This gilded miniature galleon stands 3 feet high, and
is in fact an elaborate, automated clock. [It] played music, fired its cannons and trundled across the table at imperial banquets. Clocks like this were important status symbols in the courts of Europe in the 1500s and this clock is based on the great European ships that sailed the oceans during this period. It is unlikely that the clock's creator, Hans Schlottheim in inland Germany, ever saw an actual galleon.
via www.bbc.co.uk
In the program, historian Lisa Jardine declares that clockwork is magic in the sixteenth century. But, I think there might be a better metaphor. Magic often evokes myths and mythic feats of the past: things disappearing, the dead being raised. And magic works by deception and slight of hand. Clockwork does not. And there's little doubt in my mind that when a person of the early Renaissance beheld a clock for the first time, she saw the potential for progress, the promise of the future--even if at the same time the object's function spoke also to mortality and memories of time past.
The program features an excellent reading aloud of a description written about the object in the 1500's. (See below.) It's clear the writer is not baffled by the object, which is understood to be mechanical and impressive.
I think clockwork was more like computer technology, not magic, in the sixteenth century. We understand computers to work according to electricity and circuits, but most of us don't know the particulars. Like clockwork, computer technology can serve both entertainment and utilitarian purposes. Like clockwork, the best computer technology is the most expensive and is more likely to have an urban setting than a rural one. The people watching the galleon moving along the banquet table of Augustus I of Saxony were not mystified ignoramuses or Cro-Magnons the day before doing chalk drawings in caves. They knew that they were seeing something made by man, and they may well have been amazed and delighted, but probably not afraid. If anything, they would have been more fearful--and rightly so--of the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor that this clockwork masterpiece was meant to dynamically represent. In that way, magic and computer technology do have something in common: both can be used to serve political purposes, too.
The description:
A gilded ship, skilfully made, with a quarter and full hour striking clock, which is to be wound every 24 hours. Above with three masts, in the crows' nests of which the sailors revolve and strike the quarters and hours with hammers on the bells. Inside, the Holy Roman Emperor sits on the Imperial throne, and in front of him pass the seven electors with heralds, paying homage as they receive their fiefs. Furthermore ten trumpeters and a kettle-drummer alternately announce the banquet. Also a drummer and three guardsmen, and sixteen small cannons, eleven of which may be loaded and fired automatically.
