The discovery of a long-sought enamel and the successful manufacture of a new and beautiful type of pottery can scarcely be ranked among the great inventions of history, but the story of Bernard Palissy is far too interesting to need any such excuse. He was a worker in the fine arts, in a day when objects of beauty were considered of the first importance, and his success was then regarded as almost as great a thing as the building of the first McCormick reaper in another age.
This maker of a new and beautiful porcelain was a Frenchman, born about 1510 at the little village of La Chapelle Biron, which lies between the Lot and Dordogne, in Perigord. His parents were poor peasants, without the means or the opportunity to give Bernard much of a schooling, but he picked up a very fair knowledge of reading and writing, and kept his eyes so wide open that he learned much more than the average country boy. It was the age when the churches of France were being made glorious with windows of many-colored glass, and Bernard, watching the glass-workers, dared to ask if they would take him as apprentice. One of them would, and so the boy of Perigord began his career of artist, his field covering not only the manufacture of glass, but its cutting, arranging, and sometimes its painting for the rose-windows of the Gothic churches. And so skilled were those glass-workers and so deeply in love with their art that their glass has been the despair of the later centuries that have tried to copy them.
Like a true artist he was very much in earnest. With his spare time and such money as he could save he studied all subjects that seemed apt to be of help to him. He learned geometry, and drawing, painting, and modeling. In his desire for the greatest subjects for his windows and the finest treatment of them, Bernard turned to Italy, the home of the great painters, and copied their works. This led his eager mind to delve into Italian literature, and shortly the young workman was not only draughtsman and artist, but something of a man of letters as well. The little village of La Chapelle Biron found that the peasant's son, without any education in the church schools, was already a man of many talents and quite remarkable learning.