(upbeat music)
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] We're in the galleries
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
looking at an object that dates to the time
of the Renaissance in France.
And we're looking at a platter
that you wouldn't wanna eat off of.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] This is a platter
by a follower of Bernard Palissy,
and it is this incredible dish that is showing
us essentially a microcosm of a pond.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] By microcosm
we're talking about an environment,
a world, but in miniature.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] We see lizards, you see a frog,
a crawfish or a lobster, snakes, shells.
And we see all these different plants
that you would find at a pond.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] As we look at
these living forms, they look incredibly lifelike
and that's because he cast these from life.
We know that Renaissance thinkers
were interested in studying nature
and trying to understand the laws of nature.
This is so true of the 16th century,
a period that we often refer to
as the scientific revolution.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] Bernard Palissy, who is the inventor
of this type of ceramic, it's what he called rustic pottery.
He was truly a Renaissance man.
He dabbled in geology, he was a botanist.
He was someone who was very interested in collecting.
He had a cabinet of curiosities.
He was also a painter, he did stained glass.
And here we have ceramics.
Supposedly how he invented this particular type
of rustic pottery was that he initially
wanted to master making refined pottery.
He was not able to master it and through much trial
and error developed this specialized technique.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] And so what he did
was he would collect specimens
and that includes the shells
as well as the living organisms.
And you would create a cast from them from plaster.
He would stun the animals just before creating
the cast by immersing the animals
in urine or vinegar and then he would create
a plaster cast around them.
First coating them in oil, I guess,
so they could be removed from the cast.
He would pose them carefully in the plaster
to make sure that the movement
of the animal imitated their movement in life.
Not only does the snake really look like a snake
in terms of its scales, but also its movement.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] And Palissy was especially interested
in the pond environment.
In the Renaissance people became fascinated
by the idea of the pond as a space
or a place of life, but also putrefaction.
So you have this concept of life and dying and death,
and he would collect these specimens
using different nets that he collected.
And sometimes at great risk,
some of these snakes are vipers
and some of the frogs and things were venomous.
He would collect them live,
bring them back to his workshop.
The process of making these, he himself as like a scientist,
he's a collector of these specimens.
The ceramic itself is like a microcosm of the pond
that is encapsulating this environment
like a cabinet of curiosity,
but the very process that he uses
to create the forms that we're seeing
are in and of themselves as part of
this scientific revolution.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] This is the time of Galileo.
This is the time of Kepler and Copernicus soon after.
We're at this time of incredible curiosity
about the natural world and how it works.
And Palissy is theorizing about that.
He's not just a ceramicist, he's thinking
about how does life emerge from the pond?
How does life transform into a fossil?
These are things that early scientists
were working very hard to understand.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] In cabinets of curiosity
from the Renaissance, you have a lot of naturalia,
or these natural specimens collected
from different parts of the world and put on display.
So that collecting impulse, that scientific impulse,
they're all involved here in the making
of this particular dish.
Even the glazes he uses are adding
to this interesting dynamic,
because as a hallmark of Renaissance art,
we have this incredible naturalism,
these animals that have been cast,
but then we also have the glazes
that are adding to that naturalism.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] And what we have here
is this shoreline with an island in the center of the water
and in the center of that island, this writhing snake.
The plate itself feels encrusted.
It's so easy to forget that we're looking at pottery.
It feels like fossilized animals.
It feels like stone.
It looks like water.
You can see he's used a very fine tool
to create what looked like waves
in the water, around the stone.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] And because these things
were cast from life, we can see the scales on the snake
and we can see all these different textures.
But then he's also given us in the background,
these really animated textures as well.
There's a looser glazing on the background
of the plate to give the impression
of water or a watery environment.
So there is a sense of the transforming
of the natural environment happening
before our eyes of forms that are moving and shifting.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] Palissy himself
is a really fascinating artist of the time,
not only did he become incredibly famous
for this technique, he had many followers
of which this artist is one,
but he himself was a Protestant
living in Catholic France.
But because he was so exceptional
as this Renaissance man who was involved
in so many things, he was protected by his patrons.
And in fact, he had two very well known female patrons.
One of whom was Catherine de'Medici.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] And in fact,
he made a grotto for Catherine de'Medici
and the Tuileries in Paris.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] Partially he got
that commission because of his fame surrounding
his interest in natural science,
natural history, in ceramics,
and other types of art making.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] So we have to think about this idea
in the Renaissance of artists
who are also thinking about themselves as scientists.
Think about the great artists of the Renaissance,
of Michelangelo, of Leonardo, of these artists
studying human anatomy, dissecting human bodies,
dissecting animals, learning about the world
through visual observation.
But also through understanding
that comes through creating something,
that comes through making.
- [Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank] This is not only
a microcosm of a pond, but we could even argue
that in some ways this platter functions as a microcosm
of Renaissance artists and Renaissance art.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] And yet here we are not in Italy,
but in France.
And we're looking not at a painting or a sculpture,
but at a piece of earthenware.
(upbeat music)