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Dolce & Gabbana used the artist’s watchmaking ideas to create a clock on display in Milan.
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Leonardo da Vinci has been credited with contributions to inventions that include the parachute and the submarine, and even of conceiving the theory of plate tectonics.
Less well known, however, are his studies in watchmaking. But now a two-meter-high (6.5-foot) clock that incorporates some of his discoveries about timekeeping is on permanent display at the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, a cultural institution founded in 1607 in Milan.
The clock, named Chiaravalle, was conceived by the fashion house Dolce & Gabbana, which began producing watches in 2012. It was made as a tribute to the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, in 1519, and created as part of its Alta Orologeria, or high watchmaking, collection of one-of-a-kind pieces.
“Making the Chiaravalle clock was a real challenge and an even greater privilege for our team of experts and us,” Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, the brand’s founders, wrote in an email, “because it meant approaching Leonardo and his unparalleled genius with great respect, giving shape and material to his intuitions, allowing our creativity to emanate.”
Named after the abbey in Milan whose tower clock appeared in Leonardo’s drawings, the clock has a skeletonized rectangular structure of 53 iron pieces.
The lapis lazuli dial echoes the star-studded design of the one on St. Mark’s Clock Tower in Venice, and at the dial’s center is a miniature golden globe, in keeping with the geocentric theory prevalent in the 16th century, the symbols for the moon and the sun rotate around it. The moon completes its phases in about 29 days, while the sun takes 365 days to move across the months, written in Italian, and their corresponding zodiac signs.
At the top two corners of the clock, two smaller dials indicate the minutes and the hours; the hour dial is divided into 24 sections, in keeping with Hora Italica, or Italian time, a way of counting the hours that was widespread in church clocks in Italy until the 19th century.
An Italian watchmaker, whom the brand declined to identify, created the clock’s movement from Leonardo’s drawings, including the artist’s “worm drive” (vite senza fine in Italian). The brand said it reduced the number of wheels needed in the movement, improving the clock’s accuracy.
The house also has highlighted Leonardo’s work in its Manifattura Italiana Collection, a limited-edition group of wristwatches. Last fall it introduced the San Marco, which also reproduced the dial of St. Mark’s Clock Tower, and, in 2019, presented the Leonardo. Its dial was engraved with a drawing from the Codex Atlanticus, the compilation of Leonardo’s drawings and writings also displayed at the Ambrosiana.
The watches are a blend of tradition and innovation, Mr. Dolce and Mr. Gabbana wrote, just as “watchmaking is a dream made of art and technology.”
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