Cartier WHRO0014 Rotonde de Cartier Mysterious Hour Palladium Skeleton Dial

This Cartier WHRO0014 is the Rotonde de Cartier Mysterious Hour Skeleton — the first watch in which Cartier united two of its Fine Watchmaking signatures, the "mysterious" floating-hands complication and full skeletonisation, in a single piece — cased in palladium; a watch for the collector drawn to genuine horological theatre rather than mere decoration. It is driven by the hand-wound calibre 9983 MC, whose hour and minute hands appear to float unattached, carried instead on transparent toothed sapphire discs with no visible link to the movement — a trick Cartier inherited from the mystery clocks it built more than a century ago — while the openworked bridges are shaped into the Roman numerals themselves. The palladium case measures 42mm across with a thickness of 11.9mm, its beaded crown set with a sapphire cabochon the watch's single note of colour. The dial is skeletonised, its gear train laid bare yet giving nothing of the mystery away. Theatrical, technical and unmistakably Cartier, it is among the maison's most bewitching modern creations.