The origins of Leonardo’s watchmaking: Andrea Verrocchio and Lorenzo della Volpaia for the Mercato Nuovo clock

Abstract

Giorgio Vasari remeber that the Arte della Mercanzia commissioned to Andrea del Verrocchio the bronze group with Christ and St. Thomas and another work, also to be dated at the end of the Seventies of the Fifteenth Century. It is not a sculpture but a work of technology, an automata: a putto beater to be placed on the clock of the Torre del Saggio in Piazza del Mercato Nuovo in Florence. New documents shed further light on this technological project that Leonardo certainly knew.