The manufacture of porcelain in Europe has a history of very recent origin when compared with the long story of its invention and development in the land of its birth, but what it lacks in antiquity is atoned for by the interest and diversity of the vicissitudes through which it has passed. We can never know at what period and by whose agency the mysterious substance was first brought into Western lands. From the earliest records that can rightly be supposed to refer to it, we gather that the rare vessels of porcelain which found their way from China in the Middle Ages were regarded with superstitious wonder as the work of superhuman hands, to be treasured as jealously as gold or precious stones. How to rival this ware of pure white surface and translucent substance may well have been the problem that many a potter of those days attempted to solve, but it must have been the despair of the rudely-trained craftsmen whose hands shaped the rough stone-wares of the Rhineland, or the lead-glazed slip-wares, with their artless scratched or moulded designs, of mediæval France and Italy. The road to success was first opened by the potters of the last-named country. The Italian tin-enamelled maiolica, which attained its full development at the end of the fifteenth century, marks the first pronounced step in the advance. It derived its inspiration in the first instance not immediately from Chinese porcelain, but indirectly through the painted earthenware of the Near East and of the Moors in Spain, which was itself evolved in emulation of the Chinese wares. By the early years of the sixteenth century, the latter must have been quite familiar to the Italian maiolica potters, who used the term “alla porcellana” to denote a certain type of design in which they sought to imitate the contemporary Oriental “blue and white.”
The mere outward simulation that could be achieved by coating grey earthenware with pure white enamel did not satisfy the keen spirits of an age when every mind was pregnant with new ideas, and no task seemed too gigantic for the artist’s hand. To produce a body which, in substance and surface as well, should equal the object of imitation, must have been the aim of many a pioneer in the art of whose efforts all record has been lost.
If contemporary documents are to be trusted, it would appear that something in the nature of porcelain was made in Italy as early as the first quarter of the sixteenth century; it is not surprising to learn that the scene of the first successful experiments was Venice, a city by that time famous all over Europe for its glass, a substance for the manufacture of which its seaboard situation gave it exceptional advantages. Though the literary evidences for the fabrication are too clear to be reasonably doubted, no piece of this early Venetian porcelain is known to exist at the present day. We reach sure ground towards the end of the century, when we come to the porcelain invented at Florence about 1575 by Francesco de’ Medici, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany. This, the earliest European porcelain of which specimens still survive, is an imperfect artificial porcelain largely compounded of glass. It is mentioned in a letter dated 1576 by the Venetian ambassador at the Tuscan Court. The only dated specimen known is a flask with the arms of Philip II. of Spain and the date 1581, now in the museum at Sèvres. The Grand Duke probably ceased after a short time to take interest in the factory, and it became a private enterprise; of its subsequent fortunes something will be said on a later page.
PLATE 14
Jardinière, Sèvres, dated 1761, painted with cupids on a rose Pompadour ground. Mark of the decorator Dubois. Height, 7½ in. Jones Collection.
No. 787-1882. See p. [56].
Mark: