Detail of a Palissy still-life platter of c. 1550 (see below for the whole piece)
Bernard Palissy (French pronunciation:[bɛʁnaʁpalisi]; c. 1510–c. 1589) was a French Huguenotpotter, hydraulics engineer and craftsman, famous for having struggled for sixteen years to imitate Chinese porcelain. He is best known for his so-called "rusticware", typically highly decorated large oval platters featuring small animals in relief among vegetation, the animals apparently often being moulded from casts taken of dead specimens. It is often difficult to distinguish examples from Palissy's own workshop and those of a number of "followers" who rapidly adopted his style. Imitations and adaptations of his style continued to be made in France until roughly 1800, and then revived considerably in the 19th century.
Palissy is known for his contributions to the natural sciences, and is famous for discovering principles of geology, hydrology and fossil formation.[1] A Protestant, Palissy was imprisoned for his belief during the tumultuous French Wars of Religion and sentenced to death. He died of poor treatment in the Bastille in 1589 (1590 according to Burty 1886).[2][3][4]
Early life
According to his friend Pierre de L'Estoile, Palissy was born in 1510. The location of Palissy's birth is not certain, but it is believed to be either Saintes, Périgord, Limousin or Agen. He lived most of his life in Saintonge.[1] Palissy was born to a poor family, and while his education did not include Greek or Latin, it did instruct him in practical sciences including geometry and surveying. Early in his life, Palissy was commissioned by the crown to survey the salt marshes of Saintonge.[1] In his memoirs, Palissy tells us that he was apprenticed to a glass painter. At the end of his apprenticeship he spent a journeyman year acquiring fresh knowledge in many parts of France, including Guyenne, Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Burgundy and the Loire.[1] He later traveled north to the Low Countries, perhaps even in the Rhine Provinces of Germany, and to Italy.[1]
Workshop of Palissy, rusticware platter, 1575–1600
Palissy returned to Saintonge where he married and had children. Other than what he tells us in his autobiography, namely that he worked as a portrait painter, glass painter, and land surveyor, we have little record of how he lived during the first years of his married life.[4]
Interest in ceramics
In 1539 or 1540, Palissy was shown a white enamelled cup that astonished him, and he began a project to determine the nature of its production. The piece of fine white pottery may have derived from Faenza, Urbino, Saint-Porchaire or even China.[1] In Palissy's time pottery covered with beautiful white tin-glaze painted with enamels was manufactured throughout Italy, Spain, Germany and the South of France. A man as travelled and as acute as Palissy, however, would have been acquainted with its appearance and properties.[4]
At the neighboring village of La Chapelle-des-Pots, Palissy mastered the rudiments of peasant pottery as it was practised in the 16th century. He may also have learned of manufacture of European tin-enamelled pottery.[4] In his work Palissy produced ceramics using a great many ingredients including tin, lead, iron, steel, antimony, sapphire, copper, sand, saltwort, pearlash, and litharge.[1]
Rustic pottery
Rusticware featuring casts of sea life (1550)
For nearly sixteen years Palissy labored to recreate the pottery that he had seen, working with the utmost diligence but never succeeding. At times he and his family were reduced to poverty; he is said to have burned his furniture and the floor boards of his house to feed the fires of his furnaces. Meanwhile, he endured the reproaches of his wife, who, with their children clamouring for food, likely regarded her husband's endeavors as little short of insanity. All these struggles and failures are faithfully recorded by Palissy in his autobiography.[4]
Palissy failed to discover the secrets of Chinese porcelain or white tin-glaze maiolica, but he created a style of rustic pottery, called "Palissy ware," for which he is now famous.[1] Analysis confirms that Palissy used coloured lead glazes, lead silicates with added metal oxides of copper [for green], cobalt [for blue], manganese [for brown and black], or iron [for yellow ochre], with a small addition of tin [for opacity] to some of the glazes.[5] The pottery is decorated with reliefs mimicking wildlife from Palissy's native Saintonge marshes. These include fish, crustaceans, reptiles, ferns, and flowers.[1]
In 1542, a peasant revolt against the "gabelle" salt tax in Saintonge resulted in royal forces, headed by the Duc de Montmorency, arriving near Palissy's home. The duke was impressed by Palissy's artistry and commissioned him to build retreats at the Château d'Écouen and Meudon.[1] Palissy's work there included the construction of wild gardens and ceramic creatures, following a romantic style similar to that of Italian artists Vasari, Cellini, and Michelangelo, and foreshadowing the baroque period.[1]
In 1548 Palissy was brought to Paris under the protection of Montmorency and Catherine des Medicis. Despite his conversion to Protestantism in 1546, in a departure from the established Catholic religion, Catherine asked Palissy to construct gardens for her in the Tuileries. In 1562, she gave him an official title in her court: "the king's inventor of rustic figurines."[1]
Palissy was outspoken in his Protestant religious beliefs; he sometimes chastised influential officials by quoting from the prophetic books of the Old Testament.[3] According to contemporaries, Palissy would criticize traders, judges, or Parliamentary counsellors, and benefices by citing the Book of Ezekiel: "They are accursed, damned, and lost... Woe be to you, shepherds, who eat the fat and clothe you with the wool, and leave my flock scattered upon the mountains."[3]
Although Palissy was Protestant, these nobles protected him from the ordinances of the parliament of Bordeaux. In 1562, it seized the property of all the Protestants in this district. Palissy's workshops and kilns were destroyed, but he was saved. By the interposition of the all-powerful constable, he was appointed inventor of rustic pottery to the king and the queen-mother.[4]
Around 1563, under royal protection, he was allowed to establish a fresh pottery works in Paris in the vicinity of the royal palace of the Louvre. The site of his kilns afterward became included within a portion of the Tuileries Garden. For about twenty-five years from this date, Palissy lived and worked in Paris. He appears to have remained a personal favorite of Catherine de' Medici and of her sons, in spite of his Protestantism.[4] Catherine may have saved him from the bloodshed of Saint Bartholemew's Day Massacre in 1572.[1]
While he was working for the court, he produced numerous and varied works. In addition to continuing rustic figurines, he made a large number of dishes and plaques ornamented with scriptural or mythological subjects in relief. He seems to have made reproductions of pewter dishes of Francois Briot and other metal workers of the period.[4]
During this period Palissy gave several series of public lectures on natural history, the entrance fee being one crown, a large fee for those days. His ideas of springs and underground waters were published in his Discours admirables, de la nature des eaux et fontaines, tant naturelles qu'artificielles, des metaux, des sels et salines, des pierres, des terres, du feu et des maux (Paris, 1580).[3][6] While Aristotle and Wang Chong correctly hypothesized about the role of precipitation in the water cycle, Palissy was the first to accurately surmise that rainfall alone was sufficient for the process and that rising underground water played no vital part.[7] He was one of the first Europeans to enunciate theory consistent with today's understandings of the origin of fossils. That and his practical application of Alexandrian theoretical works on hydraulics to the social issue of delivering public water to cities, were far in advance of the general knowledge of his time.
Palissy maintained that experience or practice should inform theory, which was useless without empirical foundations.[3] He furthermore argued that scientific knowledge should be derived from observation and practice before classical philosophy:
If things conceived in the mind could be executed, [alchemists] would do great things... [We must] confess that practice is the source of theory... By experiment I prove in several places that the theory of several philosophers is false, even of the most renowned and the most ancient.
—Bernard Palissy, (quoted by Henry Morley in 1853)[3]
Palissy described systems for acquiring or transporting water, and for insuring its quality, adding that any unable to reproduce his instructions were free to contact him through his publisher.[3] He elaborated upon a theory of hydrothermal vents, volcanoes and earthquakes, which he attributed to a mixture of volatile substances and combustion beneath the earth surface.[3] Palissy furthermore correctly surmised the origin of springs in his study of hydrology and geology.[3]
Palissy correctly maintained that fossils were the remains of once living organisms, and contested the prevailing view that they had been produced by the biblical flood, or by astrological influence. He argued that minerals, dissolving into water to form "congelative water," would precipitate and thereby petrify once living organisms in order to create fossils.[3]
Imprisonment and death
Oval Dish with Winged Putti
The close of Palissy's life was quite in keeping with his active and stormy youth. Despite the protection of the nobles and the court, the fanatical outburst of 1588 associated with the War of the Three Henrys led to his being thrown into the Bastille. According to D'Aubigné and fellow Protestants, Henry III offered Palissy his freedom if he would recant, though Palissy refused.[2] Condemned to death when nearly eighty years of age, he died in a Bastille dungeon in 1590.[4] Friend, chronicler and fellow prisoner Pierre de L'Estoile later recounted Palissy's fate:
In this same year 1590, master Bernard Palissy died in the dungeons of the Bastille, a prisoner for his religion, aged 80 years, and killed by misery, need and poor treatment. With him were three other women detained as prisoners also for their religion, themselves strangled by hunger or vermin... The very good woman who brought me the news had returned from the Bastille, where she had inquired about Palissy's condition. There she found Palissy had died, and was told that if she wanted to see him, she could find him on the ramparts with the dogs, where he had been placed since he was a dog himself.
In Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, Palissy is mentioned when the author describes the opulence of a character's apartment: "The rest of the furniture of this privileged apartment consisted of old cabinets, filled with Chinese porcelain and Japanese vases, Lucca della Robbiafaience, and Palissy platters; of old arm-chairs, in which perhaps had sat Henry IV."
Marcel Proust mentions Palissy in the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past: "...and a fish cooked in a court-bouillon was brought in on a long earthenware platter, on which, standing out in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, intact but still contorted from having been dropped alive into boiling water, surrounded by a ring of satellite shell-fish, of animalcules, crabs, shrimps, and mussels, it had the appearance of a ceramic dish by Bernard Palissy."[8]
In Michel Zévaco's Les Pardaillan, Jean de Pardaillan helps Pallissy in Bastille, and leaves him free. His guilt is described as "make angry the fictional Catherine de' Medici"
Palissy's life and work are described in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. Palissy serves as an inspiration to the potter Benedict Fludd and his apprentice, Philip Warren.[9]
Palissy figures as one of nineteen exemplary heroes in a series written by Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga that was first published in 1927 in the popular Argentine weekly Caras y Caretas.[10] Author Léonard N. Amico has produced a recent English language biography.[11]
In the chapter on 'Shells', Gaston Bachelard, in his poetics of space, describes in some detail Palissy's description of a natural fortress. It is constructed on the principle of a shell, with rough exterior and smooth interior in the form of a citadel. (Poetics of Space: Beacon Press. Ed 1994. XI. pp 127–132)
See also
Faience commemorative plaque for Bernard Palissy by 19th-century artist John Eyre. The top-right cherub is painted holding a Palissy rusticware platter.
Delftware or Delft pottery, also known as Delft Blue or as delf, is a general term now used for Dutch tin-glazed earthenware, a form of faience. Most of it is blue and white pottery, and the city of Delft in the Netherlands was the major centre of production, but the term covers wares with other colours, and made elsewhere. It is also used for similar pottery, English delftware.
Earthenware is glazed or unglazed nonvitreous pottery that has normally been fired below 1,200 °C (2,190 °F). Basic earthenware, often called terracotta, absorbs liquids such as water. However, earthenware can be made impervious to liquids by coating it with a ceramic glaze, and such a process is used for the great majority of modern domestic earthenware. The main other important types of pottery are porcelain, bone china, and stoneware, all fired at high enough temperatures to vitrify. End applications include tableware and decorative ware such as figurines.
In different periods of time and in different countries, the term majolica has been used for two distinct types of pottery.
Maiolica is tin-glazed pottery decorated in colours on a white background. The most renowned Italian maiolica is from the Renaissance period. These works were known as istoriato wares when depicting historical and mythical scenes. By the late 15th century, multiple locations, mainly in northern and central Italy, were producing sophisticated pieces for a luxury market in Italy and beyond. In France, maiolica developed as faience, in the Netherlands and England as delftware, and in Spain as talavera. In English, the spelling was anglicised to majolica, but the pronunciation usually preserved the vowel with an i as in kite.
Les Mignons was a term used by polemicists in the contentious atmosphere of the French Wars of Religion and taken up by the people of Paris, to designate the favourites of Henry III of France, from his return from Poland to reign in France in 1574, to his assassination in 1589, a disastrous end to which the perception of effeminate weakness contributed. The mignons were frivolous and fashionable young men, to whom public malignity attributed heterodox sexuality, rumors that some historians have found to be a factor in the disintegration of the late Valois monarchy.
Mintons was a major company in Staffordshire pottery, "Europe's leading ceramic factory during the Victorian era", an independent business from 1793 to 1968. It was a leader in ceramic design, working in a number of different ceramic bodies, decorative techniques, and "a glorious pot-pourri of styles - Rococo shapes with Oriental motifs, Classical shapes with Medieval designs and Art Nouveau borders were among the many wonderful concoctions". As well as pottery vessels and sculptures, the firm was a leading manufacturer of tiles and other architectural ceramics, producing work for both the Houses of Parliament and United States Capitol.
Edmé Samson, founder of the porcelain firm Samson, Edmé et Cie, was a famous copyist of porcelain and pottery. The firm produced high-quality copies or imitations of earlier styles of porcelain, mainly 18th-century European and Chinese and Japanese porcelain, but also earlier styles such as Italian maiolica.
Jean-Joseph Marie Carriès was a French sculptor, ceramist, and miniaturist. His ceramic work is mostly in stoneware, and part of the French art pottery movement, and includes many faces and heads, often with grotesque expressions, but he made several conventional pots, often with thick unctuous ash glaze effects in the Japanese style.
Saint-Porchaire ware is the earliest very high quality French pottery. It is white lead-glazed earthenware, often conflated with true faience, that was made for a restricted French clientele from perhaps the 1520s to the 1550s. Only about seventy pieces of this ware survive, all of them well known before World War II. None have turned up in the last half-century. It is characterized by the use of inlays of clay in a different coloured clay, and, as Victorian revivalists found, is extremely difficult to make.
Palissy ware is a 19th-century term for ceramics produced in the style of the famous French potter Bernard Palissy, who referred to his own work in the familiar manner as rustique. It is therefore also known as rusticware. Palissy's distinctive style of polychrome lead-glazed earthenware in a sombre earth-toned palette, using naturalistic scenes of plants and animals cast from life, was much imitated by other potters both in his own lifetime and especially in the 19th century. In this revival, pottery in Palissy's style was produced by Charles-Jean Avisseau of Tours, who rediscovered Palissy's techniques in 1843, his relatives the Landais family of Tours, Georges Pull of Paris, Maurice, and Barbizet.
Bristol porcelain covers porcelain made in Bristol, England by several companies in the 18th and 19th centuries. The plain term "Bristol porcelain" is most likely to refer to the factory moved from Plymouth in 1770, the second Bristol factory. The product of the earliest factory is usually called Lund's Bristol ware and was made from about 1750 until 1752, when the operation was merged with Worcester porcelain; this was soft-paste porcelain.
Victorian majolica properly refers to two types of majolica made in the second half of the 19th century in Europe and America.
Tin-glazed pottery is earthenware covered in lead glaze with added tin oxide which is white, shiny and opaque ; usually this provides a background for brightly painted decoration. It has been important in Islamic and European pottery, but very little used in East Asia. The pottery body is usually made of red or buff-colored earthenware and the white glaze imitated Chinese porcelain. The decoration on tin-glazed pottery is usually applied to the unfired glaze surface by brush with metallic oxides, commonly cobalt oxide, copper oxide, iron oxide, manganese dioxide and antimony oxide. The makers of Italian tin-glazed pottery from the late Renaissance blended oxides to produce detailed and realistic polychrome paintings.
The city of Nevers, Nièvre, now in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in central France, was a centre for manufacturing faience, or tin-glazed earthenware pottery, between around 1580 and the early 19th century. Production of Nevers faience then gradually died down to a single factory, before a revival in the 1880s. In 2017, there were still two potteries making it in the city, after a third had closed. However the quality and prestige of the wares has gradually declined, from a fashionable luxury product for the court, to a traditional regional speciality using styles derived from the past.
Lead-glazed earthenware is one of the traditional types of earthenware with a ceramic glaze, which coats the ceramic bisque body and renders it impervious to liquids, as terracotta itself is not. Plain lead glaze is shiny and transparent after firing. Coloured lead glazes are shiny and either translucent or opaque after firing. Three other traditional techniques are tin-glazed, which coats the ware with an opaque white glaze suited for overglaze brush-painted colored enamel designs; salt glaze pottery, also often stoneware; and the feldspathic glazes of Asian porcelain. Modern materials technology has invented new glazes that do not fall into these traditional categories.
Catherine-Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Montpensier, was a French princess from the house of Guise who played a leading political role in the Catholic League during the French Wars of Religion.
Auguste Delaherche was a French ceramicist, who was a leading figure in French art pottery through the Art Nouveau period. Like other leading French potters of the period, he was intensely interested in ceramic glaze effects of colour and surface texture. He began his career making stoneware, but later also made porcelain in his studio.
Saintonge, historically spelled Xaintonge and Xainctonge, is a region of France located on the west central Atlantic coast, corresponding with the former province of the same name. The largest city is Saintes. Other principal towns include Saint-Jean-d'Angély, Jonzac, Frontenay-Rohan-Rohan, Royan, Marennes, Pons, and Barbezieux-Saint-Hilaire.
Jean V de Parthenay-L'Archevêque, or Larchevêque, Sieur de Soubise , was a Protestant French nobleman, last lord of Mouchamps, from the Parthenay-l'Archevêque family. His father, Jean IV de Parthenay, died before he was born. His mother was humanist Michelle de Saubonne. He married Antoinette d'Aubeterre, and their daughter and was Catherine de Parthenay, who later married René II, Viscount of Rohan.
Antoine de Pons, Count of Marennes (1510-1580) was hereditary sire of Pons, near Saintes in Charente-Maritime with 250 noble fiefdoms and 52 parishes. He was Count of Marennes, baron of island of Oléron, and had other lands in France. He was the governor of Saintonge and Saintes.
References
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Wright, Brooks (1943). The Geological Studies of Bernard Palissy. Cambridge: Harvard University Thesis.
↑ Bouquillon, A & Castaing, J & Barbe, F & Paine, S.R. & Christman, B & Crépin-Leblond, T & Heuer, A.H.. (2016). "Lead-Glazed Rustiques Figulines [Rustic Ceramics] of Bernard Palissy [1510–90] and his Followers": Archaeometry. 59. 10.1111/arcm.12247.
↑ "Admirable discourses, of the nature of waters and fountains, both natural and artificial, of metals, salts and brines, of stones, earths, fire and enamels."
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