Porcelain

PORCELAIN. - It is one of the great classes into which the products of ceramics (v.) are divided. It is a paste artificially composed cold on a ternary base: kaolin, feldspar, quartz; it consolidates at high temperature (from 1350° to 1420°) into a body in incipient vitrification (conchoidal fracture); white, translucent, not attackable by steel nor by most chemical reagents. It requires, as a coating, a feldspathic glaze; without a coating, "marble-grained," it is called in French biscuit, and serves ornamental purposes. Typical porcelain (kaolinic), also called hard porcelain, is of Chinese origin, but imitations of it are known, such as soft porcelain based on vitreous frits (Italian, of the 16th century, then especially French of the 18th century); phosphatic (or English, based on bone ash, obtained in England around the middle of the 1700s); magnesian (or Italian, composed between the 18th and 19th centuries in Vinovo [Piedmont] by G. A. Gioanetti).

The word porcelain is held by some to be of Portuguese origin, because with that name is meant, in the Lusitanian language, a shell of the Eastern seas, shining and white, precisely, like porcelain. But it must be noted that the Portuguese navigators set course for the East Indies only at the end of the fifteenth century, whereas Marco Polo, who lived from 1271 to 1295 at the court of Cambalik (Beijing), designates with that word that kind of tableware produced by the ceramists of the Mongol Empire, adding that they are exported "por mi le monde." This is confirmed by historical records and by relics of an age far earlier than the Venetian traveler, which lead one to believe porcelain was known at least from the 9th century to the Islamic world, whence it passed very early to the West, by way of Cairo, Byzantium and Venice.

Its rudiments can be found in a type of porcelainous stoneware with a grayish body made in the district of Yüch (Chekiang) ca. in the 1st century A.D.; but the first true translucent porcelain, still a little ivory-colored, appears with the T'ang dynasty (618-906). The product was perfected even more under the Sung (960-1280); and well known, for example, are the somewhat heavy pieces, which are usually called celadon, with decoration lightly scratched or molded under a coating of an indefinable glaucous color, otherwise called hansai, and also ghuri and martabani; a production that continued to be imitated also under the succeeding dynasties. With the Ming (1368-1634) and with the Manchu (after 1644), alongside the "egg-shell" pieces, so called for the extreme thinness of their walls, there were very fine snowy pastes that also served for delightful sculptures. French terminology (also retained for other varieties of Chinese porcelain) calls this genre blanc de Chine. But the taste for color imposed superb monochrome tonalities (e.g., the famous sang de boeuf and rouge-flambés reds, the lustrous glazes of the famille verte and the mirror-black ones, the most delicate clair de lune, the less common imperial yellow, and sumptuous polychromies, such as those of the so-called "five colors"). Special to the Ming is the class of white and blue, widely diffused and continued over time, while a pale pink glaze, introduced from Europe into China shortly before the death of the emperor K'ang-hsi (1662-1722), gave rise to the famille rose. Once the Jesuits were admitted into the country, they stimulated there the production of pieces with religious subjects ("Jesuit porcelain"), while that more largely destined for export to Europe with motifs also of Western heraldry, departing from the port of Canton, took its name from that place. Japan itself had been invaded by Chinese porcelain. Local production, begun perhaps with the seventeenth century, grew and developed in the two following centuries, so that there became known also in Europe the sumptuous porcelains called

Imari from the port of Imari, from which departed the products of the nearby kilns of Arita, and those called Kakiemono, from the name of a family of artisans long active. It should scarcely be recalled that around the year 1700 Augustus III the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, collected them in such a conspicuous number as to form the celebrated Dresden collection.

But already for a long time Europe had avidly sought the ancient products of China, to which the Middle Ages attributed, one might say, miraculous virtues; they therefore formed the object of precious gifts, eagerly coveted even by sovereigns. The formula of manufacture was long sought by alchemists, and there are records (but no surviving relics) of special futile attempts made at Venice, Urbino, Ferrara, Milan. As knowledge of kaolin, the indispensable element for forming true porcelain, was still lacking, the products eventually obtained could only be more or less successful decorative imitations. And indeed the so-called "Medici porcelain," composed in the last quarter of the sixteenth century in Florence by the grand duke Francesco I and by the artisans and researchers he hired, although representing a conquest of the genius of the patron and his collaborators, from the ca. 50 pieces that remain of it proves to be formed of a mixture of clay and vitreous frits, to which one can give only the convenient name of "soft" porcelain. Equally based on vitreous frits was the product found a century later in France, in Paris and in Rouen; it then took shape and had marvelous decorative charm at Sèvres with the creation of that celebrated manufactory. There soft (or vitreous, or fritted) porcelain continued to be produced until the early years of the nineteenth century, when the new director of Sèvres, A. Brongniart, replaced it with true kaolinic porcelain. Holland, Germany and England also attempted to obtain that product. In the latter country ca. 1750 bone ash was introduced into the mixture, similar to what had been done for almost a century in Germany to obtain milk glass; and this English product, on a phosphatic base, was called bone-china, that is, bone porcelain. A few decades later at Vinovo in Piedmont magnesium silicates in the form of talc were employed, through the work of Vittorio Amedeo Gioanetti; and this type of magnesian porcelain, even in the brief duration of its production, can be considered the prototype of today's cordieritic porcelain, which industry employs for particular requirements (chemical and electrotechnical).

But the romantic search for the method of composing true porcelain had reached a favorable conclusion around the year 1709 through the work of the German alchemist J. F. Böttger. Kept at work by Augustus III and having come into possession of kaolin, after exhausting research and trials, with the collaboration of the scientist Tschirnhaus he was able to obtain the first genuine European porcelain. Thus arose at Meissen the glorious Saxon manufactory, which availed itself, for its products — admirable both from the technical and from the ornamental standpoint — of the work of distinguished chemists and artists, among them Herold, J. J. Kändler, Marcolini, etc. The secret of the process, despite the most jealous precautions, could not be kept. Vienna had a manufactory of its own in 1718, Venice in 1720, in 1733 Doccia in Tuscany through the house of Ginori, whose name is still linked to one of the best Italian productions; in 1740 there was a workshop at Capodimonte by the will of Charles III of Bourbon, who in 1737 had married the daughter of the Elector of Saxony. Every state wanted its own particular production of hard porcelain; patrons and industrialists devoted themselves to it out of fancy and out of interest, and the manufacture of porcelain became a broadly European phenomenon, which often took on the aspects of a veritable "disease." "Arcanists," artists and refined modellers gave their work to its composition and to its plastic decoration. The ornaments were at first executed in the taste of the so-called chinoiseries, spread in Europe by the Oriental embassies and then further popularized by the works of European travelers (a typical example is that of Johann Nieuhof, sent by the East India Company to the Emperor of China, whose account appeared at Leiden in 1665 and in German translation four years later). The decorations and figurations were then inspired by the Baroque and the Rococo, which dominated Europe, taking their subjects especially from contemporary French prints; and not only in the forms of vases and rich table services, painted in "third fire," but, in general, for fashion, costume, the commedia dell'arte, pastoral scenes, cicisbeism, the Watteau-like scenes of the moment, together with warlike episodes, portraits of personages on plaques and in half-figure, genre figurines, animals, flowers, candelabra, architectural ornaments applied to entire "cabinets" of princely residences. Christian religious expressions too (as well as Buddhist ones) had notable representations in this noble material. One may cite, besides a rare Chinese plate with the Crucifixion, now in the Museum of Bergen (Norway), various plastic works depicting the salient motifs of the Catholic faith, executed in Italian, Spanish, German and English workshops, such as the grandiose Deposition, from Doccia or Capodimonte, of ca. 1775, in the National Museum of Stockholm, besides scenes from the life of Jesus and from the Passion, figures in the round of the Virgin with the Child, of the Immaculate Conception, of the Mater Dolorosa, etc.; and also the saints (for example, that of St. Charles Borromeo, modelled by Linck in the workshops of Frankenthal, ca. 1770, in the Museum of Munich, and others). - See plates CXIX-CXX.

Gaetano Ballardini