Material and style in white porcelain sculpture: Dehua blanc de Chine and the Leningrad biscuit made by the Leningrad Porcelain Factory

The article aims to identify how the physical properties of the material, technological processing modes, and the cultural-artistic context form two distinct but structurally correlatable models of white porcelain sculpture in Dehua and the Leningrad tradition. The article compares not two “types of porcelain” in general, but two artistic models of white porcelain sculpture: glazed Dehua blanc de Chine and the unglazed Leningrad biscuit made by the Leningrad Porcelain Factory named after M. V. Lomonosov. The scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying the mechanism through which the distinction between glazed and unglazed white porcelain surfaces forms two different systems of artistic expression. The comparison is conducted based on artistic parameters: surface and light, modelling and silhouette, genre and imagery, and the cultural function of whiteness. As a result, it is shown that material becomes style not automatically, but through a stable connection between the properties of the material, the technological regime, the nature of the surface, the light behavior of the form, and the cultural semantics of the image.