Time Machines: Clocks in Art and Literature from 1300 to now
Lecture on Monday 4th October 2027 at 2:15PM
Lecturer: Dr Christina Faraday
Venue: Larruperz Centre
Few people nowadays give more than a second thought to their clocks: practical, sometimes beautiful, devices that form the background noise of our daily lives. But from their introduction in the thirteenth century onwards, clocks have held a variety of philosophical and social meanings.
This talk explores the visual and literary uses of the clock, the varied meanings it could hold throughout the ages: as an ominous symbol of oncoming death, but also as a metaphor for the soul, for capitalism, and for the good use of time.
We will consider medieval manuscripts and frescoes, poetry by Dante and Jean Froissart, still life and genre paintings, satires by Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Hogarth. We will consider nineteenth-century ideas about power and the working day, in portraits of emperors and seamstresses and novels by Dickens. Finally, we will consider the breaking down of temporal certainties in the twentieth century, with Dali, Chagall, Harold Lloyd, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Christian Marclay.
Dr Christina Faraday FSA FRHistS is a historian of art and ideas, specialising in Tudor and Stuart Britain and the wider 16th and 17th-century world. She is an Affiliated Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, a Trustee of the Walpole Society for British art history, and a BBC New Generation Thinker, appearing regularly on BBC Radio 3 and in other popular media.
She is the host of British Art Matters podcast, and from 2020-2025 she was a Research Fellow in History of Art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is an experienced lecturer, teaching for the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge, The Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, London, and for Professional and Continuing Education at Cambridge, where she is Co-Director of the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture. Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England, was published in 2023 by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press. Her latest book, The Story of Tudor Art, was published by Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury in September 2025 and was named a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year.