The Clock that told the Future

You have to love a clock that doesn't bother counting insignificant minutes and seconds. Built in 1410, Prague's Astronomical Clock tells time on a much grander scale. On the outer rings, you can see the hours tick by on a 24-hour scheme, but also "Bohemian Time"—a system that counted the hours since sunset. The inner mechanical components colorfully mark the sunrise, sunset, phases of the moon, position of the sun, and the zodiac, essentially painting a picture of the position of the earth within the universe as it was understood in medieval times. On the hour, the four animated figures around the dial—later additions—come to life: Death with his hourglass and bell, Vanity with his mirror, Greed waving a bag of gold, and a Turk. The last two (inadvertently) depict the 17th-century ethnic stereotypes and tensions that would haunt Central Europe in the future.

Writer: Megan Cytron Photo: Frank Yang

THE TURKS OF PRAGUE: THE MUNDANE AND THE SUBLIME

The Prague Orloj

This is a draft chapter, copyright I. Kalmar 2008. Do not quote in print or on the internet without the author’s permission. Asterisks (*) indicate places to be filled in or revised.
One of the major tourist attractions of Prague is the famous Orloj, a large astronomical clock whose origins are shrouded in mystery. The Orloj takes up two or three stories on the outside wall of the city’s old city hall. It has two clock faces, the one on top showing time (as well as astronomical models of the universe) and the one at the bottom the calendar. The upper clock face includes the figures of Vanity holding a mirror and of *, both of which wear a hat that has some elements recalling an Ottoman turban. There is also Avarice, represented before the post-World-War II renovation by the hooked-nosed figure of a Jew. Finally, there is a skeleton representing Death. Since an ingenious nineteenth century remodeling, every hour on the hour when the clock tolls, Death pulls on a string setting in motion a procession of Jesus’ disciples. He also makes Vanity, Avarice, and * shake their heads, deliberately rejecting the message about the limits of Time.

Clocks were a common “vanitas device.” Ordinary upright clocks used in private homes often featured a skull and the inscription, tempus fugit or “time is running (out).” The message was to oppose the eternity of Heaven to the fleeting character of earthly existence. The theme became extremely popular in the Renaissance. In the famous Ambassadors of Hans Holbein the Younger (1533, fig. *),1 the two men’s wealth may be considered an allegory of Avarice, the mirror of Vanity,* and the considerable girth of the men perhaps as Gluttony. But the focus here is not on these medieval categories of sin as much as on worldly pleasures and knowledge do not represent sin as much as the folly of relying on this world rather than the divine sphere beyond. Worldly pleasure is symbolized, as it would be frequently also in the next century, by music: here, a lute and pipes. Music, apart from being widely considered a particularly fleeting pleasure, helped to represent sensuality by invoking the sense of hearing. The carpets, like the rich garments, of the men stand for wealth and prestige, and they also bring in the sense of touch. The most important signs of worldliness, however, are those of scientific knowledge. One of the men holds a telescope; there are globes, scientific instruments and an open book. But although the two men are obviously competent in science, they are completely unaware of the foreshortened skull that flies by, as if in a different dimension, at the bottom of the scene. It reminds us but not them that neither worldly knowledge nor pleasure will save us at the Day of Judgment approaches, and are not worth much compared to Faith. That was and remains the standard interpretation of the opening verse of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which warns about all human endeavor being in vain: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” vanitas vanitorum omnia vanita,2- hence “vanity painting,” “vanity device,” the name given to works with this message, including Prague’s astronomical clock.

Although the hourly parade of the figures on the Orloj’s upper clock face dates in its present form only to a nineteenth century renovation, it captures this spirit of stressing the limits of the world, which the much older clock has no doubt long represented. Clocks themselves were a worldly achievement of what we now call technology and science, and one of the greatest inventions of the secular scientific spirit. Here a magnificent clock is forced here to pay obeisance to religion and so proclaims its own limitations.

What concerns us here is not so much the more spectacular upper clock face, but the more modestly decorated bottom of the Orloj composition. Under the calendar face there are two statues of “Turks,” part of a set of figurines that was placed on it in the seventeenth century, most likely in 1659.3 Like one of Holbein’s Ambassadors, one of the Turks holds a telescope and is popularly known as The Astronomer. The other Turkholding a book, an item also found in the Holbein picture, and is popularly known as The Philosopher (fig. *).

4 Next to the Philosopher stands the imposing, over sized figure of an angel. The angel holds a drawn sword in one hand and in the other (hidden behind a shield decorated with a cross) a pointer aimed at the calendar. No doubt it is the Archangel Michael, the heavenly warrior whom Christian tradition expects to appear on Judgment Day to lead our souls to judgment. He points to the calendar to remind us that tempus fugit

Wisely, the nineteenth century designers of the upper face’s mechanical show did not make the Turks’ heads shake in denial along with those of Avarice, Vanity, and *. For the Turks’ failing is not that they willingly contradict the supremacy of God over human science and pleasure, but that they are ignorant of it. What the Orloj is saying to us is that worldly knowledge is really disguised ignorance if it is not coupled with religion. If you have worldly wisdom but not the Holy Faith then you might as well be a Turk.

A Turk? Classic Church doctrine has it that the gates of heaven remain closed to those who have not been baptized. Those who died before Christ cannot get in; even Abraham and Plato must languish in Purgatory. Muslim philosophers (philosophy then included science and medicine, as well as alchemy and astrology) were often classed with these righteous non-Christians, especially the Greeks whose knowledge they inherited and transmitted to the Christian world. In Rafael’s School of Athens the Arab savant Avicenna (****-****) is anachronously included with Plato and the rest; in Dante’s Purgatory, too, he lingers with Hebrews and Greeks. The Muslim scholars’ wisdom like the Greeks’ was pre-Christian, not in chronological terms but in terms of the logic of Christianity: it figured at the limits of worldly knowledge where Christians could enter with a higher Truth.