A Clock Picture as a Philosophical Experiment: The Tableau Mécanique in the Physics Cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson

This essay focuses on a rare, technological marvel: the Automaton Landscape with Clock of 1739. The result of a collaboration between a painter and a clockmaker, this hybrid image-object was commissioned by wealthy collector Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson to be placed on a shelf in his celebrated Cabinet de Mécanique et de Physique, in between replicas of engineering machines. I argue that its position as a device rather than a decorative object makes this clock-painting a model of mechanical ingenuity as much as a 'philosophical instrument'. In the context of the changing attitudes towards mechanical philosophy and the central position of the clock metaphor, proffered by Descartes, Robert Boyle and Christian Wolff among others, I suggest that the clock-painting participates in this debate as the materialization of the philosophical problem as to whether the world was mechanical.