18th-Century Porcelain: The Excellence of Fragility

The Correale Museum’s porcelain collection celebrates the magnificence of this fragile and vibrant material, which from its arrival in the West conquered the Courts of Europe, becoming the identifier of the social status of its possessor. The story of the start of porcelain production in Europe may perhaps boast, in the history of the decorative arts, the most fascinating of stories: it took centuries of research and the wealth of great European sovereigns and princes to succeed in obtaining in the West, a production of porcelain similar in quality and consistency to that coming – at very high cost – from China and Japan.
The first porcelain known in Europe (i.e. in Italy) was introduced by Marco Polo, who, on his return from his long stay in Beijing, imported from China a kind of proto-porcelain, a hard-paste ceramic painted white or brown. Europe, where until then only terracotta had been known and worked, looked on in astonishment at these objects, totally unable to imitate them.
Results of some value were only achieved in 16th century Florence, where the alchemy workshops of Francesco I de’ Medici, already around 1575, succeeded in obtaining a type of soft-paste porcelain, known as Medici porcelain: technically imperfect, it was decorated with cobalt blue motifs, vaguely inspired by contemporary Chinese production. A total of about fifty pieces are known. However, it does not seem that the production survived the death of Francesco I.
The dream of owning a porcelain manufactory, considered by a European ruler to be the ‘necessary completion of glory and magnificence’, was only realised in 1710 in Meissen (Germany) thanks to the expensive research promoted and financed by Frederick Augustus of Saxony, when the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger discovered its composition – a fusion of kaolin, quartz and feldspar – and initiated Europe’s first porcelain production. Despite tight controls, a leak of information made the formula for producing porcelain known and the arcane manufacturing and firing process, strenuously defended by the German ruler, quickly spread across half of Europe. Thus other porcelain manufactures sprang up, patronised and financed by kings and sovereigns: the many objects made – crockery, snuffboxes, perfume holders, stick handles, popular figurines, wall decorations – testify to the collecting passion that exploded with the introduction of porcelain, which contrasted with the use of majolica.
The fortunate parable of porcelain production began its decline with the establishment of the first porcelain ‘factory’ in England in the late 1700s: it was then that porcelain lost its connotation of fascination, mystery and rarity to slowly become a commonly used material.