Ceramics (keramov, clay, earth potter) is the art of shaping clay and to fix the forms by cooking. The word refers to ceramic products composition and appearance different, based clay or plastic land. The art of shaping clay into ritual objects or domestic, needed to humans, appears among sedentary peoples primitive and it is maintained without interruption until the contemporary industrial era.
The pottery sherds witnesses are still confident of the presence of man and employment documents are accurate because progress in ceramics closely followed the progress of civilization and reflect.
1. Sustainability techniques
It should be noted the sustainability of technical ceramics: the three core operations for the production of a plastic clay remained roughly the same through the ages.
The washing and kneading of the earth are intended to provide uniformity necessary to oust the foreign matter, air bubbles. The simplest means are to trample the earth or beating her.
The finishing first became entirely by hand from a flange earth (colombin). The invention of the potter’s lively tour of a rotation, which dates back at least to the first dynasty of pharaohs of Egypt (without being able to fix the exact date), resulting in a circular objects to perfect. The operation more elaborate is a two-step: the ébauchage, who gives shape by the pressure of hands, and tournassage which refines and clarifies with a few tools. For parts or asymmetric angular form, we must deform after the shooting or return to the primitive method of colombin or proceed by moulding. The parties annexes bottlenecks such as creeks, and so on. Are performed separately and attached to believe in the slip (clay diluted). The casting is by finishing in the last years of the eighteenth century, this technique is to make the dough in the fluid in a plaster mold of hollow form of the piece to obtain. In contact with the plaster, the water is absorbed by capillary action, it happens then filtered and the dough is deposited on the wall absorbing all embracing sinuosities plaster. The manufacture of plates and dishes are being serially through mechanical calibration.
Firing ranges from simple drying in the sun, or on a wood fire outdoors in the heats in brick kilns or refractory land. The temperature of the cooking tends to rise, not exceeding 800 to 900 oC for the tender of pottery sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it may reach today for pulp hard over 1400 oC. The first fuel wood is still traditionally preferred by some manufacturers. However, the use of coal was introduced as early as the eighteenth century and heating coal became widespread in the nineteenth century. It will, in turn, gradually supplanted by heated gas, electricity, propane or fuel oil. The cooking time, once set in a very empirical, is now adjustable. The ovens modern arrangements varied that it is the next four intermittent derived from the old furnace globe, the four cells, or four continuous furnaces-tunnels. Through the latter, the trucks pass shaped parts for twenty-four to thirty-six hours or more.
2. Classification of ceramic products
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847), director of the manufacture of Sèvres, mineralogist and botanist, regarded as the father of palaeobotany and the real founder of modern ceramics, gave a classification of ceramic products. Admitted by all historians of ceramics, it recognizes two broad categories according to the nature of the cooked dough, as it is tender (porous) or hard (impervious).
Technicians contemporaries refer to a classification established by Mr. A. Jourdain for the Confederation of Industries ceramics France, it highlights the variety and complexity of current ceramic products.
There are therefore two general classifications: the ceramic art and ceramics industry utilities. Both types can also intersect, as in paving tiles that allow large mural compositions usable both on the outside and inside, depending on whether the medium is a material gélif or not. According to its composition and fabrication techniques and ceramics can present a very high resistance to heat, which makes it suitable for many uses.
3. Historical aspects
Potteries mates
The beginnings of a manufacturing ceramic fall towards the end of the Neolithic period. Its development s’accuse from the Bronze Age. It is confirmed by the many discoveries made in the ancient cities lacustrine (lake of Savoy, Switzerland, Italy and Germany), in cemeteries on the Rhine as tumuli in the south of England and the flush burials in the region of the Marne. These are mostly vases or religious funeral, large urns to receive the ashes of cremated bodies, vases offerings, but also of everyday objects such as provisions in jars, vases to drink containers for the transport of liquids .
The first stage is the bare clay (pottery mate), which before its tightening, may receive a background ribs obtained by pinching or rejection of the land still soft, application of pellets or clay ornaments, traced by draught or finger nail. According to the dimensions of fingerprints, it seems that this work was often done by women’s hands. Gradually appear engraved or incised decorations and paintings made using land délayées tones opposed. Research plastics are very early: religious statues and representations human or animal abound.
These processes have remained primitive in parts of the African continent. In America, in the pre-Columbian era, they gave rise to the creation of works of art very original.
Potteries glossy or not, or painted decoration in relief
With Crete and Mycenaean civilizations, a very remarkable pottery, geometric decoration, vegetable or animated, developed over the past three millennia BC on the shores of the Aegean Sea and in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. The announcement that production of Greece. The painting vases, successively to black figures in red figures, peaked in Attica, from the seventh to fourth century; on the meeting later in central Italy (Campania, Apulia). It must also comply with a small Greek civilizations terracotta statues of rare perfection. The Etruscan created around the eighth century BC, pottery decorated plastic, in her darkened mass, and to the third century, a thin red pottery decorated by printing stamps, known as pottery or sigillée Pottery étrurie red. Many examples of this pottery, as well as used punches were delivered by the excavations conducted in northern Italy where Arezzo happens to have been one of the main centres of production. Imported anywhere in the Roman world, of Etruria pottery were often imitated, especially in Gaul.
Potteries in covered, lacquer or enamel
It is the countries of the Middle East, which had a very ancient ceramic science, the discovery of coating derived from natural substances that can ensure watertight vase porous clay or apply to the architectural decoration. The first coatings, original alkaline, and even varnish type plombeux cooking to a relatively low temperature, date back several thousand years before the Christian era.
The lead covered transparent, tinted or not, that the Roman world was used, the technique became fundamental to the medieval glazed pottery of the West. In the sixteenth century, the french potter Bernard Palissy, managed to enhance and enrich the range considerably colored.
The use of an enamel tin opacifié by which the invention would spread to the Babylonians. It is particularly suited to receive a painted decoration with metal oxides set by cooking and, in addition, it can tolerate the addition of a chandelier based silver or copper. This last stannifère pottery glaze, with or without metallic lustre, which is the “Crockery” within the meaning of the word historic. The process passed by the Muslims in Spain since the eighth century gave the wonderful flowering of earthenware Hispano-Moorish (Malaga, Valencia-Manises), then those of earthenware Italian Renaissance called “majolica” (Florence with della Robbia, Faenza where is the international word “faïence”, Siena, Deruta, Gubbio, Casteldurante, Urbino …). From earthenware Hispano-Moorish and Italian majolica drift, in its infancy, as regards technology, the European earthenware seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Netherlands and France, who were the major creators (Delft, Nevers, Rouen, Moustiers and Marseille, Strasbourg …), that of Germany (Nuremberg, Hanau, Frankfurt, Bayreuth), Hungary (Tata near Budapest, Holitsch), Scandinavia and the Baltic region (Rörstrand, Marieberg, Copenhagen) or England (Liverpool, Bristol).
Ceramics hard (stoneware, porcelain and earthenware fines)
If, from the time of polished stone, men of the Yellow River Valley practiced the art of pottery decorated, the essential contribution of the Far East (China, Korea, Japan) for the ceramics is the Hard paste waterproof, cooked at high temperatures. The search for sandstone and opaque “proto-porcelain”, which date back to the first Chinese dynasties, more than a thousand years before our era, leading to the porcelain itself, white and translucent. The manufacture of imperial Jingdozhen, founded in 1369 in the vicinity of Nanking, soon took considerable development. The porcelain from China, known in Europe since the late Middle Ages and imported in abundance in the sixteenth century, had a decisive influence on the evolution of ceramic art. Their delicate matter arousing great admiration, it looked good time to imitate even before knowing or possessing the main elements used in its composition: kaolin (gaoling), fine white clay infusible and petuntse (baidunzi) variety of feldspar. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Italians won, from the earth of Vicenza, probably more or less kaolin, a ceramic hard, whitish and slightly translucent, designated as the “porcelain Medici.” In France, in the late seventeenth century, the earthenware of Rouen and St. Cloud found a recipe without kaolin china and plombeuse rayable covered by steel, called “artificial bone china.” The royal, transferred from Vincennes in Sevres in 1756, brought to perfection and gained a worldwide reputation. For most of the eighteenth century, European factories composed without kaolin porcelain tender type variable (Chantilly, and the Seals Mennecy, Tournai, Bow, Chelsea and Worcester, Capodimonte). But it is only with the discovery of deposits of kaolin in Europe we got a true “hard porcelain natural” similar to that of Chinese. The first major source of the valuable white clay was found in 1709 in the mountains of Saxony, in the Erzgebirge, which ensured a quick and overwhelming success at the factory established by the great elector of Saxony in the castle of Albrechtburg, Meissen. Everywhere else, very early in Austria (Vienna) and in Germany (Höchst, Nymphenburg, Fürstenberg, Berlin, Frankenthal, Ludwigsburg), Italy (Venice, Doccia), Spain (Buen Retiro), in the Scandinavian countries (Copenhagen) in the Netherlands (Weesp, The Hague) and Switzerland (Nyon, Zurich), the manufacture of a hard porcelain developed on the basis of local resources or kaolin possibilities. In France, a quarry in Saint-Yrieix in Limousin, put into operation in 1768, made Limoges a city of porcelain. They will provide for some time raw materials for the manufacture of Sevres itself, and then most factories in Paris and french number of institutions or foreigners.
The manufacture of a pot gréseuse hard sandstone or a lacquered salt, which began in Europe in the late Middle Ages, experienced a great flowering from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was developed first in the northern regions, Germany (Rhine), France (Beauvaisis), and in Holland and England.
In England, the scientist potter Josiah Wedgwood sought to create tough new ceramics, “jasper” precious, slightly translucent in light gauge very close to the biscuit porcelain and pottery opaque cream painted inaccurately called “fine earthenware “. This latest move was perhaps already by the use of the land clear, tight grain, Devonshire in the late Middle Ages and by some research done in France in the sixteenth century, especially in the mysterious glazed ceramic attributed to the ‘workshop Saint-Porchaire. The qualities of the practices will fine earthenware pottery par excellence of the nineteenth century and the important factory “Etruria, as Josiah Wedgwood was founded in 1768 near Burslem, his hometown, will soon open an era of industrial manufacturing modern. The Staffordshire, with the grouping around Stoke-on-Trent, remains today the great English ceramic center.
Contemporary Ceramics
During the nineteenth century, all processes ceramics were given in honor, but the utilitarian point of view, the efforts for rapid manufacturing and economic meet the multiple needs of modern societies became more important. Manufacture of Sèvres, under the leadership warned of Alexandre Brongniart (1800-1847), focusing on the mastery of technical difficulties experienced a certain level of affluence. The manufacture of Meissen also survived by trying to recapture the spirit of the models of the eighteenth century who had his glory. Around 1900, the royal Copenhagen tried to adapt to the principles of porcelain art nouveau, while the factory Hungarian Herend took place beside predecessors.

Attempts individual master potters of the late nineteenth century paved the way for the revival of a ceramic art committed to the creation of the work unique. By the attraction it holds for painters and sculptors, ceramic directly akin to contemporary art. Many potters, taking advantage of modern scientific discoveries, mainly focused on technology, to get their decorative effects. The exhibitions and competitions held annually, such as the Museo Internationale delle ceramiche in Faenza, can be used to monitor current developments in ceramic art and highlight its global nature.

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