Black Pottery Glaze Research Paper

Most pottery that we see has been glazed, which means that it has been covered in a very thin coating of glass. The glaze is often colored, for aesthetic reasons, but pottery glaze is also very practical, especially for pottery that will be holding food and liquids (Breuer, 2012). Pottery glaze is most typically made up of three components: silicon dioxide, aluminum oxide, and fluxes that are generally alkali or alkaline earth metal oxides. The silicon dioxide provides the main body of the glaze, the aluminum oxide enhances the viscosity of the glaze by cross-linking the silica networks, and the fluxes lower the melting point of the mixture to the appropriate temperature for firing the glazed pottery (Breuer, 2012). This paper will focus more specifically on black ceramic pigments for glazes and the research that has looked at black pottery glaze.
Adding coloring to the glazes requires transition metal oxides, because the main minerals that form the glazes are colorless. In addition to the oxides of the first row of transition metals, copper is also used for the coloring of glazes (Breuer, 2012). In order to make a pottery glaze opaque, tin oxide must be added into the formula (Mason and Tite, 1997). Famous pottery …show more content…
These glazes have been found to have significant amounts of MgO in them, unlike modern Western glazes, and appear to have been fired in oxidation rather than reduction. A man by the name of Jon Singer replicated this China Black glaze and found that the glaze did indeed look more glossy and pleasing when fired in oxidation, even though the glaze did behave fairly well in reduction (Singer, 2004). Pottery glazed with the authentic Black Ding glaze has been deemed “as rare as black swans” (Singer, 2004, p. 64). Today, about less than a dozen of these pieces exist in their entirety, along with some shard excavated in

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