The early 1300s saw a scientific and technological revolution that changed forever not only the Medieval view of time, but the artistic representation of it. The invention of the escapement mechanism, a bit of machinery that allowed more accurate clocks to be built, caused a profusion of publicly available clocks throughout Western Europe (Camille 98). This caused a massive change in society; all manner of public events became regulated by "real" hours rather than the somewhat fluid hours dictated by the Sun and the seasons. Eventually, this phenomenon made its way into churches, which came to house these massive mechanical clocks. .
Gothic art, as it is wont to do, neatly appropriated this technological breakthrough for its own - the depiction of time changed a great deal, and artists of the period also began to use the clock as a tool for religious allegory (Camille 99). .
Throughout early Gothic architecture prior to this breakthrough, time was represented in a "multilayered" fashion, as in the portals of Chartres cathedral (Camille 72). The images are combined from numerous time periods, wherein different events are occurring for a variety of people who did not exist at the same time. While the use of Old and New Testament figures together is partially due to the influence of typology, it also reflects the Medieval conception of time. This tends to blend the past, present and future into a cyclical view, which regards the future as naught but the End of Times, even the distant past as relatively recent, and the present as everything in the eyes of God (Camille 74-94). The standard clock did away with this, however, and brought forth the idea, in art, of "events unfolding within a single, coherent, unified space (Camille 99)." .
A strong example of this phenomenon exists in Heinrich Suso, a 14th century Dominican mystic from Germany. His masterpiece, a Latin translation and modification of his first major book - Das Buchlein der ewigen Weisheit (The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom), Horologium Sapientiae (The Clock of Wisdom), uses the clock as a metaphor for the Eternal Wisdom of Christ (Blessed Henry Suso 3).
