Italian antique clocks

An Italian clock is two objects that have to belong together: a movement and a case. The dial is the part most often repainted or replaced, so the name on it is not the date. Open the question of the plates, the pillars, the countwheel or the rack striking, and the style of the hands before you trust a signature. Italian provincial cases, altar-like wooden hoods, and later Napoleonic and Restoration designs each constrain the movement that should sit inside them. A fine movement in a case of the wrong decade is a marriage, and it is common. Pendulum bobs, pulleys and even the seatboard are often renewed; the useful point is whether the renewal is declared by the construction or hidden by new varnish. These articles treat Italian clockmaking as a collecting field with its own vocabulary, separate from furniture even when the case is a cabinetmaker’s work.

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