half translucent and milk white, like a narcissus
i
The new laboratory in the Jungfernbastei was convenient as it meant that Augustus could keep close to these new experiments and Böttger could be well guarded. But its vaults were low, and it was close to homes, so firing kilns was perilous.
On 15 January 1708, they open a kiln in their new laboratory. It holds seven trials, using a new white clay from Colditz and an alabaster in different proportions.
N1 clay only
N2 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 4:1
N3 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 5:1
N4 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 6:1
N5 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 7:1
N6 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 8:1
N7 clay and alabaster in the ratio of 9:1
In the archives at Meissen I hold this page of notes. Böttger has written them aslant, quickly, in German and dog-Latin, scattering alchemical symbols: ‘after five hours in the kiln … first had white appearance, second and third collapsed, fourth remained in shape but discoloured … last three album et pellucidum’, white and translucent. Five is optimum, the best.
They hold the tests up to the scant light.
It is twenty years since Tschirnhaus started his trials for a porcelain body for a pure white clay through which light can pass. It is eight years since a young, scared apothecary’s boy was brought to Dresden. It is five years since they were brought together.
It is 400 years since porcelain first arrived in Europe from China.
Page from Böttger’s notebook showing his first porcelain tests, 15 January 1708
In a smoky, murky vault, slung alongside the billets for soldiers, porcelain has been reinvented. It has come into being.
ii
With this mixture they trial again and again until they can make small vessels. The court potter Fischer, whom no one likes, is asked to make pots for them. And Tschirnhaus makes himself a little jar. It comes out ‘half translucent and milk white, like a narcissus’.
I love this. My mathematician’s milk-white jar.
And the pace is now frenzied.
The accounts are cinematic. ‘Every half an hour they looked into the kiln, like cattle, and the glow made everyone jump back, it was so hot that big stones were pulled out of the vaults and the hair on their heads was singed away and the tiles got so hot that big blisters developed on their feet.’ There was real danger that the heat of the kilns could ignite the wooden structures above them on the ramparts.
Augustus arrives with Prince Fürstenberg to inspect. As they enter they feel ‘the ghastly glow hitting them’. The prince would have preferred to turn around, but Augustus wants to see the kiln in action. It is hellish with noise and heat and Böttger looks like a ‘chimney sweep’. He has damp rags wrapped around his head.
He opens the spyhole and the king and sceptical courtier see the saggars appearing darkly amongst the flames. The men draw a saggar out, and inside is a white teapot. This glowing pot is taken with metal tongs and thrown into a bucket of cold water. There is a loud bang. Böttger then takes the teapot out of the water and it’s still intact. And according to the records, though ‘the glaze hadn’t completely melted’, it was otherwise ‘completely successful’.
Something has gone right.
Security at the vaults is ramped up. Ninety soldiers are detailed. Large pits to store the clay are made. A bigger kiln is commissioned and 1,000 white bricks ordered from the Glasshouse. An order goes out across Saxony to all civil servants that samples of local clay and brick clay are to be sent to the laboratory to be analysed. You suddenly see the reach and power of this king. You see what five generations of investment in the mineral-testing laboratory of the Goldhaus means to the king of Saxony.
The workshop trials all the new clays coming in. Their recipe for Kalkporzellan, or chalk porcelain, settles on nine parts of Colditz clay, three parts of white Schnorrische clay and three parts of alabaster.
On 24 April 1708, Augustus signs and seals a decree establishing the first porcelain factory in Dresden, the first porcelain manufactory in the West. Everyone gets titles, promotion and the promise of money.
I read this decree. It is the sigh of a nugget of gold folded thoughtlessly into a velvet pocket, the wash of royal appropriation over anything you do, or know. It means you cannot really impress the king as he owns you, what you know and what you will know.
And Tschirnhaus refuses his elevation to the Privy Council, saying that he doesn’t want a title, ‘until this thing is in a state where I am justified to use one’. I feel so proud of him pausing at this moment of exhilaration.
On 9 October, Tschirnhaus and Böttger fire the first cup of true unglazed porcelain, the first white, translucent vessel.
And two days later on 11 October 1708, Tschirnhaus dies.
He is fifty-seven.
His room is sealed, but his papers cannot be found. It is said that someone has stolen them within hours of his death. His servant flees with gold and samples of the white porcelain and is arrested and questioned, but denies any knowledge of Tschirnhaus’s notebooks.
Böttger writes briefly, ‘I have lost a very high and worthy friend, His Royal Majesty has lost a very loyal servant … If God will have it, his place will be filled with an equally loyal and able man, but I have my doubts.’
The same day he announces to the king that the first porcelain in the West has been created, that he has finally cracked the mysteries of the Arcanum, is in possession of the knowledge to create porcelain, has discovered white gold. This new white material is Böttgerporzellan.
iii
I now have my second white object in the world. I am very slowly building up my installation, collection.
The first is my monk’s cap ewer from Jingdezhen, made for the emperor Yongle, sweet-white for a man who needs and desires purification.
And now I have my white cup from Dresden. It was made for Tschirnhaus. Augustus the Strong may claim whatever he claims, but this is an idea that comes from a compulsion to think something through, not an order to sate a desire.
It took my mathematician a very long time for it to come into being. I look at it very closely. Watch closely the moment of formation, Tschirnhaus writes in his book, the moment that one thing becomes another, and I take him seriously.
I see his childhood in a noisy family in the country, his lessons with Spinoza and his conversation with Newton, I see him learning to grind lenses, learning to make great mirrors that focus the rays of sun until he could make one small part of the world melt. I see him in conversation about China, about porcelain, about the interiority of materials with Leibniz. I see him here in Dresden, navigating the court and its echoes and rumours and endless edicts, coaxing a febrile, scared boy into work, continuing to experiment year after year. I see how he brought his method and a boy’s intuitions into charged connection and compounded porcelain.
Amongst Tschirnhaus’s possessions – alongside his books and ‘curiöse Sachen’, or ‘odd things’ – was a wooden toy, used in mechanical demonstrations. It was a hand span across, a ‘v’ of two slightly inclined rails and a beautifully turned double ended cone. You place the cone at the base of the ramp and it goes up.
That is what the world does. It may be explicable, but it remains extraordinary. In my hands there is a white cup. It is modest, but this is my alchemical moment where, for the first time in this journey, I have clarity about how an idea can come into being.
This is a different white.
iv
In that winter of 1708, there were terrible frosts across the whole of Europe. In London, William Derham recorded lows of minus twelve degrees Celsius; ‘I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man.’ Trees explode. People freeze in their beds, animals in their byres. The Thames, the Baltic, the lakes at Versailles are ice. It is the Great Frost, Le Grand Hiver. Everything is white.
Meissen porcelain cup, c. 1715
The Dresdner Merckwürdigkeiten announced that ‘the cold was so persistent, that you couldn’t heat your living rooms and birds fell to the floor as the air was so cold’. On 10 February 1709, it suddenly got warmer and the melting started, so the Elbe flooded terribly. A fortnight later, new snow fell. At the beginning of March the snow melted again and there was a new flood.
The obituary of Tschirnhaus is published in the Acta eruditorum. And then he disappears into footnotes, in the way that people can flare and illuminate an idea or a place and be gone. In Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels a perfect ship is sailing on as Icarus disappears into the sea. A ploughman continues his work, unconcerned. Auden gets it perfectly: ‘the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.’
The expensive, delicate ship moves on.
v
It is announced that there is to be a new factory at Meissen to create this white porcelain invented by the Arcanist, Johann Friedrich Böttger.
It is announced that there is to be a visit to Dresden in the summer from the Danish King Frederick. There will be a foot tournament emulating Roman combat, night jousting in the riding school with seventy-two participants dressed as gods, the Danish king as Mars and Augustus as Apollo. There are to be banquets that go on to dawn, a castle resting on ships moored in the river, attacked from both banks with cannons firing tracer shots, the cipher of the king of Denmark high up on the tower, the castle illuminated in various colours, a large number of images set in flames.
I read the reports of the visit. ‘The air was constantly full of fire.’