The National Museum of Finland
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H6519 1 tiimalasi rajattu 1
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Hourglass

The Baroque-style hourglass with a stand, originating from Maalahti Church in Ostrobothnia, was probably made around the year 1700. It was donated to the church by Johan Wikar, a trader from Stockholm.

The stand of the hourglass is made of wood and has a gilded surface. The frame of the glasses is made of gilded brass.

Hourglasses were often attached to the sides of pulpits. This free-standing hourglass may have been, for example, on an altar table.

The Maalahti hourglass has four pairs of glasses that measured different lengths of time. The hourglass could be turned over when it ran out, and the time would start to run again. With the help of the flowing sand, a priest delivering a sermon could keep track of the length of the sermon to the nearest quarter of an hour.

The passing of time has, of course, a symbolic value for human life: the flow of sand in a glass also symbolically represents human life and its transience.

The video is about an hourglass used in Maalahti Church in Ostrobothnia.

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H6519 1 tiimalasi rajattu 2
Above the skull is a large, silver-plated pearl resting on a shell. In 17th-century emblem literature, the pearl mussel symbolised divine grace. This was illustrated in literature by, for instance, the sentence: “Fill me, O Christ, with a flood of true grace so that my life may flow transformed into eternity.” Placed above the skull, the pearl mussel therefore emphasises the triumph of eternal life over death. The content of the sermon and the symbolism of the hourglass regarding the measuring of the time it took thus formed a single, instructive whole. H6519:1

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