Alchemy, Porcelain, and the Beginnings of Modernity

Medici Porcelain Dish in the Met

Here is something I did not know about until today but should have suspected: an 16th-century Florentine attempt to recreate Chinese porcelain:

The grand-ducal workshop of Casino di San Marco was one of several founded by Francesco I as a laboratory for experimentation where painters, sculptors, academics and artisans worked together to investigate natural phenomena and invent new materials and processes. Francesco had a great personal interest in alchemy and glassmaking, as well as in collecting at and antiquities, and he invested much time and money promoting technical innovation by marrying the experimental sciences in the applied arts.

On the first floor of the palace alone were glass works, an alchemy laboratory, foundries for metal work, including the forging of steel tools hard enough to hew porphyry, furnaces where rock crystal was fused to create decorative objects and precious stones (emeralds, rubies) were counterfeited, and ovens for producing a soft paste porcelain that became known as “Medici porcelain.”

Unable to find suitable clay, the Florentine craftsmen tried to make their own:

It is thought that the body of Medici porcelain consists of glass, powdered rock crystal, and sand, as well as clay from Vicenza and white earth from Faenza.

The first good examples of what would come to be known as “Medici Porcelain” were made in 1575. It is thought that about 350 vessels were eventually made, of which 60 survive. This was what we now call "soft-paste" porcelain, generally considered to be lower quality than the "hard paste" original. Because the process was so cumbersome, and the firing required so much fuel, it was far from economical, and the workshop was closed after Duke Francesco's death.

So, an economic failure of no great significance. But look closer and you get yet another glimpse of the wave of innovation that was sweeping across Renaissance Europe, building into a tsunami of growth and change. Everywhere you look you see people trying new ways of doing things: of building ships, of making glass and pottery, of printing books, of erecting buildings. It took a long time for all this innovation to transform Europe, but once this competition in innovation was launched it did not stop until everything was different than it had been.

Notice also the part played in this by Alchemy. Alchemy has a dubious reputation now because so much of it was devoted to turning lead into gold, and because some practitioners were more interested in spiritual transformation than chemistry. But alchemy always had a practical side, and even some men obsessed with making gold found that to fund their researches they had to use their chemical skill for more mundane purposes. The European ceramic and glass industries made huge advances between 1400 and 1760, and men trained in alchemy played a large part in that work.

Chemical skill built up slowly, but by 1700 every sort of chemical process, including making gunpowder and casting bronze, had been greatly improved.

This restlessness, this refusal to stick to the tried and true, this endless searching for more knowledge and better ways of doing things, is what gave us the modern world.