Birthday Boy

It's 500 years since the death of Palissy. It seems he is the model for 'potter as renaissance man' who personifies the art-science nexus. Michael Keighery has set up a kind of fan site in his honour here.

Top: Palissy portrait fromFossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy Bottom: Plate fromVisualizations by Martin Kemp

The work of French potter Bernard Palissy was so admired that in 1563 he was named King's Inventor of Rustic Ceramics, and in 1567 he was summoned by Catherine de Medici — who dubbed him "Worker of the Earth and Inventor of Rustic Ware" — to decorate her palace. He even did the lecture circuit, but the road to all this adulation was anything but easy.

Born in southern France around 1510, Palissy worked as a painter and surveyor before he one day spotted "an earthen cup, turned and enameled with such beauty that I was immediately transfixed." He may have seen the cup around 1540, and he spent the next several years trying to make perfect ceramics of his own. According to his account, at one point, he was so poor and desperate that he fed his kiln with the wooden tables and floors of his own house. Art historian Martin Kemp has stated that Palissy's account may be "less than reliable," and the simple fact that Palissy's wife didn't kill him for torching all their furniture supports Kemp's contention. A thoroughly accurate historian or not, Palissy eventually found fame, not to mention the ability to support his family effectively, for a type of pottery that contained no dainty white cups. He coated his plates with life-sized replicas of amphibians, reptiles, shells, bugs and plants.

The plants and animals in Palissy's pots were so accurate because he cast them from life, and ingeniously avoided leaving any indications of harm to their soft tissues. Palissy wasn't the first to cast animals from life, but his work was particularly prized, and he jealously guarded his methods, glossing over the details in any written accounts. For over 40 years, he took the same basic approach to his work, making one pond scene teeming with life after another. Some have criticized his seeming lack of creativity, but to Palissy, a pond was more than a pond. It was the site of putrefaction and, from putrefying matter, the generation of new life, especially frogs. (Spontaneous generation was a widespread belief in his day.)

Palissy might have lacked a modern understanding of some aspects of biology, but in understanding the process of fossilization, he was ahead of his time. Maybe it was no coincidence that a man who cast models from life would figure out how fossils form, and while many of his contemporaries collected a few "figured stones" along with all the other weird objects they could find for their curiosity cabinets, Palissy's collection focused on fossils. His searches for ceramic materials acquainted him with many kinds of specimens, and he saw that they were formed in much the same way as pottery. Putrefaction and petrifaction were just different sides of the same coin to Palissy and, depending on the circumstances, an organism might rot into slime or leave its remains for posterity.

Just as all kinds of metals and other fusible materials take on the shape of the hollows or molds in which they are placed or thrown, and even when thrown into the earth take the shape of the place where the material is thrown or poured, so the materials of all kinds of rocks take the shape of the place where the material has congealed.

Palissy was among the first to argue for the organic origin of fossils.

And because there are also rocks filled with shells, even on the summits of high mountains, you must not think that these shells were formed, as some say, because Nature amuses itself with making something new. When I closely examined the shape of the rocks, I found that none of them can take the shape of a shell or other animal if the animal itself has not built its shape.

Hand-in-hand with insights about fossilization came a keen understanding of the earth's water cycle. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, naturalists had puzzled over why streams and rivers kept emptying into the ocean, which somehow never filled beyond its capacity to accept more water. Perhaps the world's ocean funneled water into springs via subterranean channels? No, Palissy argued. Springs were fed by rain, and often dried up during the dry season. Rivers and streams kept running because the water took time to infiltrate the waterways.

Looking at the behavior of both fossils and water, Palissy rejected the idea that the biblical flood could have deposited all fossils throughout the world, even on the highest mountaintops. But this stance put him in a shaky position because the fossil shells he found well above sea level resembled marine — not freshwater — species. (Palissy got out of the difficulty by suggesting the fossils had come from inland lakes that had somehow been salty.) He didn't escape every theological tight spot quite so easily; more than once, he was imprisoned for his Calvinist beliefs. Being an alchemist didn't help him avoid accusations of heresy, either. After two especially difficult years of imprisonment, he died in 1590.

Palissy made the best he could of his time in prison, writing admirable dialogues on earth science in 1563 and 1580, and taking pride in his status as a "man without Latin." The dialogues he wrote were debates between Theory and Practice. Practice won every single debate. Clearly even the worst situations didn't dampen his self-confidence.

. . . I have found grace before God, who has revealed to me secrets which until now have remained unknown to men, even the most learned, as may be ascertained from my writings . . .

His work as a naturalist, however, went largely unappreciated until the 18th century.

Lifted from http://www.strangescience.net/palissy.htm