One of the five important exhibition appointments of the 2007 Biblical Festival is the exhibition The Night Clocks of the Popes, which will be inaugurated on Sunday 27 May at 5.00 p.m. in the rooms of the Civic Museums of Palazzo Chiericati and which will provide a singular analysis of how the perception of time has evolved. In fact, the theme around which this year's Biblical Festival revolves is "The Times of Scripture" and the exhibition - conceived and curated by Cherubina Marte and Stefano Soprana, a Vicenza-born watchmaking enthusiast - will highlight peculiar aspects of the different measurement of the hours from antiquity to the present day with the three sections entitled The Reading of the Hours in the Bible, The Popes' Night Clocks and The Birth of Mean Time through the Equation of Time and Use of the Lunar Phase.
The central hall of Palazzo Chiericati will host The Reading of the Hours in the Bible, an enthralling voyage of discovery through the history of watchmaking: from Babylonian time, which calculated the first hour from sunset and was applied in Veneto until it was abolished by Napoleon, to Egyptian time, which provided the sundial with the obelisk and set the zenith at noon, and finally Galileo Galilei's pendulum and the subsequent development of today's timekeeper, the clock. Photographs and panels display historical dials of public clocks, whose depictions are closely linked to some evocative biblical passages from Genesis, referring to the relationship between light and darkness and to the elements sun, moon and stars.
The human experience of the succession of day and night thus gave rise to the need to know the time even in the dark, and night clocks were designed for this purpose in the second half of the 17th century. Here, then, is the second exhibition The Popes' Night Clocks, a curious cameo that includes ten clocks from a private collection, which were created as luxury items for the popes and nobles of the time. The initiator of this singular fashion was Pope Alexander VII who commissioned the Campani brothers with his wish: 'how I wish someone could invent a watch that would allow me to tell the time even at night! One that does not require a light to see the dial; and one that does not produce an endless noise, that rattling of wheels that keeps me awake for the rest of the night!".
Finally, the Birth of Mean Time thanks to the equation of time and use of the moon phase section will host Ferdinand Berthoud's watch, three modern Breguet timepieces with the equation of time and the moon phase, and three Omega models, the Speedmaster Professional Moon Watch, the Speedmaster Professional Moon Watch "50th Anniversary" and the Speedmaster "Pre-Professional", against the backdrop of the fascinating lunar terrain. Also on display will be the world hour dial in relation to the Vicenza meridian made in 1876 by Agostino Barberini, the Father of the Servants of Mary of Monte Berico. The entire exhibition makes it clear that in antiquity the measurement of time followed the changes of the seasons, and even we today - despite having built a high-precision instrument such as the clock - make conventional adjustments, changing the time in winter and summer.
The opening will take place on Sunday 27 May at 5 p.m.; the exhibition will be open from 27 May to 30 June 2007 with the following opening times: Tuesday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
For more information: 3487824006 Stefano Soprana.
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