Cells of Fire: A Short History of Champlevé Enamel

The technique I work in is more than a thousand years old, which I find quietly comforting.

Champlevé enamel began somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean — probably Byzantium, probably the 6th century, though the earlier history is fuzzier than historians would like. The Celts had been doing something like it on the western edge of Europe even earlier, fusing red glass into bronze; whether that line and the Byzantine line are connected is a question that depends on which historian you ask. Either way: by the high middle ages the technique was alive on both ends of the continent, and the cities and monasteries in between were learning it from each other.

The word itself is French — champ levé, "raised field" — and it refers to the technique of carving small cells ("the field") into a metal surface and filling them with powdered glass that's then fired into place. The result is colour set permanently into metal, the colour as durable as the metal itself. A good champlevé piece looks today exactly as it looked the day it was finished. A great champlevé piece will look the same in a thousand years, assuming someone is alive to look at it.

By the 12th century, the French city of Limoges had become Europe's champlevé capital. The Limoges workshops produced an enormous output of reliquaries, crosses, plaques, and altar fittings for the Christian church across Europe. Many of these pieces survive in museum collections — the Cluny in Paris, the V&A in London, the Met in New York. To see a Limoges reliquary in good light is to understand that nothing fundamental has changed about this technique in 800 years. The colours have not faded. The technique is unimproved.

Champlevé spread from Limoges through the rest of Europe and eventually beyond — into Russia, into the Middle East again (where it had begun), and slowly across to the Americas and to Australia, where I work today. The chain of transmission is unbroken. Every champlevé maker in the world right now learned the technique from someone, who learned it from someone, who learned it from someone, going back through hundreds of generations of hands to those early Byzantine workshops.

It is worth saying that very few jewellers today work in champlevé. The technique is slow, fussy, requires real engraving skill, and is enormously demanding of the kiln. Most contemporary enamelling is cloisonné (where thin wires are bent and fixed to the metal surface to form cells, instead of the cells being engraved into the metal itself) or basse-taille (a low-relief variation where translucent enamel is fired over an engraved pattern, so the engraving shows through) or simple painted enamels. Champlevé is the oldest of these, the most demanding, and the most permanent.

I learned it the way it has always been learned — from someone who learned it from someone who learned it from someone else. There is no shortcut. There is no machine. The kiln is the same temperature it has always been, more or less. The patience is the same patience.

What this means, when you hold a champlevé piece, is that you are holding more than the maker's hands. You are holding the hands of everyone who carried this technique forward to be carried forward again.

I think that's worth thinking about on a quiet Sunday morning.

If you'd like to see one of these pieces in person, come to Paddington Markets on Saturday. The light catches the colour in a way no museum case ever does.