Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour

Home , Horae

The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VI ASP Conference Series, Vol. 441 Enrico Maria Corsini, ed. c 2011 Astronomical Society of the Paciﬁc

Maia Wellington Gahtan Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute, Marist College, Firenze, Italy Universita` di Firenze, Firenze, Italy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, Italy

Abstract. Giorgio Vasari created the ﬁrst allegories of the twenty-four hours in the mid-16th century. This essay explores Vasari’s novel images in the context of his visual and literary sources, the rising importance of household timepieces, and the artist’s other works and writings. Although a focussed study of a single motif within Vasari’s oeuvre, it has implications for the broader transformation time perception and its psychological dimensions then taking place in Early Modern Europe.

One significant, but gradual transformation that took place in European society over the course of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance was the adoption of twenty-four clock hours as the usual mode of counting time. With the invention, and then the public diffusion of large tower clocks in the 14th century, followed by table clocks in the later 15th and 16th centuries, the equal hours they measured grew in popularity, eventually replacing the canonical hours and more intuitive modes of time telling (such as the division of the day into four parts or the seasonal hour system), all of which were based on fixed points of time rather than continuous durations. Even sundials which in earlier times had represented seasonal hours, by the late 15th century became calibrated with slanting gnomens to measure clock hours1. By the mid-16th century, table clocks had become typical furnishings of wealthy homes and people began wearing the first watches so that clock time quite literally could be carried with you2. While we know quite a bit about the history of these fascinating objects and their owners, it is harder for us to appreciate how people felt about the hours they measured. Did the broad diffusion of clock hours elicit any special psychological response? One simple way of probing this question is to look at allegorical representations of the hours in the art of the period. This essay will focus on the images of a particularly thoughtful and articulate painter, Giorgio Vasari, whose works cluster in the middle

1A. M, Seasonal-hour Sundials, “Antiquarian Horology”, 19, 2, 1990, pp. 147-174. 2See G. D-V R, History of the Hour. Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. T. D, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, as well as C. C’s classic, Clocks and Culture, New York and London, W. W. Norton & Co., 1978. The earliest dated watch (1530) exists in the Walters Art Museum and belongs to Philip Melanchthon (on this latter, see M. W G- G. T, “GOTT ALLEIN DIE EHRE”, Engraved on Philip Melanchthon’s Watch of 1530, “Lutheran Quarterly”, 15, Autumn, 2001, pp. 249-272). 169 170 Wellington Gahtan

Figure 1. Baldassare Peruzzi, Apollo’s Chariot and 12 Hours shadowed by Sat- urn, detail of frieze, 1520, Sala delle Prospettive, Villa Farnesina, Rome. (Credit: MIBAC Archive) decades of the 16th century–the period when the final and most intensive chapter in the transition to clock hours was taking place. These allegories by Vasari bear witness to a man in the process of working out his attitudes and making peace with hourly time. Giorgio Vasari was not the first to represent the hours in art: that honor goes to the Roman painter and architect, Baldassare Peruzzi. The year was 1520 and the place was the Villa Farnesina in Rome as a part of a frieze in this villa’s famous Sala delle Prospettive. An antiquarian artist serving an antiquarian-minded patron, the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, Peruzzi took his inspiration for the context and form of the hours from ancient literature (Figure 1). According to Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, the Horae were daughters of Apollo who prepared the horses of his chariot and guarded the gates of Olympus. Associated with the Seasons and the Graces, they numbered three or four, until later mythographers (such as the Pseudo-Hyginus, from the 2nd century and Nonnus, from the 5th century) sometimes offered twelve as an alternative. This alternative was based on real usage after the introduction of the Babylonian twenty-four seasonal hour system into Greece– so says Herodotus–sometime during the classical period3. Renaissance mythographic traditions and commentaries are based on the great poets and mythographers of ancient Greece and Rome, and they repeat the Hours’ association with the Sun, the Graces and the seasonal time, though Boccaccio and Giraldi also distinguish between the three or four mythological Horae (as Apollo’s handmaidens) and the more scientific division of the natural day into twenty-four hourly parts4. Although mentioned in such scholarly

3D-V R, History of the Hour (cit. note 2), p. 18. 4B, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, Bari, Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1951, chap. XIV.xx on Day, Son of Herebo, pp. 63-66, and L G G, De deis gentium, Basel, 1548, Syntagma XIII, Charites, Gratiae, pp. 574-575. Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour 171 literature, before the mid-16th century, the Horae are absent from art and are rarely depicted in poetry5. When they do appear in poetry, they attend Apollo, and usually number three or four6 In appropriate antiquarian fashion, Peruzzi’s Hours surround the Chariot of A- pollo, but here the ancient inspiration stops. Instead of further associating the Hours with the Seasons or Graces, Peruzzi presents his viewers with twelve mythological hours. He also chose to include another unorthodox element: the sinister ﬁgure of Saturn, the pagan god most associated in the Renaissance with linear and destructive time. Like a shadow, Saturn lurks behind the radient sungod, Apollo7. It would seem that for Peruzzi, Apollo’s daughters, the Hours, serve more as expressions of time’s shortness and witnesses to its ultimately destructive nature, than as companions to the solar circuit. Peruzzi’s treatment of the hours is more conceptual than antiquarian, not unlike Raphael’s own conceptual vision of hourly time dating from 1515, also produced in Rome. In Raphael’s case which occurs on the borders of a tapestry for the Medici pope, Leo X, Apollo and Diana–the Sun and the Moon–are backed up against an hourglass, and black and white nudes standing for day and night sit on a twenty-four hour clock8. Raphael’s timepieces most likely refer to the shortness of linear time, a primary meaning that hourglasses and clocks had only recently acquired. Timepieces of various types were familiar in the visual representations of the Mid- dle Ages and early Renaissance as attributes of Temperence. A famous example is Am- brogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of Temperance which forms part of his Good Government

5The Sun as Apollo alone or with Aurora as his companion is frequently represented in both the art and the poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. On medieval and Renaissance visual representations of the Sun and his companions, see C. C V, La Casa del Sole, Fonti e Modelli per un’iconografia mitologica, in S. R-S. V (eds.), Le due Rome del Quattrocento, Roma, La Sapienza, 1996, pp. 245-253, by the same author, I luoghi del mito fra decorazione e collezionismo, in Immagini degli dei. Mitologia e collezionismo tra ’500 e ’600, Roma, Fondazione Memmo, 1996, pp. 29-48, S. P, Le drame de la lumier´ e e de l’ombre: La tradizione iconografica della sequenza notte-aurora-giorno, “Studi romani”, 50, 2002, pp. 279-301, F. N A, L’iconographie du soleil dans la renaissance italienne in Le soleil a` la renaissance. Sciences et mythes, Brussels and Paris, Presses Universitaires de France e de Bruxelles, 1965, p. 538, and also my own, Observations on Apolline Imagery in Italy: 1450-1750 in S. S (ed.), The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena III, “Memorie della Societa` Astronomica Italiana”, 73, 1, 2002, pp. 129-135. An exception to this rule in art (discussed by C V, La Casa del Sole, this note) is Filarete’s description of ideal solar imagery which he felt should include the twenty-four hours. 6In poetry, for example Poliziano describes three Ore in his Stanze per la Giostra (1.92). Dante, however, provides an exception on two occasions in his Purgatorio (XII.80-81 and XXII.118-20) in which the solar chariot is accompanied by six and five handmaidens (“ancelle”) respectively, implying a total of twelve hours. Dante refrains from naming them Horae or hours, perhaps so as not to create too close an association the classical tradition. Since in his Convivio, Dante makes the point that the church uses seasonal hours as a basis for its liturgical hour system (Book 3.6.2), it would appear that he adapted his poetic presentation of the Hours to conform to Christian church practice. This would be consistant with his other adaptations of pagan mythology throughout the Divine Comedy. 7On Saturn as a figure for destructive linear time, see E. P’s still fundamental essay, Father Time in Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York, Harper and Row, 1972, pp. 69-94. C V, La casa del Sole (cit. note 5) and P, Le drame de la lumie´re (cit. note 5) discuss Peruzzi’s unusual image. 8On these tapestry borders, see J. C-R, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 30, 1984, p. 52. 172 Wellington Gahtan in the Sienese Palazzo Pubblico executed between 1337-1339 in which Temperance holds a large hourglass9. By the late 15th century, hourglasses and clocks were most commonly used as attributes of Father Time–normally allegorized as Saturn as in Peruzzi’s image–sugges- ting that their roles as indicators of fleeting linear time were growing while their associations as regulatory devices were waning. Even allegories of Death began to carry hourglasses and later Renaissance images of Temperence, deprived of their hourglasses, resort to holding yokes instead10. Thus it would seem that Peruzzi’s twelve handmaidens to Apollo and their Saturnine shadow draw more from recent cultural meanings associated with clocks, hourglasses and linear time than from the ancient literature that gave them their physical form. When Giorgio Vasari first imagined the Hours, he, like Peruzzi, followed mythographic tradition by linking them with the solar day. The decorations were for a tempo- rary pavillion where a performance of Aretino’s comedy, La Talenta was staged for the theatrical company, the Sempeterni. The decorations are gone, but Vasari records his efforts in some detail in a letter to Ottaviano de’ Medici from 1542 as well as in later summary accounts in his own biography and in that of his assistant, Cristoforo Gher- ardi. A few scattered preparatory drawings for the Hours by Vasari’s hand survive11. From these accounts we learn that the twenty-four Hour allegories resided between and around large narratives representing the four parts of the day, Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night. In the middle space a figure of Time divided the Hours into twenty-four. The whole ensemble, Vasari tells us, was illuminated by a large moving glass ball representing the Sun12. In contrast to Peruzzi’s Hours, Vasari’s are more specifically characterized. Not only do they have wings on their backs but also they have wings on their heads and hold various types of timepieces indicating which hour of the twenty-four hours each represents. More importantly, at least the twelfth Hour–the hour marking the closure of the daytime hours and the day itself which officially ended at sunset in this period in Italy–explicitly exhibits a human psychological dimension: she was represented as

9The idea of the clock as a regulatory mechanism also provides the title and the twenty-four chapter structure of Henri Suso’s fourteenth century, Horologium sapentiae. On this latter, see E. P. S, L’Horologe de Sapience, “Scriptorium”, 17, 1963, pp. 277-299. 10On the transformations of these allegories, especially those of Time and the attribute of the hourglass, see E. P, Reflections on Time in Problems in Titian: Mostly Iconographic, New York, New York University Press, 1969, pp. 88-108 and his earlier cited Father Time (cit. note 7). 11See A. C, Nuove Acquisizioni per un catalogo dei disegni di Giorgio Vasari, “Antichita` Viva”, 1, 1978, pp. 52-60 (Fig. 1, p. 52) and Meisterzeichnungen der Sammlung Lambert Krahe, Dusseldorf, Kunstmuseum, 14, 1969-1970, pp. 21-22, and T. C, Old Master Drawing in Albermarle Street, “Burlington Magazine”, 117, 1975, pp. 319-321. 12On Vasari’s decorative scheme, see S. P, Sull’iconografia dell’apparato dei “Sempeterni” di Giorgio Vasari, “Arte Veneta”, 60, 2003, pp. 156-164 and L.  G C, Vasari’s Early Deco- rative Cycles: The Venetian Commissions. Part I, “Explorations in Renaissance Culture”, 28, 2, 2002, pp. 239-284. These authors cite Vasari’s writing and reproduce the relevant passages of his letter and other texts. Vasari’s various descriptions of the stage set are not identical in all details. The letter is the longest of all of the descriptions, the only one that is contemporaneous to the design, and presumably the most accurate. Later accounts appear colored by Vasari’s later attitudes as expressed in his Terrace of Saturn images. Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour 173 eager to end the day. In Vasari’s own words, she embraces her timepiece with the desire/“ispiratione” to be consumed. When, twenty years later, an older more prominent artist-writer Vasari revisited the theme of the twenty-four hours on the ceiling of the Terrace of Saturn in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (which he remodeled for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici), he severed all connections to the Sun–and thereby all connections to ancient traditions of the Ho- rae. At the same time, he gave greater prominence to the psychological dimension of the hours. The central image of the Terrace of Saturn ceiling, completed in the 1560s, is of a powerful timegod, Saturn, who sits in the clouds holding a scythe surrounded by his own infant children which he devours one by one. Ancient mythology assigned this gruesome narrative to Saturn which the Renaissance viewed as appropriate to their concept of “Father Time” the destroyer “who triumphs over everyone, consuming each life”, as Vasari himself put it in his commentary on the image. Although Vasari’s orig- inal idea as expressed in a preparatory drawing now in the Uffizi illustrates a more benevolent Saturn surrounded by only twelve Hours and riding a triumphal chariot as he often does in visual allegories of Petrarch’s Triumph of Time13, it appears that Vasari later became convinced that a more shocking and graphic image was needed to express Time’s destructive nature (Figure 2)14. Allegories of the Four Ages of Man surround the central figure of Saturn while a band of twelve compartments, each containing two of the twenty-four Hours, frames the whole. The Hour allegories all possess hourglasses on their heads, two sets of wings (on the headdresses and butterfly wings on their backs), and plaques with the hour inscribed. The visual effect of both the drawing and the final image is that of an enormous ceiling clock guided by the central devouring figure of Saturn. In his Ragionamenti, a ficticious dialogue between the artist and Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s son, Francesco I, about the content of the decorations of the Palazzo Vecchio, Vasari describes the these Hours as female figures who appear to grow progressively older since time consumes them in succession. In the artist’s words, “once born, they grow old as together they pass though the night and day, which they in turn consume, each in its period”15. Taking their cue from the destructive devouring Saturn, these Hours represent more than the measurment of time, they illustrate their own successive demise. If Vasari’s Hours are progressively aging, then he must have conceived of them as a single being who is represented at ever more advanced stages of life. Vasari’s hours grow old like humans16 (Figure 3).

13This drawing is reproduced in U. M-A. C, The Apartments of Cosimo in Palazzo Vecchio, Firenze, Le Lettere, 1991, p. 89. On visual traditions relating to Petrarch’s Triumph of Time, see S. C, The Early Renaissance Personiﬁcation of Time and Changing Concepts of Temporality, “Renaissance Studies”, 14, 3, 2000, pp. 301-328, and also the earlier cited article on Father Time by P (cit. note 7) on which this later article builds. 14The gruesome events of mythology, usually avoided by artists and patrons in large formats and public spaces are also depicted in the central image of the Room of the Elements through which one passes to enter the Terrace of Saturn. This large ceiling painting depicts a younger Saturn castrating his father, Caelus, in order to take over the reign of the universe. 15G. V, Ragionamenti, Giornata Prima, as cited in the translation of J. L. D, Vasari’s Decoration in the Palazzo Vecchio: The Ragionamenti Translated with an Introduction and Notes, Ph. D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1973, p. 123. 16Vasari’s sentiment is partial harmony with and possibly draws from a minor medieval tradition equating the seven hours of the day with the seven ages of man, the seven liberal arts and the seven planets, but the 174 Wellington Gahtan

Figure 2. Giorgio Vasari, Saturn and Four Ages of Man, 1560s, Central Portion of Terrace Ceiling, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Credit: Servizio Musei, Firenze)

This psychological dimension of time is also poignently expressed in Vasari’s extraordinary allegories of the Four Ages of Man in the same cycle which form the inner frame to the devouring Saturn. Vasari represents each Age of Man as a male of appropriate age in close proximity to an antique urn. In Vasari’s allegories, the urn is the single external attribute so that the narrative of aging is told by the ﬁgures’ psychological relationship to it. What Vasari does with this simple format is nothing short of extraordinary. The child ignores the urn which sits abandoned at his feet because he does not yet know what mortality and time mean (Figure 4, left panel). The youth peruses it with intense curiosity as he discovers existential questions without fear for he is as yet a safe distance from death (Figure 4, right panel). The mature man, recognizing that he has lived more than half his life, contorts his face in anguish as he desperately attempts to

psychological component is absent. On this, see E. S, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986, esp. pp. 134-137 and C. G, Arti liberali, pianeti, eta` dell’uomo, ore del giorno nella “camera delle rose” di Palazzo Trinci: la metafora del “tempo che passa” in un ciclo pittorico degli inizi del Quattrocento, “Bollettino storico della citta` di Foligno”, 15, 1991, pp. 35-50. This latter cycle uses representations of the Sun’s position in the sky to indicate the time of day. Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour 175

Figure 3. Giorgio Vasari, detail of Hours IX & X and Hours XXIII & XXIV, 1560s, Terrace of Saturn, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Credit: Servizio Musei, Firenze) hide the urn from view (Figure 5, left panel), while the elderly man, ready to pass on to the next world, embraces the urn with resignation, though he still cannot bring himself to look at it (Figure 5, right panel). Like the final daytime hour of the Sempiterni theatrical set who embraced her hourglass with the inspiration to be consumed, so too does Old Age embrace his ultimate fate–he makes peace with death. The urn, a classic symbol of death and the finiteness of the human lifespan, was also aptly enough a popular shape for clocks in this period (Figure 6). Moreover, the urn or vase is a figurative transcription of the artist’s family name. In his biography of his great grandfather, Lazzaro Vasari, Vasari tells us that “Vasari” derives from vaso or vase, since he came from a family of vase-makers17. Knowing this, the vase-clinging allegories of the Ages of Man surrounded by the declining Hours take on a pointed autobiographical aspect18. Therefore in a very real sense, the artist was working out his

17G. V, Vita di Lazzaro Vasari, in R. B-P. B (eds.), Le vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, Firenze, Sansoni, 1966-1997, 3, p. 297. 18In the livingroom of his house in Arezzo, Giorgio Vasari painted many ancient vases, probably playing on this association. A poem by Vasari’s poet friend Giovan Battista Strozzi written to the artist and reproduced in U. S-B’s Giorgio Vasari, scrittore, “Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di 176 Wellington Gahtan

Figure 4. Giorgio Vasari, Infancy and Youth, 1560s, Terrace of Saturn, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Credit: Servizio Musei, Firenze) own attitudes to time and its hourly durations. Not only the Hour at the end of the day but all of the Hours are aging, and their winged ﬂight marks oﬀ segments of the human lifespan–indeed Vasari’s own lifespan. Of the other images and comments by Giorgio Vasari that help round out his views on the hour, perhaps the most telling was painted a few years earlier in a tiny room that served as a study adjacent to the Terrace of Saturn19. On the ceiling, Vasari painted Calliope, the muse of epic poetry who places her foot on top of a clock in a traditional gesture of triumph20. Like his Hour allegories, she has wings in her hair. As Vasari tells us in his Ragionamenti, she rests her foot on the clock because divine inspiration and study are the only ways to beat time21.

Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia”, 1 Ser., 1905, p. 295, also refers to Vasari as a vase, beginning with the words, “di bel Vaso arte fuore [... ]”. 19Other related images include Vasari’s allegory of Day on the ceiling of the nearby Room of the Elements which rather unusually exhibits a globe and an hourglass and his singular allegory of Patience who anx- iously watches a water clock that leaks water on to her chains–water which will eventually erode them and set her free. On this latter, see the classic article by R. W, Patience and Chance: The Story of a Political Emblem, “Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes”, 1, 1937-1938, pp. 171-177, and more recently, L.  G C, Giorgio Vasari’s Patience: APersonification of Daily Tolerance, in Giorgio Vasari’s Teachers: Sacred and Profane Art, New York, Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 169-176. 20For example, in Florence, David was commonly represented with his foot on Goliath’s severed head. Michelangelo’s Victory, located in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Salone del ’500 also exhibits this motif as the young victorious man raises himself with his knee on his subjugated older foe. 21V, Ragionamento IV, in D, Vasari’s Decoration (cit. note 15), p. 159. This image of Calliope and the room it decorates is discussed by A. M. G, The Scrittoio della Calliope in Palazzo Vecchio: a Tuscan Museum, “Renaissance Studies”, 19, 5, 2005, pp. 699-709. L.  G C offers further Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour 177

Figure 5. Giorgio Vasari, Maturity and Old Age, 1560s, Terrace of Saturn, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Credit: Servizio Musei, Firenze)

After this brief interlude of what we might call clock-hour anxiety in which general anxieties about time that had been maturing ever since Petrarch are applied in potent form to images of clock hours just as the novelties of house clocks and watches spead– an anxiety also shared by the 16th century French writer Rabelais who banished clocks from his Utopian Abbeye of The´leme–it` would seem that real clock hours retreated from visual imagery. Horae began to serve exclusively as handmaidens to Apollo or Aurora, and their number was reduced to three or four following the ancient seasonal tradition, even in works by Vasari’s own students such as the frescos by Jacopo Zucchi representing Apollo in his Chariot, the Seasons and four Hours in Palazzo Ruspoli, Rome, 1590s. By the 17th century, it would appear that the Hours had become absorbed into a Counter-Reformation discourse. In the ceiling image by Guido Reni representing Au- rora leading Apollo’s Chariot with seven Hours in the Casino di Aurora of the Palazzo Rospigliosi-Pallavicini, Rome, 1614 (Figure 7), for the first time, the Hours number seven. These seven handmaidens to Apollo were soon imitated by Poussin in the sky of his famous Dance to the Music of Time of c. 1640 and commissioned by Giulio Rospigliosi (later Pope Clement IX), now in the Wallace Collection, London22. Hav- analysis of Calliope as a muse in Giorgio Vasari’s Calliope: Muse of Poetry and Music in Giorgio Vasari’s Teachers (cit. note 19), pp. 197-203. 22Although these famous works have been studied extensively, the allegories of the Hours they contain has been little discussed in the scholarly literature. The first published descriptions of both works occur in G. P. B’s Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, first published in Rome, 1672, but consulted by this author in the modern critical edition by E. B, Torino, Einaudi, 1976. Bellori identifies Reni’s Hours in a wonderful passage (also cited in a note by R. E. S in his monograph, The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997, p. 178 Wellington Gahtan

Figure 6. Urn Clock, c. 1600, probably Augsburg. (Credit: Christies London, 2001) ing lost all connection to ancient seasonal associations (as they also had for Vasari in his Palazzo Vecchio scheme), they have also lost all connection to real measured time, and this despite the fact that greatest of Baroque iconographers, Cesare Ripa records twenty-four of them (twelve daytime hours and twelve nighttime hours) in 160323. Reni and Poussin’s seven Hours who glide eﬀortlessly around Apollo without wings or hour-

324): “Danzano in tanto le Ore liete fanciulle le quali si danno vicendevolemente le mani scorrendo l’area con veloci passi; sotto scuopresi il chiarore nascente, la terra e il mare nel basso orrizonte” (B, this note, p. 500). G. B. P in his Le vite di Pittori, Scultori, ed Architetti, c. 1678, critical edition by J. H, Vienna and Leipzig, 1934, p. 87, also identiﬁes the gliding women as Horae. On this work by Reni, see also the monographs by S. D. P, Guido Reni: A Complete Catalogue of His Works with an Introductory Text, Oxford, Phaedon, 1984, and G.-J. S, Reni, Milan, Electa, 2001, pp. 68-69. Bellori’s account of Poussin’s Ballo della vita umana as he calls it, also notes that “dietro seguitano danzano le Ore a volo” (B, this note, p. 463). The painting is discussed at some length (without reference to the number of Hours) by F. S, in his Veritas Filia Temporis, in R. K-H. J. P (eds.), Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1936, pp. 197-222, by R. B in his Dance to the Music of Time by Nicolas Poussin, London, Wallace Collection, 2006, and also in the recent monograph by C. W, Poussin: A catalogue raissonne´, London, Chaucer Press, 2007, pp. 161-162. 23C. R, Iconologia overo descrittione di diversi Imagini cavate dall’antichita` & di propria inventione, Roma, Lepido Faeij, 1603, pp. 203-214. Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour 179

Figure 7. Guido Reni, Aurora Leads Apollos Chariot with Seven Hours, 1614, Palazzo Rospigliosi-Pallavicini, Rome. glasses, appear to represent none other than nostalgia for the waning importance of the liturgical hours, so vital to the ordering of the day in that bygone era preceeding the broad diﬀusion of the mechanical clock. In Reni and Poussin’s Rome, clock time had become a fact of daily life in the consciousness of men for whom it had become a nor- mal habit to carry watches. With clock-hour anxiety largely passed, the image of the hour transmuted to serve other needs.