Table Clock Shaped Blue Empire Style Salimbeni

Table Clock shaped in gold-plated 925/1000 silver with translucent fired enamel on guilloche and empire decorations. Swiss mechanical “Hebdomas” movement with 8-day movement and visible balance wheel. Amethyst cabochon on crown and trestle foot. Empire style blu enamel sterling silver.

Table Clock Back SideDimensions cm. 10.2 x 11.5 Thickness cm. 1.7. weight gr. 385. Designed by Giorgio Salimbeni in 1978, reproduced in a few examples of different colours, in the Salimbeni factory with handwork by skilled craftsmen with a very thick plate and large reinforcements capable of supporting numerous high-heat enamel firings at around 800°C .

In Table Clock blue enamel is used the Guilloche Tecnique . Guilloché is an artisanal process carried out on mainly precious metals, which allows to obtain surfaces engraved with complex and repeated geometric patterns. Guilloché engraving was invented in the mid-1800s in Switzerland by watch manufacturers to embellish the dials of their luxurious products. The technique consists of engraving the metal with a burin using a machine with mainly manual controls. (see photo in the gallery) A copier, following the sinuosity of some matrices placed on the machine, transmits a movement to the object subjected to engraving, thus ensuring that the burin “cuts” the metal. By moving the positions of the matrices and the copier, precise intertwined engravings of an almost infinite geometric type are obtained and their continuous differentiation certainly adds value to the objects that are produced. The manual skills required to carry out this operation are highly specialized, the existing machines are very old, as there has never been a mass market and above all for the conservation of art. After the engraving, we generally proceed with fire enamelling, a meticulous and very long process during which the guilloche engraved surface is covered with various layers of colored glass powder and fired in small special ovens at a temperature between 700 and 800°C. The result of transparency and perfection can also require numerous firings, at least 10 for a single colour, for surfaces with multiple colors it can even reach 50 firings. One color is applied at a time and then fired, the glazes used have a different shade so that when the next color is applied the previous one does not move. The inclination of the surfaces of an object can create great difficulties both for the guilloche engraving and in the enamel firing phase as the positioning of the machine becomes more complex and requires great skill and competence while the liquefaction of the enamel produces complex situations that only the highest level of craftsmanship can achieve.In Salimbeni production, guilloche engraving and enamelling have been the main processes for more than a century and are found in almost all products. When building an object, Salimbeni starts from a drawing, which can also be provided by the customer, to build the structure by hand with silver plates of different thicknesses. Once the necessary shape has been obtained with welding and finishing, processes common to skilled silversmiths, we proceed with the guilloche engraving and subsequent enamelling, as well as all the final polishing and galvanic finishing, for gilding and/or other. Our most complex and most precious productions also required months of work for small objects, seeking a perfection that is generally not contemplated in craftsmanship but which for us is the basis of our everyday life.