The Invention of Clockwork (New Inventions of Modern Times, plate 5)
Original title
Theodoor Galle, after Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) Theodoor Galle
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 49.95.868(7)
- Credit
- The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949
- Rights
Public domain: engraved about 1600; the engraver died in 1633 and the designer in 1605. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- An engraving of a busy clockmaker’s workshop. At a bench in the foreground an old craftsman in spectacles inspects a toothed wheel while another files a part, with small table clocks beside them; a weight-driven clock hangs on the wall, a large iron clock with a sun-faced dial stands at the right where a man in a fine cloak looks it over, a smith works at a forge at the back, and gear wheels lie on the floor. The Latin title Horologia ferrea and two lines of verse run along the bottom.
- Image
- 1600 × 1222
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009104
coldlibrary.com/g/009104 - Credit line
- Theodoor Galle, after Jan van der Straet (Stradanus), The Invention of Clockwork (New Inventions of Modern Times, plate 5), c. 1600. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009104
From Nova Reperta, a set of about twenty prints designed by Jan van der Straet, a Flemish painter working in Florence, and published in Antwerp around 1600 to celebrate the inventions of the modern age, among them printing, the compass and this one, the mechanical clock. Everything here is made by hand, from the great iron clock to the small table clocks on the bench. It is a picture of machines being raised by the people who tend them, more than two centuries before Samuel Butler put it that way.
