318 IDENTIFICATION OF THE ARTISAN AND ARTIST. 



in Pliny, that when a knight named Octavius, in the time of Angustus, 

 wished to have a vase made, it cost him a talent, or npwards of £50, to 

 have the model made : which shows that the clay model was to be mod- 

 eled before the marble vase was sculptured. In this art, then, the pro- 

 ducer is the designer, the artist is the artisan, and hence comes i^erfect 

 beauty. 



Next to this must be mentioned a very important branch of productive 

 art, in which the art of design is always necessary to be in combination 

 with the actual manufacture; and that is china, or painting upon pot- 

 tery. The Etruscan vases are often simple, sometimes of one color, 

 sometimes they have nothing of ornament; at other times they have 

 most beautifully executed, though sketchy, scenes of ancient mythology, 

 or very frequently' from the '' Iliad." These are done in a way which 

 shows there must have been hundreds of artists who could do that work. 

 Very frequently it was not a painter who did them, but the man who 

 was at work on the pottery throughout ; and, although mere sketches, 

 they are considered as containing the elements of very beautiful draw- 

 ing. If we come to speak of the art of modern times, a remarkable 

 instance of genius iierseveriug in its work maybe taken from the history 

 of Bernard Pallissy. He was an artist, but as a painter of comparatively 

 humble pretensions; for he tells us he used to paint figures, images, and 

 so on; but in this he was an artist, to a certain extent. He tell ns 

 himself, in the biography he has written, that in 1544, when there 

 seemed not to have been anything approaching to ornamental pottery 

 in France, he happened to see an Italian cup, which struck him as being 

 very beautiful; and he thought to himself, "Why could not this be 

 X)roduced in France?" He set to work. He was a poor man, hardly 

 educated; but he had a great turn for chemistry, and was particularly 

 desirous of finding out a manner of enameling pottery, and especially 

 a white enamel, which he at length contrived to make. Ho took his 

 worked to be baked in glass-houses, and found it comj^letely fail ; then 

 he set to work in his own house, and built a furnace for the purpose. 

 He put his ingredients into the furnace; they would not set nor harden. 

 He had spent all his money, and he gradually pawned all his clothes, and 

 burnt every article of furniture, to keep up the furnace, and i^ulled up 

 the fruit trees in his garden, and then the very floor of the house, to 

 keep up the fire. Still the work was all spoiled. When he went out 

 the peopl^ charged him with being a coiner; he was lidiculed as mad; 

 and every sort of annoyance came on him. He persevered yet; and, 

 having found that his furnace would not act, he pulled it down, and with 

 his own hands bringj^ng the lime and bricks, he built another furnace, 

 and then sat for six days and nights w^atching the fire. Then he got a 

 little money by having a commission to make a survey, and came back 

 to his work, and tried again. The mortar he used, however, happened 

 to have some deficiency in it; and, just as the pottery was going to set, 

 he heard a crack, and the pebbles in the mortar began to fly and broke 



