Rock Your Body: Montblanc Collection Vllleret 1858 Marking Minerva‘s 150th anniversary: The Grand Tourbillon Heures Mystérieuses from the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858
Special events deserve suitable recognition. To mark the 150th anniversary of the Minerva‘s founding and the inauguration of renovated manufacture in Villeret, Montblanc is proud to announce the launch of the new Grand Tourbillon Heures Mystérieuses. The name alone is enough to alert the watch connoisseur to the highlights in this jubilee watch, but a glance -however feeting - at the new timepiece will tell him that this tourbillon is unlike any he has seen before. The Grand Tourbillon Heures Mystérieuses timepieces will be available in even more limited editions than previous models: to be precise, unique versions in platinum and editions of eight in either white or rose gold.
One feature impossible to overlook is the tourbillon, which occupies an enormous part of the dial on these exclusive timepieces. It was only to be expected that a watch line with the aspirations of the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858 would one day include a timepiece with a tourbillon. This ingenious mechanism, designed to eliminate vertical positional error in the balance spring, is one of the most demanding of all watchmaking mechanisms and calls for all the skill and expertise the best watchmakers of our age can muster. However, it goes without saying that a tourbillon from the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858 could not possibly be like any other tourbillon, and this is immediately obvious from its arrangement and exclusive design features. It is positioned prominently at 12 o‘clock, where it revolves in a case of its own, detached from the movement. Its importance is underscored by the fact that the cutout section of the dial in which it is located is the same size as the actual time display.
The tourbillon revolves around its own axis once a minute; including the balance, it comprises 95 individual parts and weighs in at 1.010 grams. The tourbillon cage, which measures 18.4 mm in diameter, contains a large balance with a diameter of 14.5 mm; it has a high moment of inertia of 59 mgcm2 and the classical frequency of 2.5 Hertz (18,000 vph). Particularly noteworthy are the three movable compensating weights with the Minerva arrow, which can be pushed to and fro on the curved arc of the tourbillon cage to obtain perfect equilibrium. The steel tourbillon bridge is a miniature work of art in its own right and takes the form of two horizontal, overlapping figures of eight, which are also symbols of infinity. All the steel parts in the bridge and cage are cut from solid pieces of metal and then painstakingly shaped, chamfered and polished by hand - a job that takes three weeks for each tourbillon and calls for standards of craftsmanship of which only a handful of master watchmakers are capable.
Heures MystérieusesThey create a sensation when they first appeared: the pendules mystérieuses whose hour and minute hands appeared to float freely in mid-air. They were mounted on crystal glass discs, driven by a movement, and rotated. The movement was positioned in the case above, below or adjacent to the aperture for the discs, and transmitted power to the gear rim on the crystal glass discs out of sight, behind the dial. The same principle is used today in the time display of the Grand Tourbillon Heures Mystérieuses, except that here, the background of the dial is not transparent but has a mirror finish. In front of this rotate two highly transparent, wafer-thin sapphire glass discs, one embossed with the hour hand, the other with the minute hand. When viewed in parallax, these really do appear to hover in mid air above their reflections. With a tourbillon positioned outside the actual going train, and its heures mystérieuses time display with floating hour and minute hands, the MB^L65.60 calibre is one of 2009‘s most fascinating new products. It is hand-wound, has a 50-hour power reserve and consists of a total of 281 individual parts, all meticulously finished by hand.
Artistic cases made of platinum or goldThe case of the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858 Grand Tourbillon Heures Mystérieuses is another work of art: it not only tapers to a smoothly rounded drop shape at 6 o‘clock but also moulds itself snugly to the wearer‘s wrist. It is the only case in the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858 not to feature a see-through back glass with a sprung cover. This is, first of all, because the tourbillon can be clearly seen from the dial side of the watch; and, secondly, because the watch‘s time display deserves to retain some of its mystique. The signature of master watchmakerDemetrio Cabiddu is therefore engraved on the back of the case. Moving from 8 through 12 to 4 o‘clock, the bezel is concave in form, but assumes a convex shape from 4 and back to 8. The transition from concave to convex is extremely attractive but also very difficult to accomplish and demands all the expertise of the very best case-makers. The gently contoured lines of the case run seamlessly into the slightly protruding sapphire glass cover, whose inner and outer surfaces follows the silhouette of the case exactly, providing a distortion-free view of the dial. The case is available in 950 platinum, 18 K white gold or 18 K 5N rose gold.
Every bit as precious as the movement: solid gold dials with guilloche decoration for the gold watches and custom-made dials for the unique models in platinum.
The Grand Tourbillon Heures Mystérieuses timepieces feature solid gold dials: with their hand-guilloched ornamentation, they bear testimony to another artistic watchmaking tradition. In the case of the white and rose gold watches, the dial is decorated with hand-guilloched Clous de Paris patterning, while the material, design and decoration of the dials for these unique timepieces in platinum is left entirely up to the customer.
Guilloche work involves the removal of swarf and leaves the treated metal surface with a regular grooved pattern. It is considered a traditional watchmaking craft because it involves a machine that is guided by hand and calls for many years of experience. It is for this reason that the dials of the gold editions of the Grand Tourbillon Heures Mystérieuses proudly bear the imprint GUILLOCHE MAIN SUISSE. The other words on the dial refer to the watch‘s technical complications TOURBILLON HEURES MYSTERIEUSES and its warranted provenance.
MINERVA 1858. The presence of such prestigious wording on the dial made the usual SWISS MADE imprint superfluous, so it was omitted, even though the watches more than measure up to the criteria required. The time is displayed on the mirrored dial at 6 o‘clock in Roman numerals with rhomboid indices and the MONTBLANC logotype, above which hover the apparently suspended hour and minute hands. There too, of course, is the Montblanc emblem, signifying the highest mountain in Europe with its six glacial tongues and, for many decades, European craftsmanship of the highest possible standard. It can be found as an inlay, made of genuine mother-of-pearl, in the large, knurled winding crown of the new watches.
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