The new Apple Watch that was unveiled this week, with its potential to merge timekeeping with the body and its rhythms, feels like the future, like something new. But it may be more like a return—time, after all, has only recently become fixed, divorced from our actual experience of the world turning.
One of six bronze reliefs, from a private collection, in “The Hours of Night and Day” at the MIA.
Which is where “The Hours of Night and Day” comes in, a new exhibition opening at the MIA this weekend that explores our relationship with time nearly 400 years before the Apple Watch. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a set of six bronze reliefs, each about the size of a turkey platter, depicting a half dozen moments in the course of a day. The works by Baroque masters Giovanni Casini and Pietro Cipriani date to 1720 and are marvels of mythology, showing the goddess Iris, for instance, waking Hypnos in perhaps the strongest representation of dreams in pre-Freudian times. Elsewhere, Apollo, the god of the sun (or day), pulls his chariot while Diana, the goddess of the moon (or night), succumbs to a dream.
The details are incredible—the bronzes were admired enough in their day to justify numerous porcelain replicas—and the settings are rich with meaning and art history, from archaic notions about the elements (earth, water, air, and fire) to the way that movement is suggested through billowing hair. Intriguingly, some ancient chronological idioms that we’ve inherited without much context, like “racing against time,” are visually expressed: at noon, in the heat of the day, Apollo races his chariot across the sky—time, you might say, is flying. And when you understand that most people then pegged time not to a fixed clock but to daylight (which grows longer or shorter, depending on the season), you realize why one would have said, “The hours are growing shorter.” Because, in a sense, they were.
Also included in the exhibition is the MIA’s own “Torso of a Dancing Faun,” a marble remnant of a statue that was copied in bronze by the same Florentine craftsman behind the bronze reliefs. Florence, in the early 1700s, was on par with Paris as a center of bronze casting.
If the Apple Watch is a statement on what time means today, the bronzes, says curator Eike Schmidt, “are an 18th-century attempt to explain what time meant to people then.” The rest of the exhibition reinforces this comparison, particularly the large 1789 clock with three faces—”three apps,” as Eike puts it—showing the time in Paris, in a dozen other cities, and the zodiac.
The clock, usually set against the wall in a period room at the museum, is freestanding here, revealing its mechanics as seen from the back. In this, the analogy to Apple—notorious for hiding technology behind clean, simple interfaces—falls apart. In the past, as we finally sought to regulate time, there were no secrets about our ambitions; the Apple Watch, on the other hand, will merge man and machine with all the mystery of an even earlier era—one of wizardry.