Bernard Palissy, Prophet of Modern Ceramics Essay Example For Students

Bernard Palissy, Prophet of Modern Ceramics Essay We have witnessed during the past two decades a rare, but not un precedented, historical occurrence, the transmutation of a popular craft in to a fine art. Photography. On similar occurrences pivot the histories of the arts. The nineteenth century saw the birth of classical ballet, the eighteenth heard the transformation of music, the seventeenth, opera and drama. One could catalogue them. All signs indicate that we are about to see another, this time in ceramics. The breakthrough in that field began about a hundred years ago, more or less simultaneously, in France, England, and the United States. Its leaders, as has so often been the case in such movements, thought of themselves as revivers or restorers rather than creators. In a sense they were right. Destiny had marked them out to be the renovators ol ceramic art. . . grave and suspicious for years in seclusion . . . they boasted no special qualifications . .. save a fervid ambition to revive the forgotten art and pro duce anew c eramic marvels. wrote an observer at the turn of the century. The ambition of each, he continued, was to be regarded as a modern Palissy. . .. His was the name ever on their lips.1 The chief model and the chief inspiration for those founders of modern ceramics was Bernard Palissy. He had achieved -for a brief period barely outlasting his own life and for one of the few times in western history—what they were seeking: the elevation of ceramics to the level of a serious art form. Moreover, the story of Palissys life was a heroic legend that helped sustain them in their own struggles. Most important, his work stood, and for that matter still stands, as the most enduring single influence in ceramic art from the Renaissance to modern times. The Palissy story, however looked at, was extraordinary. For almost a quarter of a century, during the late 1560s, 1570s, and early 1580s. Master Bernard cut an audacious figure at the court of the queen regent ol France, Catherine de Medici. With both his living quarters and his studio in the royal compound, officially dubbed Designer of Naturalistic Ceramic Works for the King, and in charge of laying out and adorning the gardens of the queen regents new palace of the Tuileries, he enjoyed the highest status accorded to an artist.1 But Palissys presence excited a certain amount of resentment. He emerges from the pages of his own writings a rustic genius whom the regent on one of her tours of the provinces had discovered and plucked up.1 He had little social grace and less polish, but more than enough energy, arrogance, and gall. Unlettered in Latin or Greek, he ex hibited a jagged intellectual profile and a good deal of the impatience, in tolerance, and aggressiveness that come from self education. But he man aged brilliantly at court, leaving critics helpless before a mantle of eccentri city. Palissy was not charming, but completely disarming. A sort of unrefined French I^onardo. Palissy indulged not only a creative imagination, but an insatiable intellectual curiosity. He designed military fortilications, made extensive geological observations, established his own museum oi natural history, and conducted a wide range of scien tific experiments. On one occasion he invited the physicians of Paris to lec ture them on medicine and they came, including the famous surgeon, Am broise Ð  Ã °rÃ'‘. As the years passed he wrote treatise after treatise touching an astonishing number of subjects including biolog), geology, paleontology, hydrology, chemistry, physics, alchemy, metallurgy, agriculture, miner alogy, embalming, toxicology, and meterology.4 But perhaps most surpris ing of all, Palissy not only embraced the new Protestant doctrines and founded a congregation, but openly championed the reform cause during the Religious Wars and on the very site of the Saint Bartholomew s Day Massacre. He managed this through the protection of the regent, but when she took to her death bed in 1588, the rabid Catholic element at court lock ed him up in the Bastille where he died within a year. Before the regent rescued Palissy from poverty and oblivion in the pro vinces, he had already gone through two careers and established himself in a third. From an obscure birth around 1510 in the ancient fruit- and fowl producing town of Agen in southwestern France, he moved through an ap prenticeshi p in the the time honored craft of stained glass to haphazard employment as a young Itinerant glazier, roaming over the better part of France and perhaps into the Netherlands and Rhenish Germany. Ancient Egyptian Cermamics Essay He tells us later that in the process, the other mistakes he made while experimenting with enamels taught me more than such things which were easy to learn.The treatise on the Art of the Earth contains, he says, an account of the calamities he suffered at the beginning of my interest in ceramics, before attaining my goal.1* Palissy never set out to duplicate the white cup but to understand it. 1 le aimed not to make one like it but to be able to make one like it. He had no sympathy for copying. He castigates those who glorify themselves only in that they know how to imitate the works of pagans and wish to be honored as designers.1 And he notes that no one in the world takes lightly the secrets of art save those who get them cheaply, i.e., those who go no deeper than imitation. Palissy understood clearly the distinction between copying and creating, something many of his contemporaries did not. One of the few clear historical patterns to be seen in the Renaissance reveals a long initial phase in which intellectuals and artists drew heavily upon anti quity. It took the better part of three generations before they felt comfor table with their own creative initiative. Palissy made the transition in a single leap. His goal, first and last, was understanding, or better said relative to art, it was mastery. That he certainly achieved. Of Palissys prodigious output, only a few score pieces remain to us. None of the large works for which he was famous in his day survive. These originally included life-size figures—so realistic that unaccustomed strollers in his garden, upon suddenly encountering one. invariably offered it a greeting—as well as a clay watchdog that stood beside his studio door to in timidate would-be intruders but as often excited ferocity in its real life counterparts.15 What we have are a range of his plates, platters, vases, bowls, basins, cups, salt-cellars, sauce dishes, inkwells, candleholders, and pitchers, plus fragments of molds for some of his life-size figures.16 Palissy worked in two broad styles. On m any of his plates, platters, and pitchers he encrusted high relief leaves, insects, serpents, and sea life, so naturalistically molded that their exact species are identifiable. And on other pieces he used elements from the store of classical motifs common to Renaissance artists. The latter formed for Palissy a ready allegorical vocabulary. Often he combined the two.