chapter of hours, additional strapwork completes a design that employs an ornamental vocabulary comparable, for example, to that found a few years earlier in the borders of illustrations for several editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, designed by Bernard Salomon (1505/10–ca. 1568) and published in Lyon in 1557 by Jean de Tournes (1504–1564).15 The single hand made of elaborately sculptured and blued steel contrasts sharply with the bright gold of the dial.



The case, into which the movement fits snugly, consists of a cast oval with decorated moldings and two hinged covers. Both covers have decorative borders that frame the high-quality engravings, unusual for watchcases, but not so surprising if the origin of the watch is accepted as Antwerp, well known for its publishers of prints and book illustrations. The subjects of the engravings on the Museum’s watchcase do not immediately present a coherent narrative in the same manner as the engravings on the clock. The scene on the exterior side of the cover for the dial of the watch is a close copy of a print by the German-born painter and engraver Jacob Binck (ca. 1494/1500–1569), who is known to have been working in Antwerp in 1549 and 1552. The print was later given the descriptive title by F. W. H. Hollstein of A Roman Soldier Presenting Grapes to a Nude Woman,[16] but it may have had an allegorical meaning as well. The exterior side of the cover for the back of the movement depicts Adam in a forest digging the earth with a spade. Eve is seated beside him, and in the distance, a shepherd tends sheep. No precise printed model for the image has been found, but a scene of comparable activity titled Adam at Work After the Fall appears in an engraving dated 1583 and published by Johannes Sadeler I (1550– ca. 1600), which is based on a design by the prolific sixteenth-century Antwerp painter and draftsman Maarten de Vos the Elder (1532–1603),[17] therefore permitting identification of the subject on the watchcase.



The reverse side of each of the two covers presents bust-length engravings of handsome ladies. The woman who appears on the interior of the back cover has an elaborate coiffure and wears a jewel hanging from a chain around her neck, which calls attention to her plump bosom exposed by a low-cut bodice; the woman who appears on the interior image of the cover for the dial wears a more modest costume but has a more elaborate coiffure with a small crescent moon on her forehead. The moon, ordinarily associated with the Roman goddess Diana, may be associated here instead with the woman in an allegory of the spiritual marriage by Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598), titled the Divinarum Nuptiarum Conventa et Acta (1573), in which she is instructed in the virtues befitting the bride of Christ.



An edition of the allegory, published in Antwerp about the same time by Philips Galle (1537–1612) with illustrations by Gerard van Groeningen (active in Antwerp 1561–76) and Jan (Johannes) Wierix (ca. 1549–ca. 1618), shows the prospective spouse as a young woman with a small crescent moon on her forehead.[18] The meaning of the woman wearing the jewel in her décolletage is not immediately apparent, but it seems to have nothing to do with spirituality. Perhaps one of them was truly meant to portray the moon goddess, or perhaps they are simply two attractive women, but the choice of the subjects on the watchcase cries out for deeper interpretation.



Some of the steel parts of the movement have areas of rust that are not now active, and some of the bluing on others has been lost. The latch on the lower end of the back plate is now incomplete. The balance wheel and verge are possible replacements, but both movement and case are in remarkably good condition. Nothing is known of the provenance of the watch before J. Pierpont Morgan acquired it from Carl H. Marfels of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin.[19]



Notes (For key to shortened references see bibliography in Vincent and Leopold, European Clocks and Watches in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015)



1 For the list of fourteenth-century turret clocks in cities that are now in Belgium, see Fraiture 2009, pp. 16, 338.

[2] Voet 1993, pp. 15–17.

[3] Fraiture 2002, p. 158.

[4] For the carillon clock in the British Museum, London (inv. no. CAI-2139), see Thompson 2004, pp. 56–57.

[5] See de Caluwe 2008, pp. 68–70.

[6] Cunningham 1559, quoted in Waters 1958, p. 58.

[7] Guicciardini 1581.

[8] Time: The Greatest Innovator 1986, p. 94; Sotheby’s 2002, pp. 120–21, no. 90, ill.

[9] Sotheby’s 2002, p. 120.

[10] See de Caluwe 2008, p. 66, and p. 63, ill. no. 4; Fraiture 2002, p. 281.

[11] Williamson 1912, pp. 121–22, no. 125. Williamson seems to have ignored the date on the watch, to say nothing of its style.

[12] Fraiture 2002, p. 169.

[13] For examples of the two forms, see Maurice 1976, vol. 2, pp. 59–60, nos. 59, 60, and figs. 59, 60, and pp. 60–61, nos. 429–36, and figs. 429–36; Cardinal 1989, pp. 111–14.

[14] Maurice illustrated an oval watch hanging from a chain around the neck of a man in a portrait said to date from 1567 and now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nurnberg. See Maurice 1976, vol. 2, p. 60, no. 427, and fig. 427.

[15] Mortimer 1964, pp. 505, 506, nos. 403, 404.

[16] Hollstein, German, 1954–2014, vol. 4 (1957), p. 67, no. 138.

[17] Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish, 1949–2010, vol. 44 (1996), p. 14, no. 28/ii, and vol. 45 (1995), p. 14, pl. 28/ii.

[18] Schuckman and Luijten 1997, pt. 2, pp. 69–73, and p. 76, pls. 290/i, 291/i, p. 81, pl. 301/i, p. 82, pls. 302/i and 303/i, and p. 83, pl. 304/i.

[19] Williamson 1912, p. 121.