The Clock of Paolo Uccello

When you step through the main doors into the nave of the Florence Cathedral, if you casually turn back to look up directly above the main portal, you will very likely gasp in total confusion: not only is there a colossal, seven-meter-tall painted clock hung up there, but—bizarrely—its hand moves stubbornly in reverse, literally running completely counter-clockwise!

This ancient mechanical fresco clock, born in 1443, features a deep, towering face painted by Paolo Uccello, a painter obsessively enthusiastic about hard geometric lines. Floating in the four corners are four very serious Evangelists peering outward through painted perspective windows. But the absolute wildest design lies in the mechanics: the gigantic clock features only one single, lonely, star-shaped hand. The dial is not split into the 12 modern segments we are completely accustomed to; instead, it is evenly cut into 24 distinct hour slices (and even the Roman numerals are arranged entirely backwards against normal common sense!).

The entire dial mask essentially functions as an intensely blown-up model of a cosmic astrolabe, used expressly to accurately calculate the now-extinct “Italian Time.” Mandated directly by the Catholic Church of that era, “Italian Time” brutally forced every day to start tracking exactly from the precise moment of sunset, fiercely symbolizing the eternal daily order that God had drawn out for the world into clockwork.

If you happen to hear the cathedral’s deafening bells ring exactly when the star-hand points right at “XXIV” (the 24th hour), can you guess whether it is completely bright outside or totally pitch black? (Hint: This was always the final, drop-dead deadline demanding that all peasant farmers toiling out in the fields instantly drop their hoes and scramble back inside the safety of the city walls.)

Long before universal, multi-national standard time zones were ever invented, for a vast majority of commoners who had never even left their home village, “time” itself was an extremely expensive and hyper-localized resource. This compulsory, authoritarian time-counting method—mandated completely by power, resetting the 24-hour day a precise half hour after sunset—rigidly dictated the tolling of the heavy monastery bells and mercilessly controlled the extraordinarily strict clock-in, clock-out schedules of every Italian city-state for centuries.