the invention of Saxon porcelain
i
Dresden is affecting me.
My notebooks have bullet points. I write up my report card for Porcelain 1719 / Saxony / France / Netherlands / China / England, without even noticing this efficiency.
Saxony remains pre-eminent. The Arcanum is no longer secret. It is still secretive, but there have been defections and lurings away by offers of better working conditions elsewhere. There is already a porcelain factory in Vienna. Every ruler wants his own little manufactory.
Böttger has just died. He was given his freedom five years earlier in 1714, six years after they pulled the first white cup from the kiln. On hearing the news it is said that he ‘continually laughed and ridiculed everything’. His biographer, Johann Melchior Steinbrück, noted that Böttger thought freedom ‘consists of just following your own moods’, which seems fair enough after thirteen years of imprisonment and threat. He adds that Böttger was negligent, forgetful, loose with money, had poor health, a childish demeanour, vanity, was fearful, irrational, had moods, was jealous and lacked gravitas. And that he lived openly with his mistress in the house he had bought in Dresden like a man of importance. This is marked on my report.
As are his epileptic fits, vomiting and dizziness from ingesting mercury, sustained carbon monoxide poisoning from the furnaces and silicosis from the dust.
The obituaries are tough. ‘Not only in life did he experience damage, nuisance and threats, but it has also continued after his death.’ Böttger left chaos. Steinbrück’s summation was that the Arcarnist:
didn’t like to be convinced. He was jealous … he spent lavishly when experimenting; he was indecisive and liked to postpone important things and easily went from one thing to another, often starting new things before finishing the old … He was inventive … He was vainglorious … He loved the attention … He was suspicious, but naïve … So this is the inventor of Saxon porcelain.
ii
Saxon porcelain continues to innovate without Böttger, without Tschirnhaus.
The innovation has been extraordinarily rapid. The white porcelain was first shown in 1713, at the great fair at Leipzig. There were few potters who could handle this sticky white compounded clay. They had to be trained. Jewellers and turners, gilders and modellers and decorators too, had to work out how to use porcelain. The preciousness of the material, rather than its plasticity, was its most significant feature. Porcelain is a new technology, lit up by new desire.
I have a small cup and saucer from this year, kindred to my Second White Pot. I find these very early white porcelains moving. The branch of prunus across the cup is not great, the very small leaves are a bit wobbly. It could be lighter.
It is the kind of porcelain cup I recognise, aspirational.
Desire changes everything. Augustus pushes, constantly. Within a year or two of this porcelain being sold this cup would have been too simple for him. It would have been decorated and gilded. In 1720, it would have acquired the two slightly curved crossed swords in blue on its base as a cipher, a trademark. It would be Meissen.
iii
I spend a morning in Albrechtsburg Castle, high above Meissen. This is where Böttger was imprisoned and where Augustus’ manufactory grew out of the laboratory from one cellar to another, across into rooms in the adjoining buildings, up and up through the castle until great runs of medieval halls were being used. The central hall with its Gothic vaults is partitioned off for decorators, another airy space becomes three floors to hold the store of saggars. A plan from a hundred years ago shows 304 rooms in use by the manufactory.
It was madness, of course. The kiln rooms were an inferno. The huge walls of the castle cracked with heat. The run of rooms near the kilns were warm whilst everything else was appallingly cold. This is a castle, a cliff face of a building seven storeys high, on a bluff 300 feet above the Elbe. It is perfect for keeping secrets, but as a study in how time and motion work, how to make, decorate and fire delicate porcelain, this is incredible.
The white clay comes down the river from Colditz, mined in the Erzberg mountains, and is carried up the hillside to the lowest of the cellars to be washed of impurities. The wood for the kiln comes the same way and is dried in sheds on the riverbank. Two pairs of horses turn a great grinding mill here for the other minerals. Wet clay is kept in another cellar and then is brought up to the throwers and modellers on the top floor, up a dramatic Gothic spiral staircase. It is a wide staircase, almost four feet across, and shallow. But try carrying a basket of kaolin up 200 steps on your shoulder. Then try going downwards and round, with a board of pots.
Who has precedence as workers climb upwards and downwards? The sounds of breaking porcelain are commonplace here.
Albrechtsburg is now a nineteenth-century fantasy of a fourteenth-century castle. In the 1860s, in the spirit of pride in the new Saxony, the porcelain manufactory was cleared out of the castle in Meissen where Böttger was imprisoned. It was given a clear, flat factory site in the town. It is still there. And this castle is made good again after the depredations of 150 years of porcelain making. Wall paintings of moments in Saxon history are painted: Duke Albrecht off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, triumphs in battle – ceiling bosses are decorated with coats of arms, fireplaces are re-carved, medieval tables and antler chandeliers brought in.
Böttger is a star here. On one wall he is shown as the alchemist, the Goldmacher, open-shirted, he sprawls in a chair grasping a glass of beer and a long-stemmed pipe, wild-eyed, as arcanists stoke a fire. It is choreographed chaos. On the other wall he crouches in front of the king, a courtier in green silk behind him, a worker in the foreground, and he displays porcelain. There is a light emanating from the white cup. It glows like the Christ child displayed to the Magi.
Tschirnhaus is given a little cartouche high up. You wouldn’t notice him in the glamour. He wouldn’t recognise all this fuss.
iv
The porcelain recipe is a secret.
No fragments could be disposed of in a place where they might be gathered and studied. The quantity of waste can be measured by a huge cellar that was used as a tip for shards. The floor of the cellar rose and rose. Several years ago archaeologists in the castle found a room two metres deep in fragments.
Once the Arcanum was lost in the late eighteenth century and Europe was scattered with manufactories, baskets of jagged, broken porcelain were tipped over the side of the hill. A landslip of white porcelain.
Meissen becomes the white hill. It is my Second White Hill. In this cellar I stoop, and embedded in the compacted floor are crescents of white.