The Louvre Museum is putting the spotlight on mechanical arts this fall through a unique selection of emblematic works that trace humanity's aspirations to grasp and measure time from antiquity to the present day. These mechanical arts remain both a source of infinite wonder for what they reveal about the intelligence and mastery of countless clockmakers and craftsmen from the past, while also representing a still lesser-known segment of the museum's collections.

The exhibition features an extraordinary range of timepieces spanning millennia, from fragments of an Egyptian water clock from the Ptolemaic period to the famous pendulum clock known as the "Creation of the World," an astronomical clock presented to King Louis XV in 1754. Among the highlights is a fragment of a peacock-shaped automaton, a 10th-century Cordoba work that represents a masterpiece of the Islamic arts collections at the Louvre, and a spherical watch - the oldest signed example preserved in France - signed and dated by Jacques de La Garde in 1551.

These works demonstrate the excellence of mechanical arts, combining clockmaking, decorative arts, and automaton craftsmanship. To illustrate the excellence of contemporary haute horlogerie craftsmanship, they are accompanied by an exceptional loan from Vacheron Constantin. The Swiss house renews horological tradition with an original creation titled "The Quest for Time," an automaton clock designed for its 270th anniversary that integrates for the first time an automaton conceived as one of twenty-three complications that compose it.

This automaton participates fully in the clock's function as it indicates the time. Embodying an astronomer inspired by ancient models and nourished by Renaissance humanist aesthetics and European sciences of the 17th and 18th centuries, this automaton is governed by 144 different gestures and movements that, beyond precise timekeeping, display cosmic and astronomical phenomena that are both exact and artistic.

The collaboration represents an unprecedented partnership that Vacheron Constantin has developed with the Louvre's art workshops since 2019, following their 2015 support for the restoration of the "Creation of the World" pendulum clock. This partnership has involved exchanges of expertise and participation in the biennial Homo Faber exhibition in Venice. The historical pieces presented tell the story of this ancient, if not immemorial, tradition of mechanical arts, born from passion for technical complexities and more or less scientific machines, never exempt from aesthetic and artistic research.

The "Creation of the World" pendulum clock, created by Claude Siméon Passemant (1702-1769), Jean-Baptiste Lepaute (1727-1802), and Jean-Joseph Lepaute (1770-1786) in Paris in 1754, represents the moment of separation of primordial elements in the early times of world creation. Earth is depicted by patinated bronze, water and air by silver bronze, and fire by gold bronze. A terrestrial globe represents the planet's surface as it was known in the mid-18th century. A series of mechanisms activates different parts of the clock, with Earth pivoting on its axis according to seasons and performing its daily rotation.

Among other remarkable pieces is a terrestrial globe mounted on a figure of the titan Atlas by Giuseppe de Rossi (active early 17th century), created in Milan in 1615. The globe's representation follows that published by Jodocus Hondius, a Flemish engraver and cartographer, in 1601, with unexplored lands left blank and only the north coast of New Guinea depicted. An armillary sphere on an Atlas figure from the 19th century represents the remarkable circles of the celestial sphere including horizon, meridian, and equator.

The collection includes several exceptional watches, including a carriage watch bearing the arms of Cardinal Richelieu by François de Hecq (active 17th century) from Orléans around 1640. This luxury object was designed for carriage travel and features refined casing mixing engraved vegetal motifs with pierced work technique. A memento mori skull-shaped watch by Jean Rousseau (1606-1684) from Geneva symbolizes time's flight leading to death, with the skull forming the case bowl and the articulated lower jaw serving as the dial cover.

The spherical watch by Jacques de La Garde from Blois in 1551 is considered the oldest dated and signed French watch preserved in public collection. Its case comprises two hemispheres, with the upper half partially openworked and engraved with crescents, volutes, and mask motifs. A square tower-shaped table clock from late 16th-century Germany bears the arms of the Farnese family and features important chiseled decoration of satyrs alternating with monsters.

A polyhedric dial by Pierre Sevin (active 1662-1685) from Paris in 1662 once belonged to King Louis XIV's cousin, Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, known as "la Grande Mademoiselle." This spectacular instrument comprises five dials distributed across different faces that all give the same time when correctly oriented. The peacock automaton element from Cordoba (962 or 972) was probably produced at the Andalusian court by a Christian scholar and would have been part of a complex, large-scale clock.

The exhibition also features a water clock fragment (clepsydra) from Ptolemaic Egypt (332-30 BC) made of granodiorite. This type of clock was invented at the beginning of the New Kingdom (around 1530 BC) and used until the middle of the Ptolemaic period with precision estimated at 15 minutes. The clock consisted of a flared container filled with water with an opening at its base allowing drop-by-drop flow, with the exterior wall decorated with astronomical and religious representations of the night sky.

Vacheron Constantin's "The Quest for Time" automaton clock represents a culmination of this tradition, integrating an automaton as one of twenty-three complications while fully participating in timekeeping function. Inspired by ancient models and nourished by Renaissance humanist aesthetics and European sciences of the 17th and 18th centuries, this creation demonstrates how these crafts inscribe themselves in a genealogy of diverse epochs and civilizations, all driven by the desire to master time.