This project examines how early modern European practitioners used minerals to color glass, ceramics, and porcelain on three levels. Firstly, I trace the pathways of these minerals from European mines to merchants, glass workshops, and porcelain manufactories. Secondly, their processing and purification in the laboratories of the latter two by experts and scientists is explored. Thirdly, I look at how minerals were used in coloring and painting glass, ceramics, and porcelain by the skilled craftsmen and follow their exploratory experiments with mineral pigments.
Saxony, and other German states feature in the project, which centers on eighteenth-century Prussia. In the eighteenth century the Prussian state sponsored systematic searches for cobalt ore, which had long been important among the materials used to color glass, ceramics and porcelain. They searched in various Prussian mining regions and promoted experiments conducted with cobalt ore from Prussian sources. Another material important to glass making and the coloring of ceramics and porcelain was lead oxide, which was poisonous. While cobalt was an environmentally unproblematic material, lead oxide was not. Technical experts and men of science, supported by the Prussian state, made efforts to find substitutes for the poisonous substance. Finally I look at the minerals used for painting on porcelain in the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin (KPM), Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory, founded in 1763. I will pay particular attention to the variety of minerals used as pigments and ingredients in fluxes and glazes as well as the laboratory workers’ experiments to improve the color of these pigments.