One of the great lost art traditions of the high Middle Ages were all the beautiful wooden clockwork or movable puppet-type statues that used to be made. Today all we see of them are medieval clocks in town squares (or inside churches), with little dancing figures. But there used to be regular church statues and dioramas of this type, and even crucifixes made in this way. This wasn’t for fraud or for humor, but rather as regular devotional church art. It was an additional feature to be proud of, that artists and craftsmen worked hard to include. The idea was to make statues even more realistic and capable of evoking emotion by making them able to adopt more than one expression.
Pretty much all of these clockwork/puppet statues were destroyed during the Reformation. They seem to have been a particular peeve of the Reformers.
Not that this has anything much to do with the thread, per se…
