The elaborate Peacock Clock is again in motion, following a long overdue restoration.
Most of the mechanics are devoted to the movement of the animals with which the singular "clock" is adorned.
The unique clock was made in 1772 by English craftsman James Cox, whose work was all the rage at the time.
By 1776 Cox, undoubtedly a mechanical genius, had produced 56 such mechanisms depicting most of the earth's animals. Some were clocks, other were fountains.
Most of Cox's masterpieces are now in museums in England, but one made it as far as Beijing, where it is now in a museum there. It features a swan on a lake hunting for (and finding) small fish.
A certain Elizabeth Chedley bought the Peacock clock from Cox. Chedley later gravitated from her native England to Russia, where she became a courtier to Catherine the Great.
She carried the 300 kilogram Peacock clock east with her, shipping it in pieces.
When Chedley later died in Paris, leaving most of her property in Russia, Grigory Potemkin, one of Catherine's favorites picked up the clock for next to nothing.
Catherine's master craftsman Ivan Kulibin (whose works can be seen in Russian art section of the Hermitage) was given the task of getting the intricate, and still disassembled, clock to work.
This he did with neither plans nor instructions, recovering the many pieces from their storage site -- a series of clothes trunks in the basement of Madam Chedley's house.
After Count Potemkin's death the Peacock clock was among the articles acquired by Catherine when she bought his former residence, the Tavrichesky Palace.
It was only when Catherine, in her turn, passed away that the clock was moved to the Winter Palace (now the Hermitage Museum) by the new Tsar, Pavel I.
There it has remained.
But for more than 80 years the clock's mechanism has not functioned properly.
Given that the full glory of the clock can only be seen in motion, that was a situation that needed to be rectified.
There are four creatures in motion on the clock. A dragon-fly jumping back and forth on a mushroom (which holds the small clock-face) marks off seconds.
But it is an owl which starts the mechanism moving each hour, by dint of singing four melodies written specially for the clock. The peacock steps in next. With regal aplomb it shows off its head, spreads its tail, and turns slowly around. Next in line is the cock, which raises its head and crows.
It is not just one's attention, but also one's labor, that the Peacock Clock demands -- the clock needs to be wound up weekly, while the mechanical animals need to be attended to every eight hours.
One of those who worked on the five-person Hermitage restoration team was Mikhail Guriev.
"James Cox created mechanisms like this more as toys and objects of entertainment for the nobility than as a real clock," he said.
"But actually the construction is a reflection of the ideas of Descartes, the French scholar whose thought was dominant at that time," added Mr Guriev.