‘The king would fain be a second Alcibiades, famous alike for his virtues and his vices’, writes a visitor to court. ‘He is noble, full of sympathy and of heroic courage … He is envious of the fame of others. Ambition and a lust for pleasure are his chief qualities, though the latter has the supremacy.’
His appetites and his strengths are inexhaustible. He bends horseshoes, rides for hours, picks up metal bars, faces down elk in his great forests of Bialowieza in Lithuania. Here there are wolves, bears, lynx and bison, ‘so mighty that three men may be seated between its horns’, and capable when cornered of ferocious attack. At court there is fox-tossing. Foxes, badgers and wild cats are released to run into nets which are drawn tight so that the animal is thrown high into the air and killed. Augustus holds the end of the net with a finger, casually, the other end held by several men. Sometimes the men dress as satyrs and the women as nymphs.
It is said Augustus has two wives, as he is a king with two kingdoms. He has official mistresses who become countesses when he has tired of them and then he has a rolling programme of lovers who are servants and minor aristocrats and actresses and girls who have caught his eye, and everyone’s sister and even, possibly, his lovers’ daughters.
This is called gallantry.
He is August der Starke, the Strong, and he has droit de seigneur over his court, city, and principalities. There is a prodigious number of bastards. I read La Saxe Galante: Or, The Amorous Adventures and Intrigues of Frederick-Augustus II, Late King of Poland, Elector of Saxony, &c., Containing Several Transactions of his Life not Mentioned in any other History. Together with Diverting Remarks on the Ladies of the severall Countries thro-which he travell’d, a bestseller across Europe from the 1720s.
It is as ghastly as it sounds.
He is, according to Thomas Carlyle, a Man of Sin.
iv
Augustus is rebuilding his city.
Next to gallantry, his greatest delight has been in military and civil architecture, and as to his cognisance of this art, there can be but one opinion. Even though however he has never carried anything to completion, because his weakness for universal applause causes him to make such frequent changes in design, that in spite of many and varied commencements nothing is ever concluded.
When he is not fighting battles on a Polish plain against the Swedes, Augustus’ attention is on Dresden. It is a battlefield of stonemasons and wagoners, an affray of rubble. The Elbe is choked with barges of timber coming downriver to moor near the bridge. Streets are closed as he has demolished and continues to demolish his patrimony. There has been a fire, which has allowed for some scope, but now he has some serious plans. This will be another Florence, he says to his mistress Maria Aurora Spiegel, but it is winter and there is deep mud and two seasons of dust ahead. Then a new mistress, Anna Constanze, and then more mud. He loves this one. She needs a palace as a present, and she will get one.
There are gifts and promises and titles, and the sun smiles on you, and the king remembers your name days and birthdays, and there are presents at Christmas and at New Year. A visiting embassy, a treaty, a marriage, are all occasions for something to be handed over, jewellery, gems from Saxon mines, local silver, dogs and horses, camels, wines from Tokaj that had been given to him by other rulers, passed on like unwanted gifts. You gauge where you are at these moments. Who knew that you needed an emerald hat brooch before you saw Count Seifersdorf wearing one as he bends towards the king at a reception?
And this is the problem at this court as in Versailles, as in Beijing. You need faith that the sun will rise and will shine on you. You cannot be agnostic in a place like this. You gain all animation from hope. You can fall out of favour. And be forgotten. There is heated gossip of Constantini, the Italian actor and impresario, who led the French troupe a hundred strong and was the man in the know in Dresden, who was locked up in the fortress of Königstein for six years for an indiscretion, perhaps propositioning a royal mistress. He is only thought of and released when Augustus needs entertainment.
The baron Pöllnitz remembered the court of Augustus as ‘plays, masquerades, balls, banquets, tilting at the ring, sleigh rides, tours and hunting parties … the plays and masquerades were open to anyone who was well dressed’. He continues listing all the pastimes, until the court sounds like a vast cruise liner, the courtiers like passengers, unable to disembark.
Chapter twenty-one
the shuffle of things
i
Scit scat goes the king’s attention.
There is a state that was recognised and named accidie by St Thomas Aquinas, where a monk is at such a pitch of lassitude, such disengagement with the world, that he cannot do anything but sit. He implies that you need to be clever to be afflicted, to have run through all conjecture and possibility and be in the words of John Berryman ‘heavy-bored’. I think of Augustus and accidie, stalled, ‘heavy-bored’, in his palaces. He is not indecisive so much as endlessly decisive, each decision another attempt to get his pulse moving.
Berryman, who knew a lot about how compulsion shades addiction, goes on, ‘moreover my mother told me as a boy / Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources’.
The king’s inner resources are non-existent. He wants more. What did he miss the first time round? He returns to the unwrapping of a new automaton, the display of a new grey stallion in front of him at the steps to the court, all sinewy neck and sweet sweat, a table confection, a girl, because the pleasures of ownership have become of shorter and shorter duration. The automaton has emeralds for eyes, which is a nice touch of the court jeweller Johann Melchior Dinglinger. The stallion is perfect for tomorrow’s hunt. The sugar and marzipan model of the seven wonders of the world is novel enough for tonight. The girl is tall.
The moreness, the excess, the repetition brings back the chance of feeling, sensation, a constriction in his breathing and a release that is life.
More is the drama of Dinglinger’s ‘The Throne of the Great Moghul’, a golden centrepiece for a table encrusted with 5,223 diamonds. A great ruler sits enthroned under a baldachin at the top of a flight of golden steps. Everything and everyone ripples away from his presence, ensconced high above the seething scene of servants bearing gifts, nobles and retainers. Two rulers, Mir Miron, ‘the lord of lords’, and Chan Chanon, the ‘prince of princes’, have arrived. The lord brings elephants, camels and horses led by handlers with turbans of mother-of-pearl and gold. The prince brings with him stretchers covered with carpets on which are lacquers, jewelled ewers and chalices. Chests are opened, filled with more gems, guns embellished and chased with intricate golden threads.
This is a choreography of the baroque, all techniques of the enameller, goldsmith, lapidarist, sculptor in step together. It is a vision of what a Kunstkammer should be, the idea put forward by Francis Bacon of:
a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man, by exquisite art or engine, hath made rare in stuff, form, or motion, whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced, whatsoever Nature hath wrought in things that want life, and may be kept, shall be sorted and included.
The world, animate and inanimate, kneels before the king. The scale of Dinglinger’s piece – five feet wide by four feet deep – means he looks down on the 137 figures of animals and men like the Great Moghul himself.
It is like playing with his own embassy-of-the-king-of-Siam-at-Versailles train set, of adoration and applause.
Looking down works well for Augustus. Balconies, for instance. Horseback, most days.
There are the pleasures of being envied and the pleasures of being feared and the pleasures of looking down on a sea of new possessions but of all the pleasures, More is the only thing that works.
ii
Augustus is self-evidently extremely able at spending money. Money goes on women, buildings, gifts, entertainments and dinners, war, a four-poster bed with a million guinea-hen and peacock and pheasant feathers woven into the fabri
c and undone to create a feather room. Money gushes out. As quickly as his ministers try to dam the flow of gold from the treasury, Augustus opens a new breach.
And now he spends on porcelain.
When Augustus became king there was porcelain in the royal collections. Sixteen pieces of Ming Dynasty ware were given by Ferdinand de’ Medici to Christian I of Saxony in 1590. But by the time Augustus dies, he owns 35,798 pieces of porcelain.
He has, he admits in a letter, la maladie de porcelaine, die Porzellankrankheit, porcelain sickness. ‘Are you not aware that the same is true for oranges as for porcelain,’ he says, ‘that once one has the sickness of one or the other, one can never get enough of the things and wishes to have more and more.’ By his death he has the largest collection of porcelain in the West. He has changed the possibilities of how porcelain can be made and used. He is the emperor of white.
Augustus has started with the Chinese blue-and-whites that have come in through the Netherlands. He has been buying Kangxi porcelain in bulk, the large lidded jars, the dishes, the vases, all the wares that Jingdezhen is creating. The kilns of the first porcelain city burn day and night to make porcelain for this obsessional man.
And now he is buying Kakiemon. This is the Japanese porcelain that is being imported through the Dutch, who since the 1630s, have the only concessions to trade with the Japanese. The Dutch East India Company, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, controls this trade brilliantly, commissioning particular types of porcelain from both China and Japan, shipping them and releasing and then choking back supply so that demand becomes greater and greater.
These Japanese porcelains feel different. The quality of the clay itself is a bit warmer than the Chinese for a start – a milky rather than a bony white – and then there is colour. The colours of Kakiemon are dense and rich and clearly delineated with the blue of the night sky, carmine reds, yolky yellows and a purple that is used for painting peonies and actually has that velvet bruise of a peony. The green is as surprising as the colour of willows in spring. These are enamels, used both under and over the glazing, with touches of gilding on rims of accuracy rather than delicacy.
The images are much closer to the dynamic spaces of an ink painting of a landscape than you might expect from a pot. Here is a dish with a craggy pine tree. It is old and is now no more than a gnarled trunk, its foliage a few small clouds of green that have lodged by chance up high. An implacable pheasant sits in the tree looking away from us. It has obviously been sitting there for a while. Its tail feathers are long. A phoenix heads off at the top left of the plate. And the rest is just a milky-white nothingness. There is no attempt to tidy it up or repeat bits of decoration to set up rhythms. It is image, a story, and it is emptiness.
This is what makes this kind of porcelain so irresistible. The quail at the scattering of millet is focus and greed and not-being-clever and everyone gets that. And come to think of it, the phoenix is just a courtesan being oh so special off and about.
These Japanese porcelains in rhythmical patterns of five, seven and nine, are for glorious display. In Dresden in the porcelain galleries at the Zwinger there is a particular group of Kakiemon that I love. A huge and rather smug lidded jar is in the centre, flanked by a pair of trumpet vases that flare in parallel to the swelling jar, that are then flanked by another, slightly smaller, pair of jars. These repetitions are part of the seduction, rhythms set up across the vessels held only a few inches apart, so that this bird in the arched bamboo – intrigued by the figures below, the woman with the fan looking up – talks to another bird, and another, and another.
Augustus’ agents go to Amsterdam to try and buy the finest, most expensive groupings as they arrive. And he is now so angry at the delays that he is contemplating sending his own ship around the world to buy porcelain from the orientals and bring back cargo just for himself. To Saxony. Landlocked Saxony.
How is he going to do this? Sail down the Elbe past Wittenberg and Hamburg to the North Sea, all the way round the Cape of Good Hope and on to Cathay?
iii
I know how this porcelain feels. Japan is where my porcelain changed.
I had escaped Sheffield for a year in Tokyo on a scholarship, learning Japanese at a tough language school in the mornings. I spent the afternoons with my elderly Great-Uncle Iggie, or making pots. Sue was working in Tibet. We wrote a lot. It was a strange, lonely year.
For the first time in my life, I could make pots without anxiety. I had no need to sell them, or exhibit them or explain them. And I was amongst others, in a cheerful studio with students and retired old men, and commuters dropping in for an hour to work on a tea bowl before starting their long journey back home on a train. There was a substantial contingent of elderly women making containers for flower arrangements. We had a little show in December and complimented each other.
My pots relaxed. I picked up a bottle I’d thrown in porcelain, and squeezed it gently. Picked up its pair and did the same, placed them next to each other so that the gestures met. They looked better together. It made sense.
Coming back to London, Sue and I decided to live together. I found a studio in South London nearby, across a scrubby park, and started to make a new kind of porcelain.
My pots had shed their learning. Hard profiles had become soft, they asked to be picked up and held. Everything became simpler, everything became celadon. The runs of prescriptive pots disappeared and I found that I was making bowls and teapots and lidded jars. These were vessels, not obligations.
And the first time I showed them, I sold everything.
I started to make small groups of porcelain. Thinking of all the traffic of objects, the shipping out from China and Japan, I called them cargos. Cargo 1 was a wonky grid of forty-nine celadon vessels on a plinth at an exhibition in Edinburgh. Everything else – the jars and the teapots and beakers – sold on the first night. My cargo stayed unwanted in the window of the gallery for the whole month. I gave it to Sue.
I put the second cargo of seventy cylinders, each with a slight tear at the top of the rim, across a wooden floor in a shop in Knightsbridge. It was bought by a fashion designer. There was attention and there were invitations to exhibit and I was photographed looking serious against a brick wall outside my studio. My pots were photographed against brick walls in warehouse conversions. Minimalism is back, said the magazines. This is the new white.
Above my wheel I pinned a great eighteenth-century list of porcelain wares to be sold at auction: a cargo.
iv
Cargos of porcelain arrive here in Dresden most days.
And though there is no reason why Augustus shouldn’t spend money on what he loves Tschirnhaus has seen with some precision where the money goes. Some wag at court has come up with a new naming for porcelain: ‘Weissener Gold’, white gold. The Chinese are Saxony’s porcelain bloodsuckers, porzellanene Schropkopfe. There is an equation that appeals to the mathematician here, involving the substitution of Saxon porcelain for Chinese porcelain, a moving of figures from one side of the page to another.
Making porcelain in Dresden could be a success on the scale of a Colbert.
Dresden has been built on generation after generation of astute husbandry. Saxony possesses the most productive mines in Europe: ‘the entire huge mountain mass along the Bohemian border is all tunnelled through and hollowed out. There is one mine shaft next to another and … all ravines ring with the sound of hammer mills’, wrote a traveller of the Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains, west of Dresden. They are rich with silver ore, tin, iron and copper, seamed with precious stones, amethyst and agate and topaz and garnet.
There is great pride in the industry. Augustus sees himself as the First Miner and has beautiful miner’s tools recreated in precious metals, a miner’s lamp in gold. There are festivities where miners parade before the guests, dinners with mountains made from marzipan in which caves with sweetmeats gleam.
And in the centre of Dresden is the Goldhaus, an experimental laboratory for the king,
a place of pragmatics, a testing-ground for research into these different minerals and ores, the earth and clay of his kingdoms, and the analysis of their potentialities. It had been established for a century, codifying and regulating mining, surveying the kingdom, taxing everything. The Goldhaus was a community of shared interests, natural philosophers, courtiers, alchemists, a wealth of men with knowledge of minerals and mining.
Augustus listens to Tschirnhaus’s idea of an academy of the sciences, similar to the one in Paris, and to the much heralded one at the Kangxi emperor’s court in Beijing, funded by the establishment of useful industries. Glass first and then porcelain.
The king is taken by some parts of this, particularly the emphasis on moneymaking manufactories: he thinks the establishment of glass factories is a good idea and is intrigued by the porcelain. No money from Augustus is vouchsafed. Tschirnhaus starts work in the Goldhaus. The king, needless to say, is in a hurry.
Chapter twenty-two
a path, a vocation
i
Tschirnhaus picks up the pace of his experiments on creating porcelain.
Using his burning lenses he melts Dutch Delftware. It puddles to glass. In a letter to Leibniz on 27 February 1694, he writes of an experiment in which he melted a piece of Chinese porcelain with the same equipment, identifying the principal constituents as alumina, silica and calcium. He has made a dense and milky stone out of a piece of good Jingdezhen porcelain. Leibniz is intrigued and asks for a piece of this ‘new porcelain’. Tschirnhaus sends him a piece ‘on which the gold has been melted’.
The White Road Page 13