NGV porcelain sculpture exhibition reveals 18th-century miniature marvels

The popularity of 18th-century miniature porcelain sculpture is explored in an exhibition at the NGV.

Roman Charity (c. 1763) by Joseph Willems; Goffredo at the tomb of Dudone (c. 1745-1750) by Gricci.

Ceramic sculpture has a long history, even if recently a frequently inglorious one. Since the 1970s it seems to have been largely the preserve of would-be ceramicists who have never learned to throw a pot. In the past decade the contemporary art industry has latched on to ceramics as a new hunting ground, where a degree of technical sophistication underwrites work that is mostly vacuous but sells for very high prices.

This was an issue that arose in April this year at the international ceramics symposium Clay Gulgong in the Hunter Valley near Mudgee, at which I also presented a paper. It was clear there was a vast chasm separating real practitioners who made beautiful but modest work with skill, honesty and care, from a new class of international art starlets conjured out of nothingness by the power of the art market.

The same sort of disconnection exists in other arts, such as painting, but it is more dramatic in ceramics because the field has kept itself apart from the speculative economy that has come to dominate most other forms of artistic expression. Potters have remained a kind of counterculture, and the economics of the craft mean that few will grow wealthy.

But the market is trying to change all that, with an insidious campaign to present ceramics as a fossilised practice in need of rescuing; if only it would throw off its quaint alternative habits and join the bright new world of contemporary art, ceramics could become so much more fashionable. In reality, while there is indeed room for improvement, it lies in a different direction: for ceramics is an art form, as I argued in Gulgong, in which sublime work arises from the most humble devotion to practice.

But returning to ceramic sculpture, the greatest exponents of this form in modern Europe were the Della Robbia family in Renaissance Florence, who executed both tombs and sculptural reliefs, such as the Resurrection for the Sacristy door at the Duomo, in white glazed earthenware and delightful coloured roundels of saints in the Pazzi Chapel at the Basilica of Santa Croce and elsewhere.

Painted terracotta sculpture was also used in the Renaissance for hyperrealist portraits such as the well-known bust of Niccolo da Uzzano by Donatello (1430s), today in the Bargello in Florence. Although white plaster casts of this head are common in art schools, the original is in a deliberately striking polychromatic finish.

This same realist idiom could be used, later in the century, to bring religious figures vividly to life, as we see in Benedetto da Maiano’s painted terracotta bust of John the Baptist (c. 1480) in the National Gallery in Washington. The potential of terracotta for realism was dramatically exploited by Niccolo dell’Arca in the grief-stricken female figures he produced for Lamentation Over the Dead Christ in Bologna. The same subject was repeated several times in a realistic rather than overtly emotive vein by his contemporary Guido Mazzoni (notably at Sant’Anna dei Lombardi in Naples).

In the baroque period, terracotta was mostly used to produce models for works to be executed in marble or bronze, but in the 18th century its potential for realism was rediscovered and natural terracotta was used for portraiture by the great sculptors Houdon and Pajou, although both employed marble as well. Pajou, incidentally, carved a marble bust of Captain Cook for a monument at the Chateau de Mereville, of which we have a studio copy at the National Museum of Australia.

It was also in the 18th century that the secret of producing high-fired, fully vitrified porcelain was finally discovered in Europe, after a couple of centuries of admiring Chinese porcelain and trying to imitate it with, for example, Dutch Delft ware, which is really a kind of faience, or English stoneware — neither of which was as hard, fine or translucent as the Chinese wares.

It is the enormous prestige of porcelain that explains the popularity of miniature porcelain sculpture in the 18th century, the subject of an exhibition at the NGV which may require some effort of historical imagination to appreciate, especially for those who have grown up associating porcelain sculpture with kitsch figurines adorning the parlours of maiden aunts.

There were also precedents for miniature sculpture, as one of the display cabinets in the exhibition reminds us. Desktop-size bronzes were produced in the 16th and 17th centuries — here we have a small Flagellation in silver by Algardi — while ivory miniatures had been common in Byzantine and gothic art and remained popular in the baroque period, as we see in a relief of Venus and Adonis. The Chinese too had produced miniature porcelain sculptures, such as the one shown here of the goddess Guanyin.

Because the secret of porcelain was first discovered in Saxony, Meissen became a famous centre of production of tableware and ornamental figurines, and has remained synonymous with the art form to this day, although many notable pieces in the exhibition come from elsewhere, including Derby in England.

The process by which the figurines are produced is delicate. First the form must be modelled in clay, and then a plaster mould is made; in complicated figures the individual parts are separately modelled and separate moulds are produced. Clay is poured into the moulds, and each piece needs to be hand-finished and polished and joined to the others. Finally the whole is handpainted, glazed and fired.

So each of the elaborate pieces in the exhibition is made in a way that combines an artisanal form of serial production with painstaking craftsmanship. Our appreciation of any kind of art is enhanced by an understanding of the way in which it was made, and this is probably especially true of any form that is unfamiliar or for which we may not feel instinctive sympathy: once we realise the skill and care that have entered into the making of each of these pieces, we are inclined to take them more seriously.

Or perhaps seriously is not quite the right word, for in style the porcelain figurines belong to the period and sensibility now called rococo. In France this was a deliberately frivolous style that arose in the wake of the unrelenting grandeur of the Sun King’s official art — though to be strictly accurate, the new style is anticipated in the last decade or so of Louis XIV’s reign. In Germany, rococo took a slightly different form, as a late and increasingly superficial, decorative manifestation of the baroque.

This is the period of the extravagant palace of the Prince-Bishop of Wuerzburg, which I saw a few weeks ago, with its remarkable frescoes by Tiepolo, the last of the great baroque ceiling painters.

The highly artificial and deliberately affected style of porcelain figurines, once again, can be better appreciated as a manifestation of the art of a certain time and place; these arch posturings become less palatable when they are reproduced in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Then there are the subjects of these pieces, with their scenes of gallantry, of peasant life, chinoiseries or shepherds and shepherdesses, which can seem rather cloying. In fact these shepherds are the distant descendants of the far earthier and indeed sexual ones introduced into literature by the great Hellenistic poet Theocritus, the founder of the bucolic genre. Ultimately inspired by the real shepherds of ­Sicily, Theocritus’s shepherds could be as bawdy as they were melancholy.

Somewhat tidied up by Virgil, these literary shepherds were reborn in Renaissance and baroque art, literature and music before ending up in this last emasculated incarnation, the anticipation of Marie-Antoinette’s toy dairy where she and her attendant ladies could play at being milkmaids. Yet even here sexuality remains present, if latent beneath mannered attitudes, suggestive encounters and coded references such as the basket carried by a girl and which alludes to her virginity.

Commedia dell’arte characters, as in the earlier paintings of Watteau, are also popular and allow for a mixture of comic and playfully erotic subjects, as in the Scaramouche and Columbine — the latter duly holding a birdcage — by the master modeller Johann Joachim Kaendler. But there are also pieces that allude to everyday life among workers, artisans or the lower middle class, which carry on a much older tradition of genre subjects in painting, perhaps imbued with a mid-18th-century sense of the virtues of the common people, as illustrated in some of the best-known paintings of Greuze.

For readers eager to know more about these often overlooked works, the gallery website has an excellent essay and impressively thorough and erudite downloadable labels on every item in the exhibition by Matthew Martin, curator of decorative arts and antiquities at the NGV. Although anyone familiar with early modern art will recognise such common iconographic motifs as allegories of the seasons, how many of us would realise the figure of a Thames ferryman wears a badge denoting him as the winner of a boatrace still held today, 300 years after its inauguration?

On the subject of iconographical motifs, Martin makes the interesting point in his introductory essay that 18th-century porcelain sculpture did indeed reproduce the whole gamut of allegorical and other sculptural themes of the baroque tradition — ubiquitous in contemporary palaces and gardens — in miniature form, as well as introducing new and more anecdotal ones of its own. So it is fascinating to find here sets of the gods and some of the more famous mythological stories, such as Europa on the bull.

In general this miniaturisation may seem typical of the playful spirit of rococo, reducing pompous rhetoric to playfulness, but in some cases at least the scale could have had a practical purpose. Thus the exhibition includes two versions — one white, one coloured — of a Pieta based on the one in Notre Dame in Paris by Nicolas Coustou, the pupil of Coysevox. These were made by the Chelsea Porcelain Factory, clearly for use by English Catholics at a time when Catholic observance was virtually illegal: the small scale in this case corresponded to the practical necessities of private and even secret devotion.

Eighteenth-century porcelain sculpture

National Gallery of Victoria. Until December.