Books & artsBook reviewCraft and commerceShifting platesPorcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe.By Suzanne Marchand.It sounds like a fairy-tale.A visionary alchemist, arrested by a tyrannical ruler, is put to work turning scraps into riches.Yet for a few years in the early 18th century Johann Friedrich Bottger was a genuine Rumpelstiltskin.Seized by Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, after he crossed Prussia’s frontier, Bottger was imprisoned and ordered to conjure up treasure―and, in a sense, he did.He didn’t make gold, but Bottger was the first European to create something almost as precious: porcelain.As Suzanne Marchand shows in her meticulous new book,porcelain has been integral to German life since its reinvention in Saxony in 1708 (the Chinese perfected the craft centuries earlier).It was initially a plaything for princes, as Bottger’s incarceration suggests;Augustus and his rivals sponsored state-run factories for what one called the “splendour and prestige” of their realms.From that beginning, Ms Marchand traces porcelain’s role in German history,examining its uses from Romantic busts of Goethe to Nazi egg cups.
