Rocky Road: Bernard Palissy

Bernard Palissy

Top: Palissy portrait from Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Bottom: Plate from Visualizations by Martin Kemp

The work of French potter Bernard Palissy was so admired that in 1563 he was named King's Inventor of Rustic Ceramics, and in 1567 he was summoned by Catherine de Medici to decorate her palace. The road to this adulation was anything but easy.

Born in southern France around 1510, Palissy was first a glass painter, then a surveyor, then a potter. He turned to making ceramics after he was transfixed by "an earthen cup, turned and enameled with such beauty that I was immediately transfixed." He spent several years trying to make perfect ceramics of his own. According to his account, at one point, he was so poor and desperate that he fed his kiln with the wooden tables and floors of his own house. Art historian Martin Kemp has stated that Palissy's account may be "less than reliable," and the simple fact that Palissy's wife didn't kill him for torching all their furniture supports Kemp's contention. At any rate, Palissy's perseverance paid off, and collectors eventually prized his pottery covered with life-sized replicas of amphibians, reptiles, bugs and plants.

The plants and animals were cast from life, and maybe it was no coincidence that a man who cast models from life would understand the process of fossilization. Besides an exquisitely talented potter, he was something else, too: a forefather of modern paleontology. While savants puzzled over the nature and origin of fossils, Palissy's work gave him a unique perspective. His searches for ceramic materials acquainted him with many kinds of fossils, and he saw that they were formed in much the same way as pottery.

Just as all kinds of metals and other fusible materials take on the shape of the hollows or molds in which they are placed or thrown, and even when thrown into the earth take the shape of the place where the material is thrown or poured, so the materials of all kinds of rocks take the shape of the place where the material has congealed.

Palissy was among the first to argue for the organic origin of fossils.

And because there are also rocks filled with shells, even on the summits of high mountains, you must not think that these shells were formed, as some say, because Nature amuses itself with making something new. When I closely examined the shape of the rocks, I found that none of them can take the shape of a shell or other animal if the animal itself has not built its shape.

Palissy rejected the idea that the biblical flood could have deposited all fossils throughout the world, even on the highest mountaintops. But this stance put him in a shaky position because the fossil shells he found well above sea level resembled marine — not freshwater — species. (Palissy got out of the difficulty by suggesting the fossils had come from inland lakes that had somehow been salty.) He didn't escape every theological tight spot quite so easily; more than once, he was imprisoned for his Calvinist beliefs. Being an alchemist didn't help him avoid accusations of heresy, either. After two especially difficult years of imprisonment, he died in 1590.

Palissy made the best he could of his time in prison, writing admirable dialogues on earth science in 1563 and 1580, and taking pride in his status as a "man without Latin." Even the worst situations didn't dampen his self-confidence.

. . . I have found grace before God, who has revealed to me secrets which until now have remained unknown to men, even the most learned, as may be ascertained from my writings . . .

His work as a naturalist, however, went largely unappreciated until the 18th century.

For more information:
Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Visualizations by Martin Kemp
Seen|Unseen by Martin Kemp
The Body of the Artisan by Pamela H. Smith
Merchants and Marvels edited by Smith and Findlen
Promethean Ambitions by William R. Newman
The Meaning of Fossils by Martin J.S. Rudwick
The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine by Horst Bredekamp