Month by month from 1570 when the work on her garden began, Catherine de Médicis, marveling at her potter’s miraculous art, watched her grotto take shape in a partially underground chamber in her garden that measured roughly five by forty feet. Made entirely of terra-cotta, its longest walls had niches and columns that were cast from molds of rocks and shells. On the second story, terra-cotta human figures metamorphosing into rock and shell stood between windows. Opposite the entrance, like an altarpiece, a fountain shaped like an enormous crag gushed water from its spouts, which fell down over the rock to the pool at its base lined with water-spouting ceramic fish, seals, reptiles, amphibians, and crustaceans. All of these sea creatures were cast from life, the Queen Mother was proud to tell the foreign ambassadors and envoys who visited here. Each and every one of them had been cast from real frogs and animals caught in the rivers and ponds of France.
Drawing of a Palissy plate: a theatrical display of interdependence, mutation, and predation.
Victoria Sawdon
Palissy had made versions of these metamorphosing human-rock-shell figures before. In his earliest printed work, Architecture and Order (Architecture et ordonnance), written while the potter was imprisoned in Saintes in 1563, he described a sequence of six herms he had built (classically inspired head and torso figures that become an inverted triangle beneath the waist), each gradually turning into plants, stones, cockle shells, and then rock as they become sequentially turned back into the rock that had spawned them. Palissy’s grotto figures were part human, part animal, part rock; they issued from a mind that had become a cauldron of classical, natural-philosophical, pagan, Protestant, and alchemical ideas.
By 1570, the Queen Mother’s grotto maker had become something of an institution in Paris. Palissy’s plates, miniature versions of the great grotto, had become collectors’ pieces. The visitors who came to his atelier came not to see the grotto—which, unfinished, was still for the Queen Mother’s eyes only—but to commission one of his extraordinary plates displayed in cabinet after cabinet across Europe.
Beyond the purse of all but the richest buyers, and bought as gifts to be given in elaborate gift exchanges between aristocrats, Palissy’s plates were some of the most unusual and bizarre productions of Renaissance France. Oval, brightly colored, and highly glazed, they depicted pond-beds writhing with lizards, crustaceans, snails, snakes, and fish; each creature, interacting and reacting with others, is shown netted together in a staged struggle of life and death, a web of mutual predation and dependency. A spotted slate-gray viper takes center stage in most of these theaters of nature, creating danger and threat; frogs, fish, and crayfish scatter outward in all directions, both in the pond water and onto its rocky edges.
Bernard Palissy encouraged patrons to visit the public rooms of his workshop, but he allowed no one into the interior rooms where he worked. Like most other artisans in the sixteenth century who had labored for years, even decades, to discover a successful chemical process, Palissy was fiercely secretive about his art. His income depended on keeping a monopoly on production. Forever in fear of imitators, he revealed his process only to his sons, who were also sworn to secrecy. Late in his life he made the mistake of promising to reveal it to his son-in-law, Charlemagne Moreau, as part of his daughter Marie’s wedding dowry. When Palissy procrastinated, perhaps regretting his promise after Marie had died, his son-in-law took him to court and, after ten years of court cases, finally smashed up Palissy’s kiln, atelier, and house in Sedan in revenge.
We know some of the secrets of Palissy’s process not because he revealed them, but because his followers did. The potter used live specimens—he kept toads, frogs, lizards, and snakes in jars in his workshop, collected for him from the ponds and ditches in the fields around Paris. To make a cast of an animal, he would first take it to the brink of death by immersing it in urine or vinegar; then he would grease its skin before embedding it in flattened plaster and posing it to make it seem alert. Once the plaster had set, the potter made a clay impression from the plaster. The casts were man-made fossils. The animal actors were then placed onto a rough-hewn plate or basin cast from a rock mold. Using needles, palette knives, and other tools Palissy worked the scene, integrating the ceramic interstices of earth and animals, water and vegetable, until the drama was both at its peak and permanently sealed, suspended in time.
These strange plates were not the random creations of the potter’s fevered imagination, nor were they the freak productions of a culture obsessed with newfangled things. In these ceramic theaters, Palissy was raising the curtain on what he believed to be nature’s deepest secrets: a miraculous process of decay and regeneration set in a borderline ooze where new life was constantly being generated. Palissy’s plates were philosophical objects, gifts, conversation pieces, things to be contemplated and discussed, at a time when scientific debate and speculation took place in the courts and salons of princes and dukes as well as in the halls and corridors of universities.
Palissy thought of himself as something of a prophet. He was convinced that, through a lifetime of suffering comparable to the labors of Hercules or the trials of Job, nature’s secret laws had been revealed uniquely to him and that it was his duty to pass this knowledge on. He began a lecture series; he took care to label all the objects in his museum, and over decades he rarely changed the staging arrangements of the pond theater plates. His sense of mission also explains the risk he took in returning to Paris after the political tide in the city turned violently against the Huguenots. He was a man possessed.
Palissy believed that ponds, salt marshes, caves, and wells were nature’s kilns or cauldrons. Here, in rotting warm water, feces, and mud, nature turned dead things into new life through the congelation of various salts, waters, and minerals. “There are a great many kinds of ponds [mares] both natural and artificial,” he told his lecture audience;
several call them claunes.* In some places they are a shallow trench, dug on a slope, so that the rain water flows into the trench or pool, and oxen, cows and other cattle may easily enter or leave to drink in it, and these are dug only on the hanging side.… They are warmed by the air and the sun and by this means generate and produce many kinds of animals. And a great quantity of frogs, serpents, asps and vipers always gather around these claunes in order to feed on the frogs. There are often also leeches in them, so that if oxen and cows remain some time within these pools they cannot avoid being bitten by the leeches. I have often seen serpents lying curled up at the bottom of these ponds.
Like Leonardo da Vinci, Palissy believed that the earth, like the human body, pulsed with life and with rising and falling fluids. But unlike Leonardo, he was convinced that these fluids were life-generating, like semen. They ran through the veins of the earth, surfacing in cracks and holes, where they were warmed by the sun into new life. The words Palissy used to explain these processes—“putrefaction,” “congelation,” “generation,” “exhalative,” “evaporative,” “germinative,” “transmutation”—he took from the language of alchemy in general and from the works of the German-Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in particular. “Transmutation” was the most important word of all for alchemists, the idea around which all other ideas turned and the goal of all practice. The alchemist was constantly searching for ways to “transmute” matter into a new state by applying fierce heat or cold or by mixing up new combinations of fluids and gases. Like Leonardo, Palissy was scathing about the claims of many alchemists of his time, but he believed in transmutation; he was convinced that alchemists had simply misunderstood the process and agency by which it happened. Nature’s secret generations happened in salt and water and rot, he insisted in all his writing, not in fire.
Palissy’s attraction to ponds was not unusual in the Renaissance. Numerous Renaissance natural philosophers, drawing on alchemical ideas and conceiving of nature as a sorcerer practicing secret arts, were fascinated with the aqueous and mineral worlds, places where all the elements of alchemy mixed in a cau
ldron or crossing place. In Renaissance art and philosophy, frogs, salamanders, and snakes are shape-shifters; as transitional creatures they were endowed with magical qualities beyond our rational imaginings. Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, alchemical concepts pervaded many aspects of what we would now call science, from ideas derived from Aristotle about the human body being made up of a combination of four elements—earth, water, fire, and air—to new experimental chemical and industrial knowledge.
Speculation about spontaneous generation had preoccupied natural philosophers for centuries, from Aristotle and Theophrastus to Lucretius and Ovid to van Helmont and Harvey. Palissy may have claimed to be working in isolation, uninfluenced by the theories of others; he may have claimed he was uneducated, a man, like Leonardo, without letters; but despite these declarations, like Leonardo, Palissy had a library and he was a reader. His published lectures and treatises make frequent references to the writing of Greek and Roman natural philosophers and to those of his own day, particularly the two great Renaissance Frenchmen Pierre Belon and Guillaume Rondelet, both of whom he read in French and in Latin.
Like Leonardo, whose work he may have encountered through the Italian Renaissance astronomer, mathematician, and physician Jérôme Cardan, Palissy rebutted the priests’ explanation that fossils were washed by Noah’s flood to the tops of mountains by making the same case that Leonardo had made seventy years earlier: “I maintain that shellfish … are born on the very spot,” he wrote, “while the rocks were but water and mud, which since have been petrified together with these fishes.… I have explained to you above that these fishes were generated in the very place where they have changed their nature, keeping the form that they had when they were alive.” He believed, as Leonardo did, that mountains were once seabeds.
Ideas and theories such as these about natural philosophy, medicine, and alchemy gushed from Palissy like the waters of his fountains. An opinionated, highly intelligent polymath with no formal classical education, he boasted of his lack of book learning: “I am neither Greek, nor Hebrew, nor Poet, nor Rhetorician, but a simple artisan hardly at all learned in the arts of language.” Everything he knew, he insisted, was based on his own observations and experiments, on years of hard looking and practice, rather than on books and theories. Sometimes so many people came to listen to his disquisitions that his atelier resembled a salon more than a workshop.
But in his salon, Palissy was walking on broken glass. He was a Huguenot living through the bloody days of the French wars of religion, and despite the patronage of the Queen Mother and his own intellectual bravado and range of knowledge, he always had to be careful about what he said and who might be listening. In his provincial hometown of Saintes, he had been constantly under surveillance and had been imprisoned and questioned for periods of time. Many of the Huguenot men and women he worked with had disappeared or been tried or executed for heresy. For the moment, he and his family were protected by the patronage of the Queen Mother; while the grotto was under construction and his famous plates were becoming collectors’ pieces, fetching high prices from the aristocracy of Europe, his religious beliefs were tolerated.
Palissy was lucky. Throughout her regency, Catherine de Médicis had insisted on religious toleration from her princely sons and ministers, particularly toward the large number of Huguenots who lived in France. Many of the most valued craftsmen who worked on her projects were Huguenots, she insisted. But she could not control her Catholic dukes and their brigand hordes, so again and again, violent sectarian battles and massacres were played out in the woods and fields and villages of France in cycles of attack and counterattack, massacre and reprisal.
Unfortunately for Palissy, Catherine’s patience with the Huguenots ran out in 1567 when a Huguenot army tried to capture the royal family and the seventeen-year-old king, Charles IX, her son, at the Surprise of Meaux. Catherine, furious and at her wits’ end, returned to Paris and kept her own counsel, biding her time. While her beloved potter was building her visionary grotto, she was planning her revenge on his people—she is even said to have planned the details of her coup in the grotto itself. Feigning conciliation, she arranged a marriage between her daughter and the Huguenot Henry III of Navarre. When aristocratic Huguenots came to Paris in their thousands to celebrate the wedding in 1572 and an assassin wounded one of the prominent Huguenot admirals, Catherine urged her son to strike against the Huguenots instead of risking an uprising in Paris. “Then kill them all. Kill them all,” Charles is said to have answered. Within days, at least thirty thousand Huguenots died on the streets of Paris and throughout France, some murdered by soldiers, most by mobs. Henry of Navarre converted to Catholicism in order to avoid being killed. Palissy and his family survived, escaping Paris for the Protestant town of Sedan, no doubt tipped off by the queen’s soldiers.
Perhaps Palissy had grown used to these oscillating periods of danger and safety, or perhaps he had acclimated to the refugee life, or perhaps his disputes with his brother-in-law about the fate of his grandchildren forced him to make more money; but given the level of danger in Paris after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and given his public profile, it is surprising to find that he was back in Paris in 1575, not keeping a low profile but pasting posters onto walls announcing the opening of an academy and advertising a series of lectures on alchemy, medicine, and the natural sciences. He had also established a small museum in a room next to his atelier that shelved his enormous collection of petrifications; these objects would later be used as evidence for his increasingly eccentric theories and demonstrations.
In these Paris lectures, Palissy unveiled his grand theories. The quantity of all the substances on the earth—minerals, metal, rock, and earth—was fixed and absolute, he claimed; it could never be increased or decreased. But within these fixed quantities, all these materials were in a constant state of flux—seas to mountains, mountains to seas, cloud to rock, rock to water. Here he was absolutely in line with Leonardo, but he went further: metals and rocks and minerals, he argued, “grow” over vast amounts of time into new and increased quantities of themselves through the action of generative water in the moist, humid, enclosed womb of the earth. He described a brilliant system that explained many natural phenomena from petrification, fossilized shells on mountaintops, and hydrologic cycles to the nature of fertilizers. Fossils were, according to Palissy, fish, shells, and mud that came from lakes that had since congealed because the lakes’ waters had at one point blended with generative salt.
Since the terrors of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when so many of his friends and neighbors had died on the streets, Palissy had become a man possessed. He could have disappeared into rural anonymity or recanted his ideas, but instead he returned to Paris to lecture. For nine years, the Huguenot potter held the attention of the Paris intelligentsia. He was a kind of elderly eccentric Scheherazade—each day that he entertained and fascinated his audiences with his philosophical ideas, his life would be prolonged a little longer. Hundreds attended his lectures in the Tuileries Gardens: physicians, including the king’s man Ambroise Paré, canons, jurists, humanists, dukes. The museum was always open, each of its labeled objects conveying the sense of urgency that characterized everything Palissy did. “I have set up a cabinet,” he wrote in the preface to his published lectures, Admirable Discourses (Discours admirables), “in which I have placed many admirable and monstrous things which I have drawn from the bowels of the earth, and which give reliable evidence of what I say, and no one will be found who will not admit them to be true, after he has seen the things which I have prepared in my cabinet, in order to convince all those who do not believe my writings.” In his writing, as in the labels in his museum, he impels individuals to see, touch, listen, and smell. In Admirable Discourses, he implores: “Look … look … look at the slates!… Don’t you see?” And then: “I have put this rock before your eyes.” The objects speak for themselves, he insists: “Consider this great nu
mber of shellfish I have put before your eyes, which are now all reduced to stone … and look at all these kinds of fishes I have put before your eyes.… They were once alive.”
Fragment of a human foot cast from life, from Palissy’s Paris grotto.
Louvre, Paris
In July 1585, the Treaty of Nemours granted Protestants six months to convert to Catholicism or leave the country. Palissy fled Paris again and went into hiding in a Protestant refuge near Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the rue des Maretz, also known as the Little Geneva and now called rue Visconti. Here he was arrested with several other men, and another round of exhausting sentences and reprieves began. In January 1587 a judge decreed that the three men be flogged, that their books be burned in the marketplace, and that they themselves be banished from France. Palissy again went into hiding, this time in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, very close to his atelier. He was arrested again a few months later and imprisoned with a group of elderly Huguenot women who were all sentenced in 1588 to be “hung and strangled and their bodies reduced to ashes, imposed on them for heresy.” The sentence was quashed again, despite Palissy’s objections. He was ready to die, he told his warders. At the age of eighty, Palissy was moved to the Bastille, where the prison warder, determined to test the old man’s mettle, told him he would be burned alive immediately if he did not convert. Palissy still refused. He died a year later from “misery, need, and poor treatment.”
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