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Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1888.

CERAMIC DECORATION-ITS EVOLUTION AND ITS

APPLICATIONS.a

By LOUIS FRANCHET.

Some author has said "The ceramic art is one of the most ancient of the world's arts. Its birth is lost in the shadows of time." It is into these deep shadows that we must first penetrate, but there is little fear that we shall lose our way, for glowing trails have been blazed for us by such men as Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, de Mortillet, Piette and others still, who have made prehistoric civilization known to us.

Among all the industrial arts, ceramics is of the most controlling interest when we wish to study the evolution of that artistic sense that has developed little by little among men.

To express the conception of his genius the potter must be at once a modeller, a sculptor, and a painter. He must also possess special faculties of invention and intuition so as to avoid the pitfalls scattered along his path, hazards which he meets at every turn in the preparation of his clays, in the working of them and above all in their baking.

The study of ceramic decoration is also of considerable importance in connection with the history of peoples, since it often affords a means of following the progression of great migrations and even discloses, as we shall see later, the very customs of the ancients. It is the ceramic art, even more than metallurgy, which enables us to more fully appreciate the degree of civilization of races which have gone before us.

We must look back, to be sure, several hundred centuries to find the first appearance of ceramic objects and we are struck with admiration as we examine the remarkable conceptions that emanated from the still primitive brain of man.

There are not yet in our possession any positive proofs that pottery was known in the paleolithic epoch, in the hewn stone age, but

Translated by permission from Revue Scientifique, Paris, 47th year, No. 23, June 5, 1909.

in the era of polished stone which followed this, art was first manifested solely in the form of ceramic objects. The forms of prehistoric pottery evidence an extraordinary artistic sense in their designers. In spite of our schools of fine arts we do not equal them to-day. Our designs, so complicated and generally so ungraceful, as a general rule are only poor derivations and consequently mere alterations of these prehistoric designs. But we need not believe that it was the lack of all decorative material that suppressed ornamentation among primitive peoples. The plasticity of the clay itself pointed out the road to the first artists. The imprint of the potters' fingers gave birth to the intaglio decoration, and in the copper age succeeding that of polished stone, we find designs engraved by means of a cord, or a bit of wood or bone, or with imprints of the leaves of ferns or other plants.

After these engraved vases came the incrusted vases, with the intaglio design filled up with a white or a colored clay, a process in common use during the middle ages. The most beautiful of these specimens are the splendid faiences ascribed to Henry the Second, made at Saint-Porchaire (Charente-Inferieure) in the sixteenth century.

However, besides this, we find in the neolithic age an ornamentation made by gluing the bark of trees or small pieces of tin to the pot with a sort of pitch. During this long period, though civilization was more advanced than is generally realized, yet man was still in a half-savage state, and struggles between tribes were no doubt frequent. It is for this reason that the custom arose of building villages in the center of lakes to give better defense in case of attack. We have to-day proof that engraved ceramic ware was used for the decoration of the rude dwellings of these lacustrine villages. In the lake of Bourget (Savoy) have been found lining panels of graven clay still carrying the imprint of the wood partition to which they had been applied. At the same time were discovered the clay matrices which had been used to make certain of the intaglio imprints observed on the panels. These precious objects are deposited in the Museum of Chambéry.

Along with the graven and incrusted neolithic pottery we find also painted pottery, not painted with artificially prepared metallic colors, however, but with colored earths. This application of one earth to another to obtain an artistic effect was the beginning of the "engobe" which itself gave birth, many centuries later, to decoration with hard enamel, which we will now consider.

What is known as "engobe" is a layer of one sort of clay applied over another clay to conceal its color and to furnish a surface capable of receiving certain decorations. In "engobing" a piece of pottery it is plunged quickly into a paste made of the engobe clay or it may

be sprinkled with the clay. Over the engobe may be applied the colored pigments. Decoration by engobage was practiced in the most ancient times, but no race took such a remarkable part in its development as the Greeks and Etruscans, who produced the greatest artists ever known in the art of fired pottery.

From a technical point of view the only feature that demands attention here is the fact that they had the skill to introduce into these engobes materials sufficiently fusible to give a true glaze to the work, and that with only three colors-red, brown, both iron colors, and manganese black-they have inscribed on their vases the entire history of ancient Greece.

The Greeks have always been our teachers in the practical utilization of ceramic decoration. Their most ancient pottery, it is true, bear only elementary designs painted with colored clays, but little by little there appeared representations of fabulous animals, then the great scenes that enable us to construct ideas of their life, customs, and religion, both from the nature of the forms and from the inscriptions and the scenes which they portray. In a word, here we find the utilization of ceramic decoration carried to the limit of perfection.

Etruscan pottery offers examples quite as remarkable. Then there are the celebrated Roman potteries, about which certain archeologists have advanced the most unlikely hypotheses to explain the famous red luster which covers them. It is to chemistry that they should have turned to find the solution of the problem, for it is chemistry that has revealed to us the fact that this luster is a true enamel which the Roman potters made by mixing a strongly ferruginous clay of rock with a glass composed of sand and carbonate of soda with small quantities of alumina and lime.

This red enamel of the Romans is therefore derived directly from the "engobe." It was applied to the unbaked piece and was consequently baked at the same time as the clay base itself, the temperature being comparatively low, about 900°.

It is pretended that we do not know how to duplicate this beautiful red; nothing, however, could be more incorrect. We have a rock, the sandstone of Thiviers (Dordogne), which, when mixed with a glass, or, more correctly speaking, a frit rich in silica, gives us exactly the same enamel that we admire on the Roman pottery.

In this field we are even more advanced than were our predecessors, for we can vary at will this red tone from an orange shade all the way to brown. All that need be done is to add to the glass (or frit) certain elements such as alumina, boric acid, borax, or zinc oxide, the proportions of which can be infinitely varied.

The Romans, however, abandoned ceramic painting to devote themselves entirely to sculpture. Their vases ornamented in relief,