Real Time and the Time of Reality Clocks at Palazzo Pitti from the 18th to the 20th centuries13 September 2016 – 8 January 2017Galleria d’arte moderna di Palazzo Pitti

French workshop, Table clock (Pendule à la nègre), 1810–14, ormolu and gilt brass, enamel and marble, 52 x 34 x 12 cm., Galleria d'arte moderna, Room 6
French workshop (Courvoiseur L. e C.), Table clock with automatons and chime, 1810–15, ormolu, wood, crystal and enamel, 40 x 27 x 17.5 cm., Galleria Palatina, Round Cabinet
French workshop (Courvoiseur L. e C.), Table clock with automatons and chime, 1810–15, ormolu, wood, crystal and enamel, 40 x 27 x 17.5 cm., Galleria Palatina, Round Cabinet, detail
French workshop (Pierre du Chesne), Mantelpiece clock with the Medici crest and an inscription reading "COSMUS III MAG.DUX.ETRUR.", 17th century, ebony, brass, tortoiseshell and bronze, 67 x 39 x 19 cm., Galleria Palatina, Vestibule of the King's Bedchamber
Meissen workshop, Clock with Diana the Huntress, 1847, porcelain, enamelled metal, 70 x 27 x 22 cm., Galleria Palatina, Vestibule of the King's Bedchamber

The exhibition will comprise a significant selection of roughly eighty clocks out of the almost two hundred pieces in the Palazzo Pitti’s collection, testifying to the passage of time for those whose daily lives were played out in the Florentine palace in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The selection of these singular objets d’art will allow visitors to admire the astonishing technical and artistic quality of these timepieces in the various different forms and formats in which they were produced, revealing their duality comprising, on the one hand, an often sophisticated and complex mechanism, and on the other, a case which started out life as a cover for the mechanism but which gradually turned into a work of art in its own right.