INVEST

Blancpain Villeret Quantième Perpétuel

Were some bizarre, modern-day Labour of Hercules to involve setting up mankind’s Facebook profile, selecting ‘It’s complicated’ from the relationship status drop-down menu would barely do justice to our epochs-long affair with the Moon. A deity and a symbol of transience and rebirth to humanity for the vast majority of our time together, its magnetic pull on us literally and figuratively has lasted through rocky patches such as Renaissance astronomy, continued suspicion about its darker side, and even accusations of gaslighting — and yet we’re still writing it poetry. (India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar craft of 2008 carried a verse from the Rig Veda, a collection of sacred texts. And possibly a mix tape.)

So it’s no surprise the moonphase complication predates the cogs/gears/hands depiction of hours, minutes and seconds by perhaps 17 or so centuries (a 37-gear mechanism designed to follow the lunar cycle was part of the Antikythera, a second century B.C. astronomical instrument discovered in an ancient shipwreck off Greece). These days, a mark of prestige for a moonphase watch is often its accuracy — Andreas Strehler’s Sauterelle à Lune Perpétuelle piece, presented at Baselworld in 2014, would, if it were continually wound, deliver an accurate