EAN: 9780691182339

PORCELAIN - SUZANNE L MARCHAND GEBUNDEN

Porcelain was invented in medieval China--but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe
by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony's revered Meissen
factory could not keep porcelain's ingredients secret for long  however  and scores of Holy
Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories  soon to be rivaled by private
entrepreneurs  eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain's uses multiplied and its price
plummeted  it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament  instead taking on a vast
number of banal  yet even more culturally significant  roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries  it became essential to bourgeois dining  and also acquired new functions in
insulator tubes  shell casings  and teeth. Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs
and artisans  state bureaucrats and female consumers  chemists and peddlers  Porcelain traces
the remarkable story of white gold from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in
Germany's cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years  porcelain firms have come and
gone  but the industry itself  at least until very recently  has endured. After Augustus 
porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity  integral to provincial pride  artisanal
industrial production  and a familial sense of home.

Aktuelle Preise zur EAN 9780691182339

Produktinformationen zur 9780691182339