Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissy's Occupation between Maker and Nature

摘要

The sixteenth-century natural historian and ceramicist Bernard Pal-issy took life into his own hands, channeling nature into clay. Best known today for his rustic-style ceramic plates (rustiques figulines), he has been celebrated as a geological theorizer, author, and religious martyr. Above all else, however, Palissy (1510-1590) was a craftsman—a polymath potter of forms, words, and natural knowledge. His labors and his legacy as an artisan of novel ceramic basins—simultaneously artworks, natural formations, and teaching tools—helped usher in a new material culture of knowledge production (Fig. 1). Palissy's career reveals a Renaissance maker embodying intellectual curiosity, artisanal skill, and spiritual fervor. From his first to his last experiments in life and clay, he seems to have worked with simultaneous passions of hand and mind. Over a life that spanned the sixteenth century, Palissy had a productive—and tumultuous—career as a ceramicist, geologist, and public lecturer, rising from humble origins to wealth and fame. Born around 1510 into an artisanal family in southwestern France, he first trained as a draughtsman and glass-painter, receiving a few years of vernacular education. In his teens and twenties, he worked as an itinerant painter, land-surveyor, and mapmaker, pursuing natural history and geology in the field. By about 1540, he settled down near Bordeaux, where he began to experiment with ceramic practice. Palissy's labors brought forth grottoes and fountains as well as his popular rustic basins, the sculpted ponds encrusted with animals and gilded by glazes that are the subject of this essay (Fig. 2).