From Theory to Practice: Daniele Barbaro’s Investigations on Timekeeping and the Villa in Maser

Abstract

Following the prescriptions of the ancient authors such as Palladius and Varro, Daniele Barbaro planned some device for timekeeping in the process of remodelling the family villa in Maser. The two large square surfaces on the villa’s two lateral towers, obtained at the expense of the harmony and hierarchy in the general composition, are an indication of the will to install devices for the measurement of time. However, Barbaro’s shortcomings in the geometrical methodology for the design of sundials on a declining wall raises some doubts about the original presence of sundials like the early twentieth-century ones seen today. The older iconographic sources show two original painted frescoes in which appear the dials of mechanical clocks. Finally, series of contact points with Ctesibius’s hydraulic clock described by Barbaro in Vitruvius makes the hypothesis of a water clock plausible, even if not proved at a documentary level.