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Updated: May 8, 2025
He led his guests from room to room, and showed them all the rare and curious objects the armoury with its store of ancient coats of mail and hauberks, of swords and helmets of ancient design, and its choice specimens of the engraved and damascened work; the breastplates and greaves that were a specialité of Milanese armourers at this period; the wonderful clock of copper and brass worked by wheels and weights, upon which Giovanni Dondi had spent sixteen years of ceaseless thought and toil, and which not only had a peal of bells, but a complete solar system, showing the movement of sun, moon, and planets as set forth by Ptolemy.
Were men of genius, as such, to have armorial bearings they might consist, not of imaginary things, of griffins and chimeras, but of deeds performed and of public works in existence. When DONDI raised the great astronomical clock at the University of Padua, which was long the admiration of Europe, it gave a name and nobility to its maker and all his descendants.
There still lives a Marquis Dondi dal' Horologio. Sir HUGH MIDDLETON, in memory of his vast enterprise, changed his former arms to bear three piles, to perpetuate the interesting circumstance, that by these instruments he had strengthened the works he had invented, when his genius poured forth the waters through our metropolis, thereby distinguishing it from all others in the world.
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