The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  For a lay audience, the burning mirrors are spectacle with the power of the sun brought into close and exhilarating contact, the surfaces of the mirrors ‘so accurately formed and so well polished that a piece of lead or tin placed in the focus began immediately to melt, stone and slate became instantly red hot, pumice stone melted, and copper and silver melt in five or six minutes … wet wood kindled in an instant, water in small vessels boiled’.

  There is terror too in this sublimity. You see the way that materials change in front of you, impossible to experience if the substances are shrouded in fire inside a furnace.

  So Tschirnhaus, young and engaged, works away at the issues that vex his contemporaries, writing on catacaustic curves, ‘the envelope of light rays emitted from a point source after reflection from a given curve’. And, of course, he starts to make his own lenses. He is starting to focus.

  iii

  And I have to focus too.

  I’m writing this in the very early morning. I can’t sleep at the moment, so I’m sitting at the kitchen table at five with a blackbird noisily announcing itself in the garden. It is August and there are chestnut trees in the road outside the house in full pomp, so that the light that comes in is dappled. The glass in the windows could be a little cleaner. There is a water jug on the table, and I’m watching the light play on the wall opposite me, and there are shudders like ripples in a stream, and a rainbow and great Gerhard Richter-like smudges across the top that move across an installation I made last year for Sue, seven stacked dishes inside a white lacquered cabinet. The top dish is gilded on the inside so that there is a reflected halo above it.

  I don’t know what is going on with light at all.

  I want to draw lines across the kitchen, sweeping parabolas across furniture and floors, mark the changes minute by minute by minute.

  I do know that light is demonstrably an area for the ‘investigation of difficult things by the Method of analysis’, as Newton memorably put the challenge of scientific experimentation. This is simultaneously an arena of poetic and metaphorical possibility. Spinoza, after all, has compared human nature ‘with a regular or flat mirror that reflects all the rays in the universe without distorting them’. Newton has wondered whether colours and the musical octave might be analogous. Do colours have harmonies?

  If so what is the sound of white?

  My only certainty, buoyed by sleeplessness, is that light is part of this journey towards porcelain. Keats wrote in the margin of his copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost of ‘A sort of Delphic Abstraction a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist.’ By which he means, I think, I hope, that he too sees the beauty and is thoroughly confused.

  I am caught up in my weather system, the turbulence of optics and mirrors and philosophers.

  Chapter nineteen

  the first mode of formation

  i

  To grind lenses you need to understand optics. To make lenses you need to understand glass and glass seems to be the pathway to porcelain.

  To make a lens of scale, you need technical brilliance in casting glass and in mathematical ambition in working out the equations for the refraction. But it also means you need to understand how to communicate what you need to others. This is far from the experimental grinding of your own lenses at your own bench in your own study, turning it in your hand against the stone as the silica dust rises to you as you breathe, and settles.

  The acknowledged expert on glass was Johann Kunckel. He had translated and added to the great Italian textbook on the art of glassmaking, Ars vitraria experimentalis oder Vollkommene Glasmacher-Kunst, with its beautiful engravings of glassmakers in their workshops. Kunckel had held the position of court alchemist in Bohemia and Dresden, as well as Berlin, and taught at the university in Wittenberg. Rather too many positions. He was an exemplar of how hard it was to be clever and still be in need of a patron.

  His career had been spectacular. When he was thirty, Kunckel had been entrusted with the keys to the alchemical library of the elector of Saxony in Dresden and told to find the secret of making gold. Instead, he found a way of making red glass with a new solution where metallic gold particles are dispersed so that the light turns red. On page 195 of his great book he coughs, and you see his mixture of pride and anxiety:

  Here I wish to indicate a better way, and to briefly teach [the making] of red or ruby glass, if it were not regarded as such a peculiar rarity by my gracious elector and master. Whoever does not believe that I can do it may come and see it. It’s true: for now it is too rare to communicate.

  Red glass is spectacular. A vessel of red light! ‘It cannot be more beautiful’, wrote Kunckel.

  His first masterwork was a red chalice made for the elector of Cologne; it’s over an inch thick, ‘the stem of a very fat knot’, and twenty-four pounds in weight. This glass could be blown so thickly that it can be cut and faceted like an enormous ruby. There was a rumour that blood was involved in the manufacture. Imagine the archbishop at early morning Mass holding up the chalice; what is being transubstantiated in this light?

  Augustus the Strong had ruby glass in his Schatzkammer, his treasury in Dresden, mounted in gold at foot and rim to hold the vessels clear of the dust and ground. They were placed near the ivories and enamels and Chinese porcelains.

  Kunckel was now in Berlin. He was sixty, a difficult age to be so shadowed by fame and by bad luck. His glassworks had burned down and he was out of favour with Berlin and was meant to be paying back his new patron his vast salary received on the promise of glass and gold. Glass is esoteric. Kunckel was working away at it from a small island near Potsdam; a place to keep secrets.

  Tschirnhaus learns a great deal from Kunckel. He sees ways of melting and refining and transmuting, sees a blowpipe that glassmakers use to produce a ‘very fine and concentrated flame’. He understands that ‘many possibilities are concealed in this art’. He sees furnaces that are well constructed, materials that are properly graded, workmen who know what they are doing, move through a congested workshop with crucibles of molten glass. He sees process and result, testing and recording, idea and action, conducted in a complex, noisy workshop not in private.

  And he also notes that the lives of experimental philosophers, men attached to the courts of difficult, irascible rulers, are never secure in their positions, that making ruby glass – or any object of desire – is never enough.

  So as Tschirnhaus watches men at work, their fluency in movement, he makes notes. And he writes ‘No artisan is unaware why he carries out a task, and it is no secret to him that certain materials and efforts are necessary to him even if he does not know that philosophers call these things causality.’ Tschirnhaus comes to understand haptic knowledge, the ways in which it is possible to know something complex without having the need, or the means, to articulate it in language, ‘a person can perform intellectual and other operations without knowing how they actually work’.

  Tschirnhaus frequently gives the example of the way in which we use our hands without any knowledge of their physiological structure. Thus we can admire the manual ability and skill of a watchmaker who does not know anything at all about the way in which his hands function, but is still creating an object of true complexity.

  Where others might not pause, Tschirnhaus pauses. Where others might patronise those who make something, Tschirnhaus shows respect.

  He has made the extraordinary step of watching how objects are made and he has learnt from this. And now all he needs is money for a tremendous idea that is coming into focus, the idea of creating porcelain.

  He is not poor. He is married and his wife Elisabeth Eleonore von Last is redoubtable. His father has died and he has inherited the family woods and fields: she has said that she will manage the estate for him. He could return to a life of dilettante experimentation in Kieslingswalde – shoot hares, write letters, note possibilities for the composition of porcelain, check astronomical positions with his telescopes and se
nd them to journals – but this would mean that his Idea was rehearsed on walks in damp Silesian fields.

  He turns back to Paris.

  He has been writing Medicina mentis sive artis inveniendi praecepta generali, Medicine for the Mind, or General Precepts for the Art of Invention. It is a passionate and lucid book on the art of perfecting ‘our understanding as best we can’, and he hopes that a dedication to Colbert might result in something. But his mentor dies just as he arrives. Tschirnhaus is named the first German member of the French Royal Academy of Science, a distinction cited in the Mercure galant, but there is no stipend forthcoming, no folding into a position in the intellectual life of Paris. Tschirnhaus dedicates his book to the king anyway.

  There is a plump Pegasus in flight across the title page, a baroque mane and an extravagant tail streaming behind. I feel this is a kind of self-portrait but the thirty-seven-year-old Tschirnhaus is barely off the ground.

  ii

  If you are interested in optics or mineralogy or funding a dictionary of philosophy, you are lucky to get two minutes of the attention of a margrave who lives for killing stags or boar in inventive ways. You are in some endless corridor of some windy schloss, and there is the clatter of men, scratching themselves, impatient for the off with their noise and weapons and rolling obscenities, and you are trying to tell His Serene Highness that you need money – a great deal of money – for a wind-furnace to test the melting point of iron ore.

  There is a different way.

  I settle down with his book Medicina mentis. Tschirnhaus thinks that it is possible to analyse the products of the arts in a philosophical manner, that boats, bridges and buildings should be considered as arts of invention. These objects can train what he calls the ‘active imagination’ because they exhibit ‘all the possibilities to the imagination’. In fact, I realise, he takes on the world as possibility – as you walk down the street there is nothing in the material world that you encounter that cannot be brought into this space of reflection. And at each point of this reflection, as you pause and look with dedication at this lamp post, that gateway, you recreate the manner of its creation, move through the series of actions that caused it to come into being.

  Above all he is interested, he writes, in ‘how to obtain what should be observed’, in the ‘first mode of formation’ of things. How something comes into being is critical, a kind of poesis.

  When I read this my heart swells. This is the rubric of my journey to my white hills, this tracing of the first formation of porcelain from white earth into something other.

  Tschirnhaus is describing with a passionate lucidity the value of looking and thinking about how an object as an idea comes into being.

  And then I find that he likes bridges, which is a mark of true sophistication in my eyes. The first piece of writing about art that truly mattered to me as a maker of things – structures – was an essay by the art historian Michael Baxandall, in which he argued that the Firth of Forth Bridge was an artwork. And Primo Levi, my hero, wrote in The Wrench of ‘the advantage of being able to test yourself, not depending on others in the test, reflecting yourself in your work. On the pleasure of seeing your creature grow, beam after beam, bolt after bolt, necessary, symmetrical, suited to its purpose.’

  By which Primo Levi, a chemist who spent his working life analysing the chemical composition of paint as well as being a writer, means that method is interesting. Be very careful when you describe how something is made, how it comes into shape, as process is not to be skated over. The manner of what we make defines us.

  And so Tschirnhaus starts to work. He has used his burning lenses to see what melts and when it melts and what doesn’t change under this intense heat.

  Things, substances, matter; the corporeal world is under siege.

  Spinoza holds ideas and decisions only valid if they are sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity. Newton’s prescription is to enquire diligently into the properties of things and Leibniz writes in a tremendous letter to Tschirnhaus, that ‘no one should fear that the contemplation of characters will lead us away from things themselves: on the contrary it leads us into the interior of things’. He talks of rei naturam intimam, the inner nature of the thing. Interiority has become an idea.

  And for Tschirnhaus, philosopher and mathematician and observer of how the world changes, porcelain is an idea to be scrutinised. It is compelling as it is a seemingly intractable white material through which light can pass: it brings together two of the principal concerns of his fellow philosophers, China and light, into one great query.

  And then, because he looks to matters of first principle, he analyses with pragmatism where to go with his idea, who will help him to make it fly, where he will find the resources he needs.

  His wife Elisabeth is from a family attached to the court in Saxony. And Saxony is rich in geology, raw materials. And thirdly the Saxon court at Dresden has a group of men who are known to be experimenting with refining and smelting, the technologies of fire.

  And so Tschirnhaus, and his idea of porcelain, go across Europe to Dresden where Prince Augustus, the young visitor to the Trianon de Porcelaine, is now King Augustus, the elector of Saxony.

  And if Tschirnhaus goes to Dresden, so do I.

  Chapter twenty

  gifts and promises and titles

  i

  Dresden is Florence on the Elbe, the greatest baroque city in Europe, a Schatzkammer, a treasure house. It is my Second Porcelain City.

  There have been the worst rains for a decade. The television shows rolling news of the floodwaters, dizzying footage from helicopters of a brown land flattened into water. As I walk across the Augustus Bridge from the station, the river is the colour of pewter. It has burst its banks. Lamp posts and the roofs of the bus shelters on the embankment are just visible in the turbulent water. There are sandbags ready. And it’s June.

  If you go straight on, if you go left, if you go right, you meet palaces and churches and picture galleries, the opera house, academies, pleasure gardens, treasuries. The skyline is domes and spires and towers, urns and statues. It is gold. It is movement, piled on top of movement, extra, surplus, refulgent, more.

  Of course it is.

  This is the city of Augustus II, by the grace of God, king of Poland, imperial vicar, grand duke of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Prussia, Masovia, Samogitia, Livia, Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia, Smolensk, Severia, and Chernihiv, and hereditary duke of and prince elector of Saxony &c., &c.

  I have to learn my way round this city. Tschirnhaus has thrown his lot in with Augustus, so I have to learn my way around Augustus, around the &c., &c.

  ii

  I do know where I should go first.

  Over the bridge I turn right, walk past the opera house, under a ridiculous archway held up by cherubs into the Zwinger, the Rococo set of pavilions around a pleasure garden that King Augustus commissioned in 1711, all runs and rills. In the far right-hand corner is the Mathematisch Physikalischer Salon, the Royal Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments. These rooms are the first public science museum in Europe, the American curator tells me with animation, his hands unfolding and folding in complex wave patterns. It was open if you were properly dressed and paid a fee. Downstairs is a long room in which the world is assessed and measured and recorded, an odometer made for an elector’s travels across his kingdom, instruments measuring distances in mines, ceremonial scales, a clock that describes the heavens, the movement of the planets, a golden celestial globe moving minute by minute; Mercury takes thirty-two years to complete its circuit.

  Engraving of Dresden, 1721

  And up the stairs is one of Tschirnhaus’s burning mirrors.

  I stand in front of it. It is an arc four feet across of copper held in a perfectly constructed wooden frame that tilts and rotates to catch the Saxon sun. There are very small, deep striations and pockmarks on the surface of the copper mirror where fragments of something have exploded during an experiment.

&nbs
p; As I move towards it, my reflection changes and distorts. Of course it does. But I hadn’t expected that sound changes too. My voice becomes clearer and louder and deeper the nearer I get, as I say to the curator, it is beautiful.

  Tschirnhaus’s burning lens, made in 1686, photograph from 1926

  And there are lenses in these galleries. I was not prepared for how strange they are. They are a world in themselves, one in which you exist, transformed, reflected and distorted. There are only a few things – a dew drop on a leaf, the meniscus on a glass of water – where you glimpse what a parabola is.

  I look at them, into them, through them, and I think of the moment that Lewis Carroll describes in Through the Looking-Glass when the world relaxes and materials become easy: ‘Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through … And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.’

  I’m a little apprehensive about Dresden for myself and for Tschirnhaus. All kinds of adventures happen through the looking glass.

  iii

  This is Augustus’ city. On 27 April 1694, after the unexpected death of his older brother, Augustus has become elector of Saxony.

  He has spent much of the previous years on his travels, visiting courts, spending money. This has prepared him. He knows about splendour, clothes, women, ambition. Three years later he has also become King Augustus II of Poland. He has achieved this with the simplest of gestures – by leaving his Protestantism at the frontier and becoming Catholic – thus allowing him to spend huge quantities of money and be elected to the Polish throne. This has gone down very poorly in Saxony, which is Lutheran, and even worse with his wife who believes in her clean-cut prayers.