Revealing the Secret of Bernard Palissy’s Rusticware with Augmented RealityRevealing the Secret of Bernard Palissy’s Rusticware with Augmented Reality
Nature in art, art in nature
This extraordinary basin is an example of the ‘glazed earthenware’ art by the great Bernard Palissy, a French Renaissance artist active in the mid-16th century. The piece showcases the natural world, depicting aquatic environments found in the Atlantic Ocean and the marshes of Saintonge, in southwestern France. Snakes, lizards, turtles, frogs, crabs, crayfish and seashells are rendered with vivid realism thanks to a technique known as life-casting, in which the artist makes a mould (generally in plaster) from a real-life specimen, which is then used to reproduce that specimen in terracotta.
Inventing ‘rusticware’
The meticulously reproduced details, the finesse and the wide range of coloured glazes seem to breathe life into Palissy’s works. Palissy called his pieces ‘rusticware’, or ‘rustiques figulines’ in French, and styled himself the ‘Creator of Rusticware for the King’. The French name that he chose for his art comes from the Latin figulus, meaning ‘potter’, and rusticus, derived from rus, meaning ‘countryside’ – his work is pottery that replicates nature. This taste for naturalism, which flourished during the European Renaissance, can also be found in other artistic creations. Today, only seven pieces of Palissy’s earthenware are held in public collections.
Bernard Palissy: a Renaissance artist and artisan
Bernard Palissy, probably born in Agen (southwestern France) around 1510 and died in Paris in 1590, was a multifaceted artist and writer. As a master of ‘earthenware art’, he came to be in the employ of the French court and aristocracy. He first worked in Saintes for the constable Anne de Montmorency (1493–1567), then in Paris, where he devoted himself to creating the grotto in the Tuileries Garden, commissioned by Queen Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589). Thousands of plaster mould and terracotta fragments were unearthed during excavations at the site of Palissy’s workshop, conducted in 1980s.
