Aventurine enamel is not the same material as aventurine, and this reference is where the distinction matters. Aventurine is a glass with metallic particles suspended through it, cut and fitted as a dial. Aventurine enamel is fired onto the dial as enamel, with the flecks carried in the enamel itself, which means the surface is bonded to the base rather than mounted on it and the depth is built up through firing rather than cut from a block. It is the harder and rarer of the two processes, and giving it a smoked effect on top compounds the difficulty, because the gradient has to survive the kiln. The case is white gold at 41 mm across and 11.8 mm thick, the movement carries a flying tourbillon, and it is no longer part of the current collection.
The case measures 41 mm across and 11.8 mm thick in white gold, and that thickness is the quiet achievement here. A tourbillon normally makes a watch tall, and holding one under twelve millimetres in a 41 mm case means the reference sits flat on the wrist and passes under a cuff, which very few tourbillons manage. The bezel is white gold and matches the case, so the metal runs continuously from the crystal out to the lugs with nothing breaking it, and white gold reads as steel to anyone not handling the watch, declaring itself only through weight. The dial is blue aventurine enamel with a smoked effect. Because the flecks are suspended in fired enamel rather than in cut glass, they sit at varying depths within a surface that is chemically bonded to the dial, and the effect under light is a field of scattered points that shifts as the wrist turns rather than a colour that brightens and dims. Smoking it darkens the perimeter progressively, so the scattered light is concentrated toward the centre and the edge goes almost black. Placing a flying tourbillon into that field is the interesting decision, because the aperture removes a portion of the dial and therefore a portion of the effect, and the two have to be laid out against each other rather than in sequence. The applied hour markers and hands are white gold, cool against the blue and consistent with the case. The inner bezel is black lacquer, which gives the darkening edge somewhere to resolve rather than terminating hard against metal. The strap is hand-stitched black alligator in a large square scale with a white gold folding clasp. Black rather than blue is the correct strap for this dial and a less obvious call than matching would have been. A blue strap would have chased the aventurine and forced a comparison the hide could not win, since a dyed leather cannot hold a colour that is itself full of scattered light. Black withdraws entirely and lets the dial be the only place on the watch with anything happening in it. The folding clasp keeps the strap in a closed loop and spreads the weight of a precious metal case more evenly than a buckle would.
The function set is a flying tourbillon with hours and minutes. A flying tourbillon is supported from beneath only, with no bridge crossing the top of the rotating carriage, so the assembly appears to turn unsupported and stays fully visible from the dial side. On an openworked watch that visibility is the whole point; here it does something different, because the dial is a solid enamel surface rather than a skeleton, so the tourbillon appears as a single moving aperture in an otherwise still field. That is a more restrained way to present the complication and arguably a better one, since the mechanism reads as a detail within a composition rather than as the entire composition. There is no date and no seconds display. On a dial whose appeal depends on an uninterrupted graded surface, every additional aperture is a subtraction, and the reference has accepted exactly one.
Within Audemars Piguet's structure Code 11.59 was launched as a third pillar alongside the Royal Oak and the Royal Oak Offshore, and it is the only one of the three not built around an octagonal bezel and an integrated bracelet. Within the line the 26396 flying tourbillons sit above the chronographs and below the repeaters, and they are the references where the collection makes its case on movement rather than on dial colour. Its direct sibling is the rose gold version with a black aventurine enamel dial, which reverses both the metal and the ground. The collection also uses plain blue aventurine on its perpetual calendars, and setting those against this enamel version shows how differently the two processes behave under the same light.
This reference suits a collector who wants a tourbillon that does not look like a tourbillon watch. Almost every reference carrying the complication at this level uses an openworked dial and sells the mechanism as the subject; this one puts it behind a single aperture in an enamel field and lets the dial do the work. The material is what will decide the purchase, since aventurine enamel cannot be photographed convincingly and only resolves in person under moving light. Now that the reference has left the catalogue the production is closed, and enamel dials are made in far smaller numbers than lacquered ones because the failure rate at firing is real. The buyer is someone who wants the complication and the dial to be equally serious, and would rather the dial were noticed first.
