Cells of Fire: A Short History of Champlevé Enamel

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

Champlevé enamel began on the western edge of Europe, not the eastern one. The earliest pieces anyone can point to are Celtic, usually dated to around 400 BC — La Tène metalworkers cutting recesses into bronze and fusing glass into them, most often a deep blood red, on brooches and weapons and chariot fittings. It is tempting to assume that a technique this refined must have come down from somewhere grander and later. It didn't. It came out of Iron Age workshops in what is now France and Britain, and it was already ancient by the time Rome spread it further.

Worth saying plainly, because the two are endlessly confused: the eastern tradition — Egypt, the Near East, Byzantium, and onward along the Silk Road to China, Korea and Japan — is cloisonné, where the cells are built up from fine wire soldered onto the surface. Cloisonné is the older of the two techniques and by some way the more famous. Champlevé is its western cousin: the cells cut down into the metal instead of built up on top of it.

The word itself is French — champ levé, "raised field" — and it refers to carving small cells into a metal surface and filling them with powdered glass that's then fired into place. The name is some fifteen centuries younger than the thing it describes. 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.

The great medieval flowering came late in the 11th century and peaked in the 12th — in the workshops along the Meuse at Huy and Liège, in Cologne and the other Rhine cities, and above all in the French city of Limoges, which became 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.

From those centres it spread through the rest of Europe and eventually beyond — into Russia, across to the Americas, and slowly 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 Celtic 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. Of these, champlevé is the most demanding of the metal, 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.