Poetry and mechanics in the XIVth. Century. I- The clocks in the Divina Commedia

Abstract

Various circular spaces appear in the itinerary of the Commedia, from the enormous turns and the music of the celestial spheres to the small wheels of two mechanical clocks. In the first clock, the relationships between wheels and music reappear in a mechanism provided with an hourly chime or alarm, that moves and sounds as a celestial wheel, “in tempra”. In Dante’s days mechanical clocks were already known and the oldest sources usually underline the capability for producing regularly musical sounds. In the second clock, the wheels that are assimilated to the saints’ turning souls move with a precise function. The movement of hourly chime describes better the wheels of the second clock. The first mechanical clocks were designed historically according to the differentiation between canonical and working urban timing, but they were also considered as instruments of a symbolic value, and only later as mechanical models of the universe. Dante was one of the first to present clocks as artefacts with mechanical wheels imitating the movements and sounds of the celestial spheres, as is indicated by the repetition of the expression “in tempra”.