Limoges enamel

[2] Luxury pieces such as plates, plaques and ewers were painted with sophisticated Mannerist decoration of pictorial figure scenes, which on vessels were surrounded by elaborate borders.

The industry was already in decline by 1370, when the brutal sack of the city after the Siege of Limoges by the English, led by Edward the Black Prince, effectively ended it.

[11] The gilded areas were also marked with incised lines, depicting the faces and clothes of figures or patterns in the backgrounds (this last known as the vermiculated style).

In medieval art blue was notoriously expensive in other media such as painting, but relatively easy to achieve in both enamel and stained glass, whose makers took full advantage of this.

[13] The growth of the Limoges industry and its reputation in the 12th century appears to have owed much to the Grandmontines, a monastic order whose mother house of Grandmont was outside the city.

The order grew rapidly after the death of its founder, Saint Stephen of Muret in 1124, and was patronized by King Henry II of England.

[17] Religious book-covers (or treasure bindings) were made in numbers throughout the period, usually in pairs of plaques which have rarely survived together; God the Father and the Crucifixion of Christ are common subjects.

[18] Other subjects that appear in Limoges enamel rather more often than in other religious art of the period include the life of Saint Valerie of Limoges, a local heroine, as well as the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket, whose cult was vigorously promoted by the church after his death, including the distribution of secondary relics (pieces of his clothes soaked in his diluted blood) around Europe.

[20] In subjects like these, with many surviving examples, the depictions are often closely similar, or fall into groups, suggesting shared designs, and perhaps different workshops using the same patterns.

[23] The number of secular pieces, or those that have survived, increased in the later period, including candlesticks, medallion plaques for ornamenting chests and other things,[24] and gemellions, bowls for ceremonial hand-washing that came in pairs, servants pouring over the hands from one into the other.

In addition, from the time of Louis XI the ability to attain the title of master in the enamellers' guild was confined to a few families by royal edicts.

[33] Unlike medieval Limoges champlevé, these enamels were made for a market mainly restricted to France, though some pieces were commissioned from Germany.

[34] While the medieval champlevé of Limoges competed with a number of other centres around Europe, in the 16th century there was really no other city producing any quantity of large pictorial enamels in a Mannerist style.

In the 18th century the role of luxury enamelware objects was largely superseded by European porcelain, but after some technical refinements enamel painting became widely used for small portrait miniatures, before this an English eccentricity.

As with Italian maiolica, to which in some ways Limoges painted enamel was a belated French riposte, the imagery tended to be drawn from classical mythology or allegory, though it includes religious scenes, often from the Old Testament.

Many masters were becoming Huguenots (French Calvinists) over the century, and new printed Bibles moralisées, with illustrations by Bernard Salomon and others, were making accessible a large number of narrative scenes that were previously not widely familiar.

[37] The jolly grotesques illustrated at right are on the reverse of a large dish whose main face shows a brightly-coloured depiction of the Destruction of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea.

[39] The introduction, around 1530, of the grisaille style, with most of the composition in black and white, may seem surprising in a medium which generally relied for its effect on a wide range of bright colours which could only be matched by pottery in the other media, such as metalwork, in which similar objects were made.

[3] Enamels were still applied to bases of copper sheets; the construction of the complicated three dimensional shapes often now used could not use solder, which would not withstand the firing temperature.

[43] Given the royal privileges, enamel workshops tended to stay in the family, and are also rather poorly documented compared to painters; the various signatures and monograms on pieces have given art historians much to argue about.

[48] The Aeneid series reflect the essentially Gothic style of the woodcuts copied,[47] but were probably made when Léonard Limousin was already in the service of the king.

[35] The largest three-dimensional piece to survive is a grisaille "table fountain" 490 mm tall at Waddesdon Manor in England, dated 1552, purportedly made for Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II of France.

The taste grew until late in the century, with Paris as the main market for gathering examples from chateaux, if necessary doing them up with the usual 19th-century audacity, and selling them to an increasingly international group of very wealthy collectors.

Art historians began to reconstruct the names and biographies behind the tangled evidence from signatures and styles,[54] as well as imitations in ceramics from France and England.

The work is made from copper, engraved and gilded, and inlaid with champlevé Limoges enamel, with tones of blues, greens, yellow, reds and whites, and depicts Christ on the cross.

Beckett was canonized as a saint within three years of his murder, and scenes from the life and death of Thomas Becket very quickly became a popular sources of inspiration for the artists of Limoges, that are on over 45 caskets surviving today.