The Wall Street Journal-20080216-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books -- The Saxon Angle- Porcelain Politics
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books -- The Saxon Angle: Porcelain Politics
Full Text (685 words)Fragile Diplomacy
Edited by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger
Yale, 369 pages, $125
FORTUNATE indeed the small state trying to be a player among contending superpowers when it finds itself in possession of a desirable commodity that they do not have. With the opening of the Royal Porcelain Manufactury in the Saxon town of Meissen in 1710, the elector prince of Saxony -- so called because he had a vote in choosing the Holy Roman Emperor -- finally held a valuable card in the high-stakes game of 18th-century geopolitics. Thanks to Saxony's delicate industry, Europe was for the first time able to produce porcelain to its own tastes instead of having to import it from Asia.
"Fragile Diplomacy," a combination of lavish illustration and substantial scholarship, captures the beauty of Meissen's porcelain and the subtle role it played among Europe's statesmen and royal houses. The book's stunning photographs, accompanied by expert essays, show off the details of ornate design and striking form -- table services, tureens and vases painted with soft landscapes or intricate patterns, gilt-edged candlesticks, hunting cups, mythic beasts and goddesses in leafy bowers. Golds and reds and blues may cover a broad surface, or decorate the draped clothes of heroic figures, or simply add points of color to sculpted edges and embellishing shapes. But it is a glassy, soft-white luminosity that sets off the experience of nearly every object. Given porcelain's fragility, it is amazing that so much has survived accidental breakage and centuries of upheaval, to say nothing of the concussive effects of wartime explosives.
The period 1710-63 is a momentous one for Europe, for those years mark the inexorable decline of France as the pre- eminent European power, creating shifting alliances as Austria, Prussia, Russia and minor states like Saxony jockeyed for position. At one point the elector of Saxony actually became the king of Poland, displacing no less a figure than French King Louis XV's future father-in-law. These years were the perfect time for Saxony to employ its one asset that no one else could match.
"Saxon porcelain," wrote an erudite observer in 1744, "is a very fine ware. Its perfection resides in neither the clay nor in the firing, but in the secret alloy which produces the enamel, the whiteness and the translucence. This is very difficult to imitate." It was Saxony's particular good fortune to be rich in china clay or kaolin, uncommon in Europe. But it was the local chemical and industrial process -- that is, the art of making a porcelain alloy worthy of the artisan's design -- that gave Meissen's objects such fame. And the objects met ends beyond mere beauty.
For traditional prestige, notes the scholar Samuel Wittwer, "porcelain could not compete with the historic materials of gold and silver." But it could navigate degrees of rank with a pleasing precision. When August III followed his father as king of Poland -- continuing the Saxon lineage there -- he risked committing lese- majeste if he sent to fellow royals "a gift of an allegiance cup in a 'genuine' precious metal." But a material like porcelain "suited his purpose perfectly."
In the first half of the 18th century, according to one of the book's essays, the court at Dresden, Saxony's capital, "used their most desirable product, the 'white gold' of Meissen, to cajole and even bribe the French." This usefulness was evident at the time of the 1747 marriage of a Saxon princess to the widowed dauphin, the heir to Louis XV. Not unnaturally, the French queen did not favor for her son's wife a granddaughter of the king who had taken away her father's throne in Warsaw.
So, as this book crisply puts it: "The Dresden faction soon recognized that they needed the backing of the king's newly established and already powerful mistress, Madame de Pompadour," not to mention several powerful financiers. The white gold did its work. Soon the Saxon king's brother was reporting to him: "We have triumphed; the master and his mistress took our side . . . our friends have served us well."
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Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.
