Dante’s Inferno ¹⁹⁰²

Dante’s Inferno, which seems to feature a scene from Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic La Divina Commedia, is a nice example of a chemical quest for the particular finish of an object. The Zsolnay porcelain factory in the Hungarian city of Pécs expanded considerably in the 1890s under the direction of Vilmos Zsolnay. Together with artist Lajos Petrik and Vince Wartha, a lecturer at the local polytechnic school, he elaborated the ‘eosin technique’, whereby a secret substance that has been placed on the glazed porcelain is partly burned away. Thanks to the light refraction, iridescent metallic colours appear. This technique, whose name refers to the Greek goddess of dawn Eos, became the Zsolnay trademark and was very popular during the period of art nouveau. To this day, it remains a well-preserved secret.

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Met dank aan Szilvia Töreky (Zsolnay Porcelánmanufaktúra).