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ELIZABETH KING
Clockwork Prayer: A Sixteenth-Century Mechanical Monk
"El movimiento se demuestra andando,"
we say in Spanish: You demonstrate movement by moving.
Carlos Fuentes [1]
Introduction
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In the Smithsonian Institution
is a sixteenth-century automaton of a monk, made of wood and iron, 15
inches in height. Driven by a key-wound spring, the monk walks in a square,
striking his chest with his right arm, raising and lowering a small wooden
cross and rosary in his left hand, turning and nodding his head, rolling
his eyes, and mouthing silent obsequies. From time to time, he brings
the cross to his lips and kisses it. After over 400 years, he remains
in good working order. Tradition attributes his manufacture to one Juanelo
Turriano, mechanician to Emperor Charles V. The story is told that the
emperor's son King Philip II, praying at the bedside of a dying son of
his own, promised a miracle for a miracle, if his child be spared. And
when the child did indeed recover, Philip kept his bargain by having Turriano
construct a miniature penitent homunculus. Looking at this object in the
museum today, one wonders: what did a person see and believe who witnessed
it in motion in 1560? The uninterrupted repetitive gestures, to us the
dead giveaway of a robot, correspond exactly in this case to the movements
of disciplined prayer and trance.
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In the history of European
clock technology, the monk is an early and very rare example of a self-acting
automaton, one whose mechanism is wholly contained and hidden within its
body. Its uncanny presence separates it immediately from later automata:
it is not charming, it is not a toy, it is "fearfully and wonderfully
made," and it engages even the twentieth-century viewer in a complicated
and urgent way. [2]
It has duende, the dark spirit Federico García Lorca described.
[3]
Myself a sculptor, negotiating competing ways of representing human substance
and spirit, I wanted to know more about this hypnotic object, and the
legend connected to it.
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The monk had arrived in Washington
via Geneva in 1977, into the care of Smithsonian Conservator W. David
Todd, who has made an extensive study of its mechanism. Conversations
over time with Mr. Todd, together with research of my own, have helped
me learn a little more about the monk. [4]
I began with these primary questions: Could I confirm the story about
how the monk came to be made (a story David Todd told me one day on the
telephone in response to my early queries)? And if so, what was the nature
of King Philip's commission for it? Who was Juanelo Turriano, and how
unique was this little artificial man in terms of the mechanical arts
of the time? Where was the line between religion and magic in such an
object? What can be said about it within the context of sixteenth-century
Catholicism, but also sixteenth-century science and alchemy? How was the
monk used once it was made, who operated it and who would have seen it?
Above all, how was it seen, and what beliefs might have been crucial
to its effect on spectators? This essay narrates the chronology of my
search for answers to these questions. I am not a historian, and I have
preferred to let the search itself be visible as a part of my subject.
Driven as much by the physical presence of the monk as by the legend of
the bedside promise, this work is ultimately an artist's homage to the
human attempt to model an act of the spirit.
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