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On 2 June 2025, in Plan-les-Ouates, on the outskirts of Geneva, I was having lunch with Piaget CEO Benjamin Comar when he told me that he had something special to show me. Curious, I followed him to a remote part of the factory where I encountered Laurent Perves, CEO of Vacheron Constantin, to whom I was handed over.
Mr Perves explained that such was the secrecy surrounding what he was about to show me, he had taken the precaution of using the premises of another brand to display it. He asked me not to mention what I was about to see to anyone – happily he believes that a handshake is as effective as a fistful of NDAs. I agreed, and with that he held back a black curtain and ushered me in to the presence of a hugely complex mechanical object over a metre in height. It took a moment for me to understand what I was looking at: part-automaton, part-astronomical clock and totally left field, this was something I hadn’t seen coming.
This was La Quête du Temps, Vacheron’s 270th birthday present to itself, and I can only liken my first glimpse as being bit by an aesthetic express train.
I simply did not know what to make of, as Vacheron puts it, ‘an unprecedented work of mechanical artistry that blends horological expertise, decorative craftsmanship and the ingenuity of automatons’. At its top stood a gilded automaton under a crystal dome depicting the celestial vault as it would have looked on 17 September 1755, the day the maison was founded. Beneath were two clocks, one tracking sidereal time, the other featuring a perpetual calendar. Below these, the mechanism responsible for the automaton’s movement (and accompanying music) could be appreciated through panels of rock crystal.
The statistics are undoubtedly impressive: 6,293 mechanical components, 23 watchmaking complications, 1,020 components for the habillage (casing) and 15 patent applications, including eight for the automaton. It is unarguably an horological tour de force; the salons of the age of Enlightenment would have been delighted by its complexity, rarity and ingenuity. But I left that room wondering what place it had in the 21st century.
As it happened, it was just context that was missing, context that could only be provided by what is arguably the world’s greatest museum. And so, shortly before 9am on 16 September, I found myself in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre where La Quête du Temps starred in the Mécaniques d’art exhibition conceived by the brilliant curator Olivier Gabet.
This masterpiece had not changed one iota since I first saw it, and yet its transformation was almost alchemical. In the Louvre, surrounded by mankind’s most exquisite and inventive attempts to capture time – from a precious fragment of Egyptian clepsydra of the Ptolemaic period to the sublime Louis XV ‘Pendule de la Création du Monde’ – Vacheron Constantin’s creation was in its locus classicus.
What struck me most profoundly was how effortlessly it assumed its place among the great horological achievements of the past, not as a relic or a replica, but as an object sui generis as to be truly timeless. In our jaded and cynical age, the Quête du Temps is a source of wonder. When the automaton began making the gestures to indicate the time and moonphase, and the only noise of the accompanying music filled the hallowed air of the Richelieu Wing, the attendant crowd of journalists stood silent and rapt, dumbstruck and awed.
This is timekeeping as cultural statement, the meeting place of horology and philosophy. In the surroundings of the Louvre, La Quête du Temps transcends its mechanical origins. It becomes something altogether more significant: a fusion of scientific precision and artistic vision that speaks not just to our desire to measure time, but to our need to find meaning within its passage.