And Tschirnhaus is using the furnaces here in the Goldhaus too: ‘I’m not sure of the contents yet until the samples are back from the kiln, it could be that the fire is too weak.’ And he has also experimented with making high-temperature furnace bricks – crucial if you want to fire porcelain – and has made trials of metallurgical smelting crucibles that contain test substances, a kind of saggar. He has fired these for about five hours and taken them from the kiln when still hot. This proves that they can withstand thermal shock.
Tschirnhaus is on his way towards porcelain. But he cannot get the temperatures high enough with his burning lenses, nor with the furnaces that his colleagues use, and melting is not the same as making.
He writes cleanly. His prose is undecorated. It rises and falls without rhetorical ascent. His lenses are lucidity. I think of him and realise that the context in which he is working, thinking, trialling materials is critical.
He is in an environment that is strange and congested, filled with fumes and heat. The Goldhaus is a series of spaces where techniques for embossing coins and for refining and mixing metals are trialled alongside more experimental technologies. The largest room is the Laboratorium, in which ore processing takes place. It contains retorts, crucibles, nine smelter furnaces and a blast furnace, as well as a distillation furnace for finer work. Beyond this is a small round room filled with scales and weights for assaying – checking the purity of gold and silver – and then there are smaller vaulted rooms for special materials and the smallest of all for books and documents. As the rooms get smaller, their contents become more rarified and access to them becomes more restricted.
It is a place of accretion. It is not that I had imagined a laboratory bench, good light and ventilation, but I hadn’t registered the scale of the congestion of materials and equipment in these rooms. I hadn’t realised the tumble of ideas and methods.
Because this is Dresden, there is an inventory. Actually, I realise after conversations at the archives, there are inventories of the inventories.
Where do you want to start? a pleasant archivist asks me. This is a good question.
I can understand that a king or a court chamberlain might want to know of the treasures in the eight rooms in the palace devoted to the Kunstkammer, the three rooms of the library, the extent of the coin collection. The inventories of the ivories in the care of the court turner and the inventories of tapestries in the care of the court bedmaker must be useful for the keepers of these offices of state. But this compulsive noting is not only to make sure that nothing gets lost, making sure that you are not culpable when the king demands that his guard wear green Turkish uniforms last used for a visit thirty years before, it is because time in this palace has a particular quality. It is not an act of piety to preserve and then document the artefacts of your forefathers, it is rather that in Dresden you live in the continuous present of the glorious House of Westin. Everything that has happened to your forefathers is still happening.
So when looking at the inventory for the Goldhaus for a century before Tschirnhaus arrives – ‘eight bowls of vitriol with foam still in them … a cupel filled with green water’ – and the inventory for the year in which he walks in, there is just more stuff.
Nothing seems to leave. If you come in you too may never leave.
ii
The Goldhaus is a place of alchemy. The smallest of the rooms contains the experiments for turning base materials into gold, the notes of successive alchemists who have offered themselves to the elector of Saxony. The records of the alchemist glassmaker Kunckel are in there, somewhere.
Alchemy takes no set path. Wandering might well be part of it – alchemists are notoriously keen on the image of themselves as free spirits, off on their Wanderjahre through the university towns, the villages, the odd tavern, princely courts. There are lots of princes in the Holy Roman Empire who have rich tables.
There is a stock bit of reminiscence where the alchemist turns to us, the audience, the king and says that he learned ‘from barbers, bathers, learned doctors, wives, those who make a habit of black magic, from alchemists, at cloisters, from nobles and commoners, from the clever and the simple’. But it can’t all be on the road. To learn how to transmute takes a certain amount of staying still as well. Alchemy is, after all, a work of fire to be skeined with goldsmithing and distilling, disciplines that require you to know the colour of flame, the sound of a melt, the distinction in fumes.
Here in the Goldhaus, transmutation is sought after and found. It is not only chaotic with materials and the apparatus to transmute them, it is full of competing ideas and theories and possibilities. So I take a very deep breath.
If Tschirnhaus is here then I too have to spend time with alchemists. How difficult can it be? The answer is very. I give them fierce concentration. I have to.
The writing on alchemy is serpentine and mazy. One idea turns into an image, an image into a reference to an authority from Egypt, Syria or Greece. When I pick up Basil de Valentinus – a popular writer during this period – I find that he gives twelve keys for alchemical progression towards the philosopher’s stone, each one illustrated with a woodcut. You see a sun, a skeleton, an unrobed woman, a king, a queen, a walled city and a shattered tree, and know that it is none of these things.
Engraving of an alchemist, from Twelve Keys of Basilius Valentinus, 1678
The twelfth key is of the alchemist in his workshop, with the sun and moon seen pendant through a window. This alchemist is firmly in control, bellows and books and a set of scales carefully set out on his bench. He is bearded, of course, and rather dapper in his conical hat and he is gesturing towards a crucible out of which grow flowers that droop to left and right while the sun and the moon hover above. There is a furnace in full fiery tumult. And at his heels, an insouciant lion devours a serpent.
I stare at it.
It gets worse. In the library I borrow a Calendarium magicum, eight pages dense with the seals of the archangels, signs of the winds and stars, figures and tables tacky with hermetic knowledge. Tacky is right. It looks a little like everything possible has been thrown at it, and shaken to see what sticks.
This is dangerous stuff.
It is dangerous not merely because it is disapproved of, though that is reason enough to be careful. There is a common notion of alchemists as Betrüger, fraudsters, on the par of pedlars who are out to con everyone, from women at the market to prince-bishops with their false promises. There are stories of these men and the dreadful punishments exacted on them, bedecked with alchemical symbols on a gilded scaffold where a sign hangs stating, he should learn to make gold better.
It is also difficult because of its seductive pull. Turn lead into gold. Turn light into a rainbow. Turn clay into porcelain. Change the world in one grand catalytic moment.
Here is poesis again, the coming into being of something new. But where with Tschirnhaus it is careful, what is promised with the sprinkling of one powder on to another in alchemy is an exhilarated moment of change, a roll of drums, a trumpet blast of gold.
In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Alchemist the workshop is chaotic, the children feral amongst the distilling basins, the broken equipment scattered, experiments half abandoned, an apprentice gape-mouthed at the bellows as the alchemist at his books points like St Jerome at the unholy mess.
Look what I have created, he smiles, as his wife shakes nothing from her empty bag. Outside the window is the future; the children trail towards the poorhouse door. ALGE MISTE, says the title; it has all failed in Flemish.
Or, in German, everything is rubbish.
iii
I wake up at three. I am furious, choked. I’ve been struggling with this alchemical stuff and the more I read about the philosopher’s stone, the transmutation of base metals into gold, the more anxious I get. And there is a constant about alchemists. They seem to be aware of their solitary nature while making a big deal of the handing on of knowledge, the choosing of who to pass it on to, adopting i
nitiates. This idea of the transmission from Albertus Magnus to Thomas Aquinas to Paracelsus and on, is compelling. A writer at the start of the seventeenth century notes that ‘you will find [the alchemist’s] primary transmutation to be of himself: a goldsmith becomes a goldmaker, an apothecary a chemical physician, a barber a Paracelsian, one who wastes his own patrimony turns into one who spends the gold and goods of others’.
Alchemy is one of those subjects that hums with credulity. It is about healing and about eternal life, and endless burning lamps, and it is all very tenebrous and I feel I’m slipping, slowly, viscously, into some kind of operetta. Alchemy seems to be a series of exclamation marks. Last night I foolishly googled something alchemical – Calculus alba calculus candida, ‘the white stone of revelation’ – and the screen lit up with invitations to buy cultic equipment, pulsating advertisements, descending circles of oddness.
In these hours before dawn my worrying swims around – money, new studio, the exhibition that I’m failing to make pots for – until it settles on the core. I do my breathing exercises until I realise, with no surprise at all, that the fury is with myself.
I remember a moment at fourteen, fifteen, when the desire for anything to make sense was so strong that making pots was irresistible. It was the feeling that something was being handed on in those long hours in the workshop, something that had come down from one potter to another across centuries, which had the feeling of being part of an elect.
What was being promised to me? A path, a vocation, a discipleship. I remember starting work in the pottery workshop. I’d been allowed to come after school each day to practise my throwing and this was a privilege not lightly given. At the end of the day Geoffrey gave me a broom. And after work for the next six years, I’d sweep up the dust. I’d scrape down the asbestos boards on which we dried pots.
The dust catches in my throat. The dust is beautiful, hazing the air. I sweep and sweep and by the time I come back from the dustbin with my empty pan, there is more to sweep up.
I think of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game for the first time since I read it in exhilarated adolescence. Disparate bits of the world slotted into place, making sense at last of purpose, study, disciplined knowledge. Everyone is allowed a foundation myth. It helps if it has some coherence, but it is not crucial. I’m not sure how forgiving I can be to my teenage self, setting out for the Hesse.
At this distance I start to wonder about Geoffrey too. I honour his memory, but who needs disciples? Who hands the broom over and tells a boy to sweep?
iv
Tschirnhaus has transmuted himself into a useful member of court, working steadily on his experiments, promising the king moneymaking ventures, hoping for payment, hoping for porcelain.
As there are still gaps in his knowledge he goes back on the road for research, to see if by looking again he can see what he has missed.
He goes to Saint-Cloud.
At Saint-Cloud I bought various pieces in the porcelain manufactory. Afterwards, however, they fell apart by themselves, because a lot of salt is used in the composition. They offer it at an expensive price, much higher than that of good porcelain, hence the sales are quite poor … The oven and machines for grinding were the best, although they were not perfect, as they should be. Otherwise, everything else was familiar to me. The blue colour that he uses is far too black. In sum, I think this manufactory will fail.
He returns to Versailles.
I was once again at Versailles, in order to examine the crystal chandeliers very carefully, which the first time had not been possible. I was also at the Trianon because of the lovely porcelain and at Marly to see the curious water machine.
He meets possible collaborators.
I spoke with someone called Schuller … Then he showed me some very beautiful pieces, which the Dutch had liked so much that they wanted to pay a lot of money in order to have him in Delft. I hope he will be of service to me in my porcelain plan.
And he goes to Delft.
I went to Delft and made myself carefully familiar with their so-called porcelain workshops. I especially learned how they glaze, how they stoke their kilns so that nothing clings to what is being fired, or also how nothing becomes impure during the firing. These things are quite unknown in our land.
But it is still not clear what he needs to make porcelain, or, indeed, who might help him on this journey.
Porcelain, says Tschirnhaus, is the bleeding bowl of Saxony. Augustus wants it, needs it so badly that more porcelain becomes a subject at court. He has many mistresses, but this particular maîtresse-en-titre holds sway against all others.
The king is in debt. He is at war again. A fire in his royal castle in Dresden, vast and grand but old-fashioned, has made him think of tearing down the whole building and starting again, creating a new palace worthy of a man who is both a Catholic king and a Protestant elector. He has in mind something akin to Versailles, and is keeping abreast of the plans for the new palaces in Berlin. Augustus feels thwarted by this city, full of burghers and churches, hemmed in by the river. He has courtiers and lovers and alchemists and flunkeys and soldiers. He needs gold, porcelain, victory. He hopes for gold, porcelain, victory.
It is the autumn of 1701. And there are rumours of a nineteen-year-old boy in Berlin, an apothecary’s apprentice who has found the philosopher’s stone, transmuted gold in front of reliable witnesses. And then has disappeared.
My story of Tschirnhaus and his porcelain is about to transmute too.
Chapter twenty-three
extraordinarily curious
i
I’m back in Dresden trying to piece together the next bit of the story of porcelain, the autumn of 1701 when the rumours of this boy swirled around the city.
It is late November and colder than I could imagine. They are putting up the Christmas decorations, and preparing the Christmas markets. The windows are barricaded, fat with stollen.
Dresden is an echo chamber. For Tschirnhaus, just back from his tour of the ceramic factories in the Netherlands and France, it is news of the greatest consequence. Not only does he work alongside alchemists in the Goldhaus for whom the discovery of the philosopher’s stone is Revelation itself, his great friend and interlocutor Leibniz is involved.
Leibniz, who knows everything about everything, knows the pope, Newton, Spinoza and the king of England, writes to Sophie, the wife of the prince elector of Hanover, and says that ‘the philosopher’s stone has suddenly appeared here in Berlin and then disappeared in the blink of an eye … I am extraordinarily curious to see what will develop because I hesitate to believe it, but don’t quite dare to neglect so many witnesses.’
The great man goes round to interview the apothecary Andreas Zorn at his shop in Molksmarkt 4 – Friedrich Zorn, Pharmacopoeus on the door – and reports being ‘im grossen und ganzen alles bestätigt’; more or less satisfied with his account of the matter.
Which for the philosopher of scepticism, is tantamount to issuing a papal bull on the matter.
‘Extraordinarily curious’ is a terrific phrase for this moment. It is three days after gold has been created through alchemy and the boy, Johann Friedrich Böttger, has disappeared and the soldiers of Frederick I, the king of Prussia, margrave and elector of Brandenburg, are searching for him. Herr Zorn has been interviewed by Friedrich and asked to explain (a) who this young arcanist is and (b) where he is, to which Zorn has to say that he has (a) no real idea anymore and (b) no idea at all.
How can you teach a country boy, and put food on the table, and treat him well, and have raised not just an arcanist but The Arcanist under your own roof?
Insultingly, King Frederick I asks to see the gold the boy has created – ‘a piece of gold, of the value of thirty ducats’ – and takes it for his specimen cabinet, so that Zorn is left without his gold. Soldiers are sent to find the boy but the boy has gone.
Leibniz interviews the witnesses to this momentous event and they all concur on what they saw.
&nb
sp; On the night of 1 October 1701, a Tuesday, Herr Zorn and his wife Frau Zorn, both people of good reputation, and two friends gathered, in an upper room of the house. The friends are both men of God, deacons.
There were some preliminaries. Böttger wanted to use pure lead for the transmutation. One of the deacons suspected this had been tampered with and suggested silver, producing fifteen silver coins that weighed three loths. Böttger agreed ‘smilingly’. There was some nonsense around who used the bellows – a deacon again – and Böttger made it clear that the fire must be very, very hot.
It took an hour to get to temperature. The boy asked a man of God to add his silver coins to the crucible. They clattered, made the right noise. The charcoal sparked and glowed under the crucible. The boy took a fold of red powder that a mendicant friar called Laskaris had given him, and kneaded a lump of wax around it and dropped it in. There was a flash of flame and then thick and unpleasant smoke. The crucible trembled. They waited. He picked up the crucible with tongs and poured it slowly, no colour, just liquid heat. There was silence. It cooled, gelid.
And there was gold blooming like pollen across the surface until it is gold itself. A piece of gold worth thirty ducats.
My apprentice, says Herr Zorn to Leibniz, created gold in front of our eyes: ‘in my presence he produced three loths of gold from two coins … it has withstood all tests’.
ii
Leibniz, who is good at questions and keen on proof, tests this story, prods it hard. Several further points of interest emerge.
Firstly, that Böttger has been experimenting for some time, much to the disapproval of his master. He was a bright lad from the country who he has taken on as a favour to an old friend. Sad circumstances, widowed mother, penury, and so on. This boy is remarkable. Very quick to learn, adept at grinding and preparing, but there were rules, as in any well-ordered household in Berlin. The Defecktor, the anteroom where powders and medicines were kept, was out of bounds, as was the laboratory with its stove and chimney where Zorn experimented, and this is where Zorn has found the boy unconscious from fumes. He once set the laboratory on fire.
The White Road Page 14