Note 238 — Chapter LV

We have had frequent occasion to notice the encouragement given at Urbino to the exact sciences, and the consequent success of those arts most depending upon them. Thus the Baroccio family were celebrated for the accuracy of their mathematical instruments and timepieces, while watchmaking attracted great attention from all the della Rovere dukes. Their family portraits very generally exhibit a table-clock of some eccentric form, and their gifts to princes and royal personages were often chronometers made in their state. One of these, sent to Pius V., exhibited the planetary movements and other complex revolutions of the solar system; another, worn by his Holiness in a ring, marked the hours by gently pricking his finger. In 1535, Francesco Maria I. presented to Charles V., at Naples, a ring wherein a watch struck the hours; and many similar notices occur in the correspondence of his grandson, the last Duke. Guidobaldo II. was especially fond of such mechanical curiosities. Having received from one Giovan Giorgio Capobianco of Vicenza, the Praxiteles of tiny chiselling, a ring which held a watch, whereupon were engraved the signs of the zodiac, with a figure that pointed to and struck the hours—he interfered to save the artist's life, when condemned to death for an assassination at Venice. In gratitude for this favour, the latter made for the Duchess a silver chessboard contained in a cherry-stone; nor should we omit to add that he displayed the same ingenuity on a wider field as an architect and engineer. So, too, Filippo Santacroce, of Urbino, and his sons, are celebrated by Count Cicognara for their minute carvings on gems, ivory, and nuts.