Footnotes

The origin of the Campani brothers is obscure, the dates of their births in the small Umbrian village of Castel San Felice is unknown. Tommaso Campani had been apprenticed near the city of Terni and the youngest brother Giuseppe became his apprentice. Matteo, the oldest was a priest, but became involved in clockmaking in some way.
In mid-17th century Italy there were two prominent centres of scientific and artistic progress, Florence with the Medici court and the Papal Court of Rome, where there were also foreign embassies, long established noble families and the renowned university of La Sapienza and Jesuit college.
The Campani brothers gravitated to Rome where Matteo was already a priest in the city. Tommaso became established as a fine and innovative craftsman, the maker of intricate mechanics for complex automata. He soon attracted the attention of influential patrons, the first being the young cardinal Fabio Chigi (1599-1667). One of the first commissions produced by Campani was a gift of an extravagant clock for Queen Cristina of Sweden with a complicated mechanism and automaton. At around the same time Campani was appointed watchmaker to the Papal court. In April 1655 Chigi was ordained as Pope Alessandro VII.
It was six months later, in October, that the Pope asked his maggiodomo Monsignore Giordano Farnese to provide him with a clock that had to be both silent as well as showing the time without the annoyance of having to have a burning oil lamp in front of it to see the dial.
The Pope, possibly a light sleeper, had been kept awake by the noise of a conventional escapement, quite apart from the irritation of an exposed lamp in his sleeping chamber. Apparently the Campani brothers had already spoken with Cardinal Farnese and were working on a silent clock, but now there was the added request for some ingenious method of showing the time in the dark without an external lamp.
The two problems now had to be solved together, and Tommaso and his brothers developed ingenious solutions; i) an entirely new, silent escapement achieved by having the last wheel in the going train in constant rotation rather than having the stop-start action of a traditional clock with balance wheel or foliot. ii) Rejecting the traditional dial mounted with a pair of hands, the brothers chose instead to show the time on a slowly moving disc arcing 180 degrees over the course of an hour (much like the apparent movement of the sun over the course of a day). Each disc is pierced and back-lit with a naked flame within the body of the clock so that the shining hour can be traced on its journey.
There has been some confusion over which of the brothers was the main instigator of the design, but at one time or another, Matteo claimed priority over at least some aspects.
The resultant clock was completed in March 1656 and was deemed a huge success by His Holiness, so much so that he granted Tommaso and Giuseppe a Papal privilege (patent) to make these new night clocks. Other commissions from noble families, dignitaries and ambassadors followed.
Contemporary clockmakers complained over the grant of the Privilege, so a committee was appointed, including father Francesco Eschinardi (born 1623, professor of mathematics) and Althanasius Kircher (1602-80 another mathematician), both noted for innovative horological ideas. Judgment was eventually cast in favour of the brothers and published in 1658. It is interesting to note that further privileges were granted to Giuseppe alone in 1659 by the Pope and in 1660 by the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Perhaps in justification of these privileges Giuseppe published a book in 1660 "Discorso di Giuseppe Campaini intorno ai suoi muti orology"
Of course, these monumental night clocks could not be made by one team of clockmakers alone in a single workshop; the Campanis collaborated with some of the finest lapidiarists, sculptors, painters, jewellers, metalworkers, and cabinetmakers of the day including for instance the artist Carlo Maratta, and the German cabinet maker Giacomo Hermann. Other cabinet makers working in Rome included the Swiss Giovanni Sigrist and the German Giovanni Falker. Unfortunately, these co-creators very rarely signed their work.
Similar clocks can be found in European collections, and perhaps the closest is that from the Ilbert Collection in the British Museum, London (illustrated). Signed and dated just a year after the current lot, it is likely that they were both in the workshop at the same time, worked on by the same artists. The current example shows perhaps a higher level of finish– there are more inset panels and the side columns, cast with figures and mounted as they are in lapis lazuli, are far more extravagant.
Another important night clock signed by Campani and dated 1663 resides in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This piece takes the form of a cabinet with a night clock mounted within it and has been attributed to Giacomo Herman.