The classification of ceramics is very complicated.
According to the firing temperature of ceramics, it can be divided into pottery and porcelain. From the Neolithic Age to the Tang Dynasty, all the utensils used in this period were pottery, such as celadon in the Three Kingdoms and the Jin Dynasty, and tri-colored pottery in the Tang Dynasty, all of which were called pottery.
Why not call it porcelain? Because the firing temperature is low, only about 700-800 degrees, the glaze is not hard. After the Song Dynasty, the firing temperature reached 1280℃- 1400℃, and the vessels in this period were called porcelain.
From the origin of ceramics, it can be divided into official kilns and folk kilns. The official kiln is called the official kiln and the folk kiln is called the folk kiln.
From the kiln mouth, it can be divided into Jingdezhen kiln, Cizhou kiln, Dehua kiln, Longquan kiln, Ge kiln, Ding kiln, Jun kiln, Ru kiln, Criminal kiln and Yue kiln. The porcelain produced by each kiln mouth has its own characteristics, so I won't elaborate here.
According to the types of porcelain, it can be divided into blue-and-white porcelain, pastel porcelain and colored glaze porcelain. We usually distinguish them by category.
1, blue and white porcelain
Jay Chou has a song called Blue and White Porcelain. Blue and white porcelain is one of our national quintessence, and it has been a well-deserved overlord of porcelain altar since its birth. Blue and white porcelain was created and fired in the Yuan Dynasty. There is a legend here.
Porcelain workers in Jingdezhen in Yuan Dynasty carved flowers on porcelain blanks with small iron knives, which was labor-consuming and time-consuming, and the decoration technique was monotonous. Craftsman Zhao Xiaobao has been trying to find a pigment suitable for painting porcelain, but without success. His fiancee Liao Qinghua is determined to help him find it. She followed the miners into the mountains to find ore raw materials, but never came back. When Zhao Xiaobao found her, she had frozen to death on the mountain. Still holding a pile of black ore in his arms. Zhao Xiaobao was heartbroken, and took his fiancee to look for ore to be ground into powder, made into pigment, painted on the blank, and finally burned out a blue pattern. So people call this blue flower "blue and white" and this porcelain with blue patterns "blue and white porcelain". This is just a beautiful legend.
Blue and white materials are actually extracted from cobalt-containing ores. It is light black when painted on a white porcelain tire. After firing at a high temperature of 1300 degrees, they can bloom blue flowers on a white background. Since then, blue and white porcelain has dominated for hundreds of years.
Today, with the development of porcelain industry, blue and white materials made of chemical cobalt oxide can also describe blue and white patterns, but this chemical dye lacks coloring power, which makes this blue and white look frivolous and far less abundant than the works of art drawn by ancient natural dyes. This is also conducive to our identification of ancient and modern blue and white porcelain.
It is difficult to burn paper because of its age. At present, among all museums and private collections in the world, there are not enough blue and white pieces from 300 yuan.
On July 12, 2005, a blue-and-white "Guiguzi Down the Mountain" sold for 230 million yuan at Christie's auction house in London, China.
10 years ago, I also saw a blue and white yuan in the Capital Museum. In recent years, I saw another one in Hebei Provincial Museum. In short, the number is extremely rare. But now many people don't understand and often buy fakes.
In fact, the probability of meeting Yuan Qinghua in the market can be described as: looking for a grain of sand in the desert, and writing your name on the sand. Look at the probability. When I traveled to Jingdezhen last year, there were a lot of imitation yuan blue and white porcelain on every booth.
Blue-and-white porcelain was pushed to the peak in the Yong Xuan period of Ming Dynasty. Blue-and-white porcelain in this period used imported cobalt material "Ma Su Li Qing" to the extreme, reaching an unprecedented level. Later, in the Qing Dynasty, there were imitations of Yungan, but they were far from each other, and only the shape could not reach the spirit likeness. Except for Yongxuan Dynasty, except for the elegant blue and white flowers made by Chenghua, other years were not ideal.
In the twenty years of Kangxi in Qing Dynasty, due to social prosperity, people lived and worked in peace and contentment, creating unique five-color blue and white. The so-called five-color blue and white means that there are shades of ink, and the whole picture and even the strokes should reflect different ink colors, giving people a beautiful enjoyment through different levels of color difference. Kangxi's five-color blue and white porcelain is gorgeous and timeless, elegant and superior to nature, gorgeous but not charming, light and not floating, and it has become another peak of blue and white porcelain, which is unparalleled.
There is nothing special about the blue and white porcelain after this. Although the blue-and-white porcelain painted by Wang Bu is known as the king of blue and white in the Republic of China, it is only innovative in painting techniques, not in the color of blue and white itself.
2. Colored porcelain
As the name implies, it is painted with porcelain of various colors. Colored porcelain includes multicolored, pastel, light crimson, bucket color, wide color, enamel color and so on.
In the Ming Dynasty, multicolored porcelain was fired. Characterized by various colors, colorful. Multicolor is a hard color (similar to oil painting), with strong contrast and too publicity. Everyone felt that there was a lack of excessive colors, so they began to create pastels. Pastel is a soft color (similar to gouache) and has become the mainstream of full-color porcelain. Later, the light crimson color only changed slightly in tone and technique.
These colored porcelains are all over-the-glaze decorations of porcelains. The manufacturing method is to first hook the outline of the pattern on the white-tire porcelain, and then pile up the pigments and fire them.
Colorful colors are like colorful pictures. These pictures are full of rich national characteristics, including figures created according to China's historical stories and myths, beautiful and colorful scenery, lifelike flower and bird feathers, neat and symmetrical geometric patterns and so on. , very beautiful.
After the founding of New China, porcelain factories began to use brush decals to improve efficiency. Brushing flowers is like printmaking effect, decal paper is to stick cellophane on it, and it will stick when burned. People's most common daily necessities belong to this category, lacking artistic value and belonging to mechanical production.
In colored porcelain, I will focus on enamel.
Enamel color is a raw material for painting on copper tires abroad. The raw materials are gorgeous and attractive. Kangxi painted this material on our porcelain.
Enamel porcelain is used to western painting and looks very real. Unfortunately, raw materials can only be imported. Because it is too expensive to be popularized, it has always been reserved for the royal family. In the late Qianlong period, due to the decline of national strength, the burning of enamel porcelain was stopped.
Therefore, enamel is very rare, with only over 400 pieces in the world, which is a very rare figure. On June 23, 2006, Sotheby's, a world-famous auction institution, held an autumn one-piece auction in Hong Kong. One of them, "The Ear Bottle with the Ancient Theme of Qianlong Enamel in Qing Dynasty", was sold for HK$ 654.38+654.38+054.8 million. You can imagine its rarity. At present, the auction prices of Ru Ci in Song Dynasty, Blue and White Pots in Yuan Dynasty, Doucai Chicken Cylinder Cup in Ming Chenghua and Enamel Porcelain in Qing Dynasty are all hundreds of millions.
More than ten years ago, Wang, a porcelain collector in Beijing, came to Zigong several times a year to ask about enamel. Because Wang had seen an old man in Zigong in an auction house in Beijing, the old man had negotiated and transferred an enamel bottle with a broken bottom at the auction house for 6.5438+0.2 million yuan. So Wang made a special trip from Beijing to Zigong to inquire about enamel. Unfortunately, nothing was found.
3. Colored glaze
Adding some oxidized metals to the glaze will show some inherent colors after baking, which is called colored glaze.
The main factor affecting the color of colored glaze is the metal oxide which acts as a colorant. For example, adding iron oxide can fire celadon and blue porcelain. Adding copper oxide can burn red, purple and ochre porcelain. At the same time, it is also closely related to sintering temperature and sintering atmosphere.
In the jargon, porcelain of any color in nature can be fired. If you visit the colored glazed porcelain in Jingdezhen, you will believe that this statement is true.
Of course, many ingredients and firing in glass are difficult, such as "offering red glaze", and there is a saying that "a thousand kilns are valuable". Its color must be between 1300℃ and 13 10℃. At 1300℃, it will burn into ugly green or dirty purple, but at 13 10℃, the color will burn and become bluish white. Red glaze will only appear between 10℃.
In ancient times, it was a wooden kiln. Firefighters observed the temperature with their naked eyes and relied on experience. It is difficult to observe the temperature difference of 65438 00℃ with naked eyes. A little carelessness will cause waste.
In Zigong, I have seen a brush for red glaze and an ochre-colored red glaze water bowl fail to be fired successfully. Therefore, the ancients said that if you want to be poor, you must burn red. Now we use steam kiln and electric kiln to burn porcelain, and the temperature is completely controllable. So the perfection of red glaze in history is rare and precious.