The Arcanum (30 page)

As his relationship with Acier deteriorated, Kaendler's once exuberant, extrovert personality became increasingly withdrawn
and aloof. Disillusionment was reflected in his work, which lacked its former flair, and in his treatment of his assistants,
with whom he became increasingly short-tempered. He was badgered to adapt his animated, lively style to the cold, static poses
of the classical subjects that were now in vogue. It was not an easy adjustment.

On January 26, 1775, Kaendler must have shuddered to hear the news that Johann Gregor Herold, his archrival, had died, aged
seventy-eight. His own health was also failing but he continued to work, producing new models and suggesting reforms to improve
the factory's efficiency. He died on May 18, 1775, aged sixty-eight, having worked unrelentingly at Meissen for forty-four
years.

The deaths of these great porcelain masters, though poignant, did not really mark the end of an era. Meissen had already been
toppled from its preeminent position two decades earlier. The efforts of discontented employees and wandering arcanists had
demolished its monopoly and spread the secret arcanum for porcelain far and wide. But it was the might of Frederick the Great's
army that had unwittingly exacted the final revenge for stealing Böttger from Prussia's grasp half a century before. By so
severely interrupting Meissen's prodigious output it had allowed young rival German factories, as well as Louis XV's porcelain
factory (which in 1756 moved from Vincennes to Sèvres), to gain a foothold in the marketplace. Frederick had achieved his
ambition to own a porcelain factory of which he could be proud, but it was not he but Louis of France who conquered the European
porcelain market. Soon it was Louis's interlaced initials, representing Sèvres, that replaced the crossed swords of Meissen
as the world's most exclusive mark.

But if Meissen porcelain no longer dominated the dining tables of the wealthy in quite the same way, its name still held celebrity
status. The impact of Böttger, Herold and Kaendler, who between them found the formula for the substance for which all Europe
clamored and then created an entirely new art form with it, spread inexorably. As time passed and manufacturing processes
improved, porcelain became less exclusive and costly, and the influence of this unlikely trio was echoed in the products of
almost every ceramic manufactory throughout the Western world. Even today, their shadowy presence is reflected in the forms
and designs of countless mass-produced objects made from myriad different materials. Technology and taste have moved on, but
the pioneering achievements of these three trailblazers remain as formidable as they ever were.

If this were so: if to the eighteenth-century imagination, porcelain was not just another exotic, but a magical and talismanic
substance—the substance of longevity, of potency, of invulnerability—then it was easier to understand why the King would stuff
a palace with forty thousand pieces. Or guard the “arcanum” like a secret weapon. Or swap the six hundred giants.

Porcelain, Utz concluded, was the antidote to decay.

B
RUCE
C
HATWIN,
Utz,
1988

T
he Albrechtsburg castle, now painted a rather incongruous shade of gray, still towers with imposing authority above the muddled
clusters of medieval Meissen rooftops. Its guards have long since disappeared, along with the modelers and painters of Meissen's
fragile wares. The barren halls where once Herold and Kaendler vied with one another were given an overhaul in 1863, when
the factory's management decided it had outgrown the castle and moved to larger premises down the hill.

Now the walls are frescoed with pastiche medieval tapestries relating the town's illustrious history, and the only obvious
reminders of the castle's porcelain past are two theatrical nineteenth-century murals painted by Paul Kiessling. In one, Böttger
drinks wine as he works in his laboratory, in the other he initiates Augustus the Strong in the art of porcelain-making.

At the new factory down the hill there are no soldiers at the gate and you no longer need special permission to visit. Meissen
has given up the perpetual struggle against outside interest and realized its potential as a serious tourist attraction. Visitors
arrive by shuttle bus from the market square to be ushered into neon-lit rooms in which the age-old techniques of paste compounding,
molding, glazing and decorating are proudly demonstrated and explained to the culture-hungry crowd. Times have certainly changed.

For its part, Dresden, city of Augustus the horseshoe crusher and his ravishing mistresses, still bears the scars of the fateful
nights in February 1945, when almost the entire center of the old city and 75,000 of its inhabitants, plus inestimable numbers
of refugees fleeing the advancing Soviet army, were annihilated in vengeful Allied bombing raids. The bombs were so many and
so lethally concentrated that they created a firestorm, an oxygen-consuming inferno suffocating most of the unfortunates who
were not burned or crushed to death. A massive column of heated air rose and produced suction of such intensity that roofs
and the core fabric of buildings were swallowed by the raging heat. Afterward there was scarcely a building or a person left
standing.

Since then, like some monumental phoenix, Augustus's triumphal city and its shattered buildings have one by one been gradually
reborn. The process is ongoing; his royal castle is still clad in scaffolding, but the covered bridge connecting it to the
Taschenberg Palace where once he cavorted with the beautiful Countess of Cozelle remains intact—and her grand residence has
been turned into one of Dresden's most luxurious hotels.

Incredibly, most of Augustus's prized porcelain collection managed to survive the bombs. In the months before the final devastation
it was taken by rescue teams, along with many of the priceless works of art bought by Augustus III, to various country estates,
so-called places of safekeeping deep inside Saxony. The porcelain treasures were later removed to the Soviet Union before
being finally restored to Dresden in 1958.

Today Augustus's richly patterned Chinese and Japanese porcelains are displayed along the gently curving walls of the long,
airy, light-filled galleries of the Zwinger that surround the vast courtyard where once his extravagant entertainments were
staged. These are some of the surviving treasures from his fantastical Japanese Palace. Dishes, bowls and vases are arranged
much as he would have liked them—in radiating mosaiclike patterns on the walls. In their midst stands a resplendent centerpiece,
the ultimate memento of the monarch's porcelain madness—a clutch of the massive blue and white vases for which he paid a regiment
of dragoons.

Here too are Böttger's first tentative trial cups and bowls; cases of Herold's painterly masterpieces, Kirchner's and Kaendler's
animals for the Japanese Palace, some still bearing traces of the paint that so incensed Kaendler; here is also his equestrian
model and the massive face of Augustus—all that remain of his dream. Vast though the collection is, what you can see is less
than a tenth of what remains. Stored in inaccessible vaults beneath the floor are further quantities of porcelain collected
by the king, along with diminutive nuggets of gold magicked by the unfortunate Böttger.

But the most potent reminder of this extraordinary story is to be found not here but beneath the nearby Brühlsche Terrace,
the elegant part known as the Balcony of Europe that now surmounts part of the old city walls bordering the river Elbe. Underneath
this fashionable strolling ground, the ancient fortifications where Böttger's first successful firings took place have recently
been excavated. Nowadays the Jungfernbastei no longer arouses frissons of horror but of fascination as troops of German schoolchildren
and parties of wide-eyed tourists are regularly escorted on a route that leads through the cavernous subterranean halls that
once witnessed the extraordinary discovery.

As you follow the dimly lit passages leading from one bleakly echoing chamber to the next you cannot but help wondering if
Böttger ever imagined, as he toiled in such an inhospitable place, that nearly three hundred years later people would still
visit the spot where it all happened, or that the fruits of his struggles would feature in countless museums and collectors'
vitrines all over the world.

In discovering the arcanum for porcelain, did he realize that his immortality was guaranteed—that no one would forget that
it was he who concocted the means for his king to earn the golden fortune he craved? Or that in making white gold, and earning
a place in the history books, he had come so close to the true arcanum after all?

My intention in writing this account of the invention of European porcelain is to bring this incredible story of discovery
and intrigue to the attention of the general reader. In order to research these events I have gratefully relied on the vast
body of scholarly and expert insights published in studies of Meissen porcelain. I have also drawn on eighteenth-century travelers'
accounts of Dresden to provide a picture of the color and intrigue of court life, as well as general works on eighteenth-century
German history to outline as simply as possible the complex political panorama of the time. The following list provides the
main sources on which I have relied for each chapter. Full details of these and other related publications to which I have
referred are given in the bibliography that follows.

Böttger's escape: Röntgen,
Book of Meissen

Fashion for alchemy: Fauchier Magnan,
Small German Courts

Alchemy: Sherwood Taylor,
Alchemists;
Holmyard,
Alchemy;
Szydlo and Brzezinski, “A New Light on Alchemy”

Pabst von Ohain quote contained in Menzhausen,
Early Meissen Porcelain

Epigraph and letters regarding experiments quoted from Hoffmann,
Von Alchimistengold

Böttger's early life and gold-making experiments: Hoffmann,
Böttger
and
Von Alchimistengold;
Doberer,
Goldmakers;
Röntgen,
Book of Meissen

Augustus the Strong: Poellnitz,
Saxe Galante

Relationship with the Countess of Cozelle: Montagu,
Travels

Political ambitions: Treasure,
Making of Modern Europe;
Bruford,
Germany in the 18th Century

Interest in Oriental porcelain: Honour,
Visions of Cathay;
Schmidt,
Porcelain as an Art and Mirror

Alchemical experiments: Doberer,
Goldmakers;
Hoffmann,
Von Alchimistengold

Oriental porcelain: Honour,
Visions of Cathay;
Impey,
Impact of Oriental Styles;
Jacobson,
Chinoiserie

Early porcelain experiments: Walcha,
Meissen Porcelain;
Ducret,
German Porcelain and Faience

History of early European ceramics: Honey,
European Ceramic Art

Friendship with Tschirnhaus: Röntgen,
Book of Meissen;
Walcha,
Meissen Porcelain

Manufacture of ceramics: Honey,
European Ceramic Art

Imprisonment in the Albrechtsburg and Königstein: Menzhausen,
Early Meissen Porcelain

Experiments: Walcha,
Meissen Porcelain

Wildenstein's account quoted in Menzhausen,
Early Meissen Porcelain
and in Walcha,
Meissen Porcelain

Composition and manufacture of porcelain: Sterba,
Meissen Domestic Porcelain

Experiments in Dresden based on Wildenstein's contemporary account quoted in Walcha,
Meissen Porcelain,
and in Hoffmann,
Böttger