Drawing on more than a century of savoir faire while employing some of the best contemporary creatives in the business, Van Cleef & Arpels began creating a series of jaw-dropping modern automatons known as Extraordinary Objects in 2017. Intricate—and literally time-consuming—works of moving art of this caliber are seldom seen outside elite museums, where 18th-century exemplars often sit within glass vitrines. Proving the kind of craftsmanship once reserved for bygone royalty is still possible in our era, Van Cleef & Arpels’s latest, Brassée de Lavande (or Armful of Lavender), sets a bouquet of enameled and hand-painted lavender stems in motion, slowly unfurling to reveal an enamel-and-jeweled butterfly fluttering in the center. “You have actually two lines of sprigs opening,” says Rainer Bernard, the company’s head of watchmaking R&D. “They follow each other, and then they move slowly, a little bit together like a little slight breeze during the animation, which takes about 45 seconds.”

Beneath the exterior beauty of the 27-centimeter-tall clock lies a bevy of complex mechanics that activate the scene on demand. The movement—based on work created exclusively for the maison by renowned Swiss automaton maker François Junod—was specially made to manage the weight of the solid-gold petals. Left to gravity alone, they would open too quickly, so the watchmakers devised an ingenious spring-loaded system that recaptures the energy created as they fall and releases it as they return, allowing the sprigs to open and close with a natural grace. The effort required for just the technical elements is so extensive that Van Cleef opened a special atelier for Extraordinary Objects in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland’s mecca for automaton making.

In total, making the piece took four years from conception to creation. “It’s a work of artists working closely together and creating something and being happy when they’ve done it,” says Bernard of the many hands required to realize this piece of art. “You should see them when we play it, and when they see what they did, because everybody’s working on a part of it.” In an age of instant gratification, such devotion to craft is increasingly rare—a reminder that time itself is the secret ingredient behind enduring beauty.