184
M. Wesley
Having started to tell you of working potter’s clay for making crucibles and shells, the wish came to me to tell you of the practice of this art also. Although it may seem at first glance to be outside the order and purpose of my writing, he who considers well will see that it is not unrelated to it but proper, since it is wholly dependent on the agency and power of fire if it is to be brought to its perfection. Moreover, the potter’s glazes and colors are all substances of various metals or impure minerals and therefore belong to fire. Since it is my intention to treat of fire, minerals, and metals for you, I surely should not have omitted this, particularly because it is a necessary art which enriches and is greatly praised both for its ingenuity and its beauty.4
Like the other arts treated in the Pirotechnia, the action of the fire on base earths and minerals provided integral transformation in the objects shaped by the potter’s hands. At the time of Biringuccio’s writing, the potter’s art was on the threshold of a paradigm shift that would create a marked division between craft knowledge and theory based practice, setting two separate courses for ceramic innovation in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His citation of alchemy as one of “two sources as [pottery’s] principal basis,” is referential to the provision of purified minerals and “elemental mixtures.”5 However, it also foreshadowed the intellectual engagement of chymists in the quest for the production of European porcelain, bringing the weight of the older alchemical tradition to bear. Prior to the fourteenth century, European pottery was external to the hierarchy of the esteemed arts, such as metallurgy, glassmaking, painting, and dyeing. The extensively copied treatise De diversis artibus, composed in the thirteenth century by the Benedictine monk Theophilus, thoroughly introduces the full range of artisanal productions valued in Europe in its first book.6 Pottery is entirely absent from this discussion of laudable arts and only appears once in the text as a canvas for enameling.7 This is a continuation of pottery’s position in the classical period, when earthen objects were valued as trade goods, everyday wares, or a medium for other decoration, not for their individual aesthetic form.8 It was not until advancements in the production of luxury quality European pottery during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the cultural perception of the material changed significantly, driving engagement by the upper classes and natural philosophers. An example can be found in a letter from Lorenzo de Medici (1449–1492) to the Malatesta family in 1490, favorably comparing their gift of maiolica to silver objects, which is one of the earliest pieces of documentary
4
Biringuccio, Pirotechnia (1942), 392. Biringuccio, Pirotechnia (1942), 392. 6 For various editions of the treatise, see Theophilus, Essay Upon Various Arts (1847), The Various Arts (1961), and On Diverse Arts (1963). 7 “Quam si diligentius perscruteris, illic inuenies quicquid in diuersorum colorum generibus et mixturis habet Graecia, quicquid in electrorum operositate seu nigelli uarietate nouit Ruscia, quicquid ductili uel fusili seu interrasili opere distinguit Arabia, quicquid in uasorum diuersitate seu gemmarum ossiumue sculptura auro decorat Italia, quicquid in fenestrarum pretiosa uarietate diligit Francia, quicquid in auri, argenti, cupri et ferri lignorum lapidumque subtilitate sollers laudat Germania.” (Theophilus, The Various Arts (1961), 4). 8 On the relative value of the potter’s work, see Boardman, “Trade in Greek Decorated Pottery.” 5