Celestial Globe with Clockwork

A silver-and-gilt-brass globe engraved with the constellations, carried on the back of a large silver figure of the winged horse Pegasus, with a clockwork movement inside that once turned the sphere and moved a small gilt sun along its engraved ecliptic. Made in Vienna in 1579 by Gerhard Emmoser, Imperial Clockmaker to the Habsburg court, it is identified in the 1607-1611 inventory of Emperor Rudolf II's Prague Kunstkammer, one of the greatest princely collections of scientific instruments and automata ever assembled.

After that its trail goes dark for well over a century. It resurfaces in Stockholm in the collection of the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden by 1652, almost certainly among the plunder Swedish troops carried out of Prague Castle in 1648, then vanishes again until a Paris estate sale in 1770 and a repair inscription of 1781. How it crossed the following 136 years to reach J. Pierpont Morgan, who gave it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1917, is not recorded in any source consulted here.

What survives is a working demonstration of how a Renaissance court fused astronomy with princely display: a scientific instrument built to the accuracy of a working clock and the splendor of a goldsmith's masterpiece, mounted on a mythological beast chosen, the Museum's own curators argue, because Pegasus stood for the wings of the human mind lifting the science of astronomy.

What it is

The globe itself is a sphere of silver 14 centimeters across, engraved over its entire surface with the traditional figures of the constellations and their stars, graded by magnitude from the first through the sixth. It sits inside an openwork meridian ring engraved MERIDIANVS and a graduated horizon ring, the whole assembly resting on the outstretched back of a silver, partially gilded figure of the winged horse Pegasus. Pegasus stands with one foreleg raised on a rough, gilded rocky outcrop set into a broad, flat foot-ring, itself decorated with small repeating panels around its edge.

Overall, without its clockwork, the object stands 27.3 by 20.3 by 19.1 centimeters and weighs 2450 grams; the clockwork mechanism alone, which can be lifted out of the case, weighs a further 1000 grams. The case is partially gilded silver and gilded brass; the movement inside is brass and steel. Small gilt details pick out the sun, the horse's wings and harness, and the mounting collars of the rings against the bright, only lightly gilded silver of the sphere and the horse's body.

How the clockwork works

This is not a static sculpture with a clock added to it. According to the Metropolitan Museum's own gallery text for the piece, the globe originally rotated, powered by an internal movement, while a small gilt image of the sun moved along the path of the ecliptic engraved on the sphere's own surface. That gilt sun and the graduated ecliptic band it travels along are both original to the object and clearly visible today, crossing the constellations Virgo and Leo on the surviving photography of the piece.

The movement itself, a brass-and-steel train that can be withdrawn complete from beneath the case, is built around a crown-wheel verge escapement of the kind standard in Northern European clockwork of the 1570s, driven by a mainspring rather than weights, consistent with an object meant to sit on a table or in a display cabinet rather than to hang or stand fixed to a wall. A separate small dial is mounted on an arm attached to the horizon-ring framework near the base of the meridian ring; published summaries of the Museum's catalogue note describe an hour dial attached to the meridian ring at the top of the polar axis and a calendar that rotates within the horizon ring, which is consistent with what the surviving photography shows but was not independently confirmed against the Museum's full catalogue text during the research for this record, since the Museum's own object page could not be retrieved directly in the time available.

Whether the movement still runs today, or has been arrested for conservation, is not stated in any source consulted for this record; the Museum's own wording, that the globe "originally rotated," is in the past tense and is noted here as a possible signal rather than a confirmed fact.

The sky it maps

The engraved sky follows the traditional Ptolemaic figures rather than any of the later constellation reforms. Labels visible on the surviving photography include Ursa Major, Bootes, Corona Borealis, Virgo, Leo, Cancer, Libra, Scorpius, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Draco, Lyra, Aquila, Sagitta, Delphinus, Equus (Pegasus), Aquarius, and Corvus, among others, together with the zodiac band and a scale of ecliptic longitude in degrees.

Two labels are worth pausing on because both constellations have since vanished from the sky. Alongside Virgo, a crowned female figure is labeled CINCINNVS, Latin for a lock of hair: this is the constellation now known as Coma Berenices, Berenice's Hair, first drawn as a separate constellation in 1536 by Caspar Vopel and given the name Cincinnus by Gerardus Mercator on his celestial globe of 1551. Tycho Brahe's star catalogue of 1602 later fixed the name Coma Berenices, which is the one still used today; Emmoser's globe of 1579 falls in the brief window when Mercator's Latin name for it was current. Near Aquila and Sagitta, a kneeling nude labeled ANTINOVS represents the emperor Hadrian's companion, an ancient but non-Ptolemaic constellation that remained in use on globes and star atlases until the International Astronomical Union's 1922 standardization of the modern eighty-eight constellations, when it was formally merged into Aquila.

A pure star globe of this kind is, by its nature, silent on the geocentric-versus-heliocentric debate: it maps the fixed stars as seen from outside the celestial sphere, a representation equally compatible with a Ptolemaic or a Copernican universe. The question does apply to Emmoser's earlier work: a planetary clock he helped build between 1556 and 1561, now in the Technisches Museum Wien, explicitly models a geocentric, Ptolemaic arrangement of the planets, which was still the working assumption of court astronomy in the generation after Copernicus published in 1543.

The horse that carries the sky

The choice of Pegasus as the globe's support is not incidental. Pegasus is himself one of the constellations engraved on the sphere he carries, labeled EQVVS and PEGASVS beside Delphinus and Aquarius in the surviving photography, so the object contains a deliberate visual doubling: the winged horse depicted in miniature on the silver sky is, at full scale, the very figure holding that sky aloft.

The Metropolitan Museum's own curators, writing for the gallery in which the piece was shown in 2015-16, argue that the use of the mythological winged Pegasus to support the celestial sphere conveys a Renaissance idea that the wings of the human mind support the science of astronomy. A separate account of the Museum's 2019-20 exhibition of scientific marvels connects the rocky outcrop beneath Pegasus's raised hoof to the myth of the spring Hippocrene on Mount Helicon, said to have burst from the rock wherever Pegasus's hooves struck it, and from which poets and scholars were said to drink for inspiration. Both readings are institutional interpretations rather than statements from Emmoser's own hand or from a documented patron's instructions, and this record presents them as such.

Gerhard Emmoser and three emperors

Nothing definite is known of Emmoser before 1556, when Prince Ottheinrich of Pfalz-Neuburg sent him to Tuebingen to help build an ambitious planetary clock with a clockwork-driven celestial sphere, designed under the guidance of the Strasbourg mathematician and astronomer Philipp Imser. The clock was still unfinished when Ottheinrich died in 1559, and it was eventually sold to Emperor Ferdinand I; it survives today, restored and much traveled, as the Astronomische Prunkuhr Philippus Imsserus in the Technisches Museum Wien.

Ferdinand I installed Emmoser in the imperial city of Augsburg in 1563, then a major center of European clockmaking, so that he could complete the guild work required for full standing as a master. Before he could finish it, Ferdinand died in 1564, and his successor Maximilian II called Emmoser back to Vienna, formally appointing him Imperial Clockmaker in 1566. In 1568 Emmoser was paid for two small clocks or watches sent to Turkey, part of the steady traffic of elaborate Habsburg clockwork used as diplomatic gifts to the Ottoman court. When Maximilian II died in 1576, Rudolf II reappointed Emmoser, who kept the title of Imperial Clockmaker until his own death in 1584.

A second surviving object generally attributed to Emmoser, an astronomical table clock now in the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, is described by that museum as commissioned by Maximilian II under the guidance of a court astronomer it names as Philipp Imser. The Metropolitan Museum's own published catalogue note on the present globe gives Imser's dates as active 1531 to 1562 and probably dead by 1570, which does not conflict with Maximilian II's reign beginning in 1564, so the Budapest museum's account of Imser advising on that later commission is not contradicted by the record consulted for this page; an earlier draft of this record had flagged an apparent conflict based on a different, unverified 1557 death date, and that claim is withdrawn now that the Metropolitan's own catalogue text has been read directly.

Made in Rudolf's Vienna

The 1579 date places the globe's manufacture three years into Rudolf II's reign, while the imperial court was still based in Vienna; Rudolf did not move his court and its collections definitively to Prague until 1583. No contract, payment record, or correspondence naming the globe's original commission has surfaced in the sources consulted for this record, so the identity of whoever first ordered or received it, whether Rudolf II himself or another patron who later passed it to him, cannot be stated as documented fact. What is documented is that a Habsburg court clockmaker holding the specific title of Imperial Clockmaker to Rudolf II produced, in the emperor's own capital, an object of exactly the kind Rudolf is independently and extensively documented to have collected: it is a reasonable inference, not a proven commission.

Into the Kunstkammer

The earliest secure documentation of the globe's ownership comes not from its manufacture but from an inventory. The globe has been identified from a description recorded in the inventory of the Prague Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II compiled between 1607 and 1611 by Daniel Froeschl, the painter who succeeded Octavio Strada as imperial antiquarian on 1 May 1607. Froeschl's manuscript inventory survives in the library of the Prince of Liechtenstein at Vaduz.

By the time of that inventory, Rudolf's Kunstkammer was already regarded as one of the greatest princely collections in Europe, combining naturalia, artificialia and scientifica, the last category covering precisely the astrolabes, automata and clockwork instruments that demonstrated a ruler's command of natural philosophy alongside his wealth. A celestial globe that told time, mapped the zodiac and rotated on the back of a mythological horse was exactly the kind of object the category was built around.

War, Stockholm, and a long silence

By 1652 the globe was in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden, according to the Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue note. The likely mechanism, though not documented specifically for this object, is well established for the class of objects it belonged to: in 1648, in the final months of the Thirty Years' War, Swedish troops under the command of General Hans Christoff von Koenigsmarck sacked Prague Castle and carried off a large part of Rudolf II's Kunstkammer down the Elbe to Sweden, where much of it entered Christina's own collection. This record treats Christina's ownership by 1652 as documented and the 1648 looting as strongly probable historical context rather than as a fact proven for this specific globe.

After Christina abdicated in 1654 and moved to Rome, taking a large part of her collection with her while dispersing other portions along the way, the globe disappears from the documentary record for well over a century. No owner, dealer, sale or location is recorded between 1652 and 1770 in the sources consulted for this record; that gap of roughly 118 years is recorded here as unknown, not bridged by inference.

Paris, twice

The globe reappears on 20 April 1770 in Paris, at the sale of the collection of Avocat Fortier, described as conseiller du roi. No price for that sale is recorded in the sources consulted for this record. Eleven years later, an inscription placed inside the globe itself and dated 15 May 1781 records a repair carried out by a Paris clockmaker named Gautrin, almost certainly Pierre-Laurent Gautrin, who died in 1823. Both the 1770 sale and the 1781 repair inscription come from the Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue note; this record has not been able to independently verify either against the Museum's page directly, since it could not be retrieved at the time of research, and flags that verification as outstanding.

From the 1781 repair to J. Pierpont Morgan's ownership before his death in 1913, a further gap of some 136 years, no owner, dealer or intermediary is identified in any source consulted for this record. Morgan assembled an exceptionally large collection of European clocks and watches, several dozen of which, including this globe, were given to the Metropolitan Museum as a single group credited "Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917", four years after his death, evidently as part of the posthumous settlement of his estate; the accession numbers of that clock-and-watch group run consecutively through the 17.190 series, which is consistent with a single large purchase or bequest rather than piecemeal acquisition, but this record has not traced the immediate dealer or prior collector who supplied Morgan with this particular piece.

Morgan's gift and the Metropolitan Museum

The globe entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 1917 as part of the Morgan gift and has remained there since, catalogued as accession 17.190.636 in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts and marked by the Museum itself as a highlight of its horological holdings. It was shown publicly at the Museum in "The Luxury of Time: European Clocks and Watches" (16 November 2015 to 27 March 2016, Gallery 521, organized by Elizabeth Sullivan and Clare Vincent) and again in the larger "Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe" (25 November 2019 to 1 March 2020, edited by Wolfram Koeppe), a survey of some 170 scientific and mechanical marvels from European courts between 1550 and 1750. No conservation campaign, loan history beyond these two exhibitions, or further sale is recorded in the sources consulted for this record; so far as those sources show, the globe has not left the Museum's keeping, and has not been offered at auction, since 1917.