Celadon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Celadon is a term for ceramics denoting both a type glaze, and a ware of a specific color, also called celadon. This type of ware was invented in ancient China, particularly in Zhejiang Province.
Etymology
The term "celadon" for the pottery's pale jade-green glaze coined by European connoisseurs of the wares. One theory is that the name first appeared in France in the 17th century and is named after the shepherd Celadon in Honoré d'Urfé's French pastoral romance, L'Astrée (1627), who wore pale green ribbons. (D'Urfe, in turn, borrowed his character from Ovid's Metamorphoses.) Another is that the term is a corruption of the name of Saladin (Salah ad-Din), the Ayyubid Sultan, who in 1171 sent forty pieces of the ceramic to Nur ad-Din, Sultan of Syria. Yet another is the word derives from the Sanskrit sila and dhara, which mean "stone" and "green" respectively.
