paste is, indeed, less hard than true porcelain (although
the terms hard and soft refer, in fact, to the higher or
lower firing temperatures). With its own qualities of
paste and pigment, soft paste continued to be in fashion
even after hard paste was successfully manufactured.
In Europe, hard-paste porcelain was first developed
at the German Meissen factory in the early years of the
eighteenth century. As in the development of maiolica
luster, the role of alchemists was a central one. Since the
Middle Ages the desire had been strong to find the "phi
losopher's stone": that ancient "medicine" for base met
als that would transmute them into gold, thereby
leading to the discovery of a medicine that would treat
the maladies of man. At the turn of the eighteenth cen
tury Johann Bottger (1682-1719), an apothecary's ap
prentice in Saxony, claimed that he could create gold by
transmutation. Frederick I, the first king of Prussia, ar
rested Bottger and ordered him to do just that. Augustus
the Strong, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, inter
ceded, bringing Bottger to Dresden so that he could con
tinue his experiments there. Although the philosopher's
stone eluded Bottger, his experiments with the physicist
and mathematician Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus
(1651-1708) led to the creation of Europe's first white
true porcelain around 1710 (fig. 17). Two craftsmen emi
grated from Meissen to Vienna and, with the help of
Dutchman Claudius Innocentius du Paquier (d. 1751),
succeeded in producing hard-paste porcelain at the Vi
enna factory by 1719.
The first Italian workshop to produce this elusive
material was established by Francesco and GiuseppeVezzi in Venice in 1720; it lasted only seven years. True
porcelain was then produced in France around mid-
century and in England slightly later. Following theVezzi workshop in Venice was the Cozzi factory, whose
owner, Geminiano Cozzi, made use of lessons learned
from other factories (he had been a partner in the Meis
sen-based Hewelcke factory during its brief tenure inVenice from 1758 to 1763), even luring craftsmen away
from rival enterprises. Elsewhere in Italy, the factory
established by Marquis Carlo Ginori in 1737 at Docciaoutside Florence has continued production, although
leaving Ginori hands in 1896, to the present day.
Another area of intense ceramic activity in Italy was
the region under Bourbon control. In the mid-fifteenth
century, southern Italy and Sicily were united into one
state—the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies—under the Si
cilian ruler Alfonso V of Aragon. In the late 1730s the in
fante Don Carlos of the House of Bourbon became king
of these "Two Sicilies" (i.e., southern Italy, essentially
Naples, and Sicily) as Charles VII, becoming king of
Spain as Charles III in 1759 and then leaving the crown
of Naples to his son, Ferdinand I. Bourbon control lasted
until the unification of Italy in the mid-nineteenth cen
tury, when sovereignty passed to the House of Savoy.
This brief account of Italian political complexities is
relevant to the production of Italian porcelain since
Charles and, later, Ferdinand were both interested in pro
moting cultural and economic development during their
reigns. In 1743 Charles established a royal factory for
soft-paste porcelain at Capodimonte outside Naples. He
brought this factory with him when he assumed the
Spanish crown, setting up the Buen Retiro factory out
side Madrid in 1760 and leaving his successor to revive
Neapolitan production in 1771, when the Real Fabbrica
Ferdinandea was founded.
Around the middle of the eighteenth century, En
glish potters from Staffordshire developed a fine earthen
ware with a cream-colored body and lead glaze that
offered a substitute for the more expensive porcelain.
Creamware, also known as Queen's ware after the En
glish queen Charlotte, created thin, durable, and light-
colored ceramics that became the specialty of Josiah
Wedgwood's factory in the second half of the century.
The popularity of this ware—which was called faience
fine in France and terraglia in Italy—drove out of the
market a number of tin-glazed earthenware factories and
even threatened porcelain ones. However, led by the
German Meissen and the French Sevres manufactories,
porcelain production continued to do well into the nine
teenth century, with a slightly less expensive version,
bone china, becoming popular in England and America.
After the eighteenth century, Italian porcelain was pro
duced in Naples, Doccia, and elsewhere.
W. B. Honey, former keeper of the Department of
Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, wrote inIntroduction 13