And spreading high and far over the walls and ceiling there was another multitude, also pressing close against each other, that they might be nearer the potent virgin. It was a crowd of waxen images, the effigies of great personages, clothed in their habit as they had lived . . . It was a perfect resurrection-swarm of remote mortals and fragments of mortals, reflecting, in their varying degrees of freshness, the somber dinginess and sprinkled brightness of the crowd below.
—George Eliot, Romola

Top: Bust of a
German Nobleman
above: Charles II
Waxworks similar in form to (no longer extant) Italian votives

In Renaissance Italy, life-sized, full-body effigies, with face, hands, and feet made of polychromed wax were part of popular artistic production. Built on wooden and metal armatures, they were clothed and embellished with human or horse hair. Wax portrayed biblical figures, but the majority of the statues were votives representing members of Renaissance society. Similar to statues in wax museums, but a part of religious artistic production, these sculptures abounded, filling devotional centers with a looming, permanent congregation. By the fifteenth century, wax sculpture and the artisans creating it were specialized and sought-after. The art was named ceroplastica, and its most famous makers, ceraiuol or fallimagini.The Benintendi, a family of wax sculptors who practiced from the early fifteenth into the mid-sixteenth century, were as well known and respected in their field as the della Robbia family was in the production of polychromed ceramics.

Body-part votives hung from the
ceiling

By 1447, in the church of SS Annunziata in Florence, the number of these votives was so great that two balconies were constructed to the left and right of the entrance in order to house them, and, later in the fifteenth century, the walls of the nave were strengthened to support their great weight. By the sixteenth century, the number had increased so that effigies were suspended from the ceiling. By 1630, six hundred life-sized figures filled the interior of the church.

Richa, a sixteenth-century historian, described the Annunziata sculptures as a “special valor,” creating a “theater of wonders . . . which do justice to the miraculous Madonna, not only for their age, but for their quantity and quality.” They were perfect physical replicas of their subjects, dressed in clothing faithful to station and style. Soldiers wore armor, held swords, and often rode wax horses; the effigy of Pope Leo X held a religious document in its hand.

Whether for a show of religious devotion or as a part of bourgeois fashion, the sculptures held power because they were able to replicate perfectly the people whom they portrayed. Giorgio Vasari (in his 1550 edition of The Lives of the Artists), found their “details so life-like” that the effigies lacked “nothing, as it were, but the spirit and power of speech.” In an age when the pinnacle of artistic achievement lay in the exact representation of nature, and, often, devotional legitimacy depended on the recognition of the supplicant by the higher power, wax was an effective material.

St Michael
17th century
miniature tableau
detail

From the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, wax was continually used to portray the human figure in a popular genre of miniature portraits, life-like images on a small scale. The product of elite patronage, these objects held fascination for their ability to describe the secular sitter or religious personage clearly, in the greatest detail, and on an impossibly small scale. Like their life-sized counterparts, the portraits were dressed and decorated—with precious gems, velvet, scraps of lace, tinsel, fur, and human hair—to represent station as well as physical likeness. The miniatures compounded the wonder of verisimilitude associated with wax as a portrait medium with the wonder of workmanship. In our selection of miniatures from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this art form’s surprising detail and surface are remarkable for variety and ability to capture the life-like spirit of their subjects.

17th century anatomical Venuses
by Clemente Susini
detail.

Not surprisingly, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the capabilities of the medium were being exploited where realism, rather than art or curiosity, was important. Some of the most striking and beautifully sculpted waxwork has been executed for the medical profession. As the public began to redefine art, and to lose its desire for the exact replication of nature, wax’s ability to mimic turned towards different functional ends. Anatomical models—whole figures, often called anatomical venuses; series showing the stages of gestation, varied skin diseases, or details of the lymphatic system—were first used by the medical faculty in Bologna to educate students without the aid of a corpse. Skillfully constructed, and artfully composed and decorated, these objects demonstrated the verisimilitude inherent in polychromed wax: its literally visceral quality and its precision in display.

The wax of such things and what shapes that wax are not immutable; and thus, beneath Idea’s stamp, light shines through.
—Dante, The Divine Comedy, “Paradiso”

Since ancient Greece, wax’s translucence, endurance, mutability, ability to carry color and light and to be lifelike has had an astonishing effect on the viewer. Wax continues to hold our collective imagination, but, now, more perhaps because of its symbolic associations—in rituals as joyful as celebration and as contemplative as faith; its organic origin—its production by living creatures; and its duplicitous nature—liquid and solid, opaque and translucent, fragile and lasting. Wax can function as “an unusually malleable medium that evokes bodily sensations, emotions, alchemical transformations, religious rituals, layers of history, and the passage of time . . . [It is] uniquely appropriate for the communication of a vast array of spiritual, philosophical, environmental, and painterly concerns.”

During the twentieth century, with the availability of equipment and materials that make the medium accessible, artists have turned to wax in ever-greater numbers—in encaustic painting and a variety of sculptural methods—to exploit its meanings and capabilities. It appeals to process-based artists eschewing mass-produced mediums. It allows surfaces as smooth as enamel or as granular as sugar. It is fascinating because of its mutability; it is both reductive and additive. And it can trap brilliant color. Still seen as a good imitator of skin, it is also a substance that calls to mind the metamorphosis of all matter. Attracted by its multiple associations and its visceral and visual sensations, many artists no longer look to wax for mimicry, but for the perceptual latitude it provides the viewer. “Waxwork” offers protean possibilities in our own back yard. Shown here the context of several historical pieces from local collections, works by these artists resonate with multiple meanings that set them apart from their strictly representational predecessors.

Marking:
Umbra de Ipse

K. M. Marking refers to—and broadens—wax’s traditional usage. Her projections suggest Clemente Susini’s anatomical venuses from the seventeenth century and Vasseur and Tramond’s model of the lymphatics of the head and neck (ca. 1870). Marking suggests the figure’s internal structure, but with results as painterly as they are biological. Both sensuously voluptuous and brutally flayed, her figures have a luxurious fragility behind their smooth translucent curtain—as much like the peep show window as the natural history museum case.

Frank Hyder also alludes to traditional votives in his treasure boxes. But unlike the beeswax body-parts offered, in thanks or remembrance, from the thirteenth century to today, his figures and faces are smeared with wax that is brushed and dripped over the surface. Like the residue of a ritual anointing or accumulation, his wax evokes the use of and belief in the objects. It also mediates the images, suggesting that someone has partially added to or uncovered them. The build-up of layers can be equated with geology, archaeology, and the sealing of the user’s memories.

Wax in John Dini’s small landscapes is atmospheric, mediating horizon lines and vistas, transforming geographical locations into places of memory, conveying the passage of time. Built from a thick, lush encaustic, but without the matte finish usually associated with the medium, Dini’s abstracted panoramas shimmer, speckled and jewel-like. Light flickers through the thick and mottled surface of his veiled imagery—the material’s luminosity and transparency are well-suited to the diffusion of light—creating the dream-like mystery of an undefined place.

DeMelas:
Solace Soul

Encaustic also suffuses Anthony DeMelas’s subjects. His images are layered and scored, and his constructions provide a survey of wax’s versatility: the ability to coat and reveal; to be fluid and hard, thick and thin. He too uses wax to mediate imagery; however, sometimes more literally: a sheer layer covers photographs, skewing their recognizable meaning. Like wax steganography in the time of Herodotus, the readable is masked. His complex surfaces and object-like fabrications treat the wax as a building block for structure and surface, and as an endlessly changeable substance.

Kevin Kautenburger recalls the elemental nature of the material in his sculptures. He uses wax as bees do; he is concerned with its genesis as a secretion. He does not mold, but injects or pours it, to adhere and pool within his Basin. Wax is a cleanser: pure, organic, essential, and raw. Both soft and hard, vulnerable and durable, it is also a structural element binding the piece together.

Sarah Biemiller uses wax structurally as well, not as infrastructure but as exoskeleton. Biemiller coats, protects, and encircles objects in paraffin. In One Hour of Breath,wax hardens and preserves her breath, making the ephemeral more permanent. The bubbles are containers, but also refer to cells, piled one atop another, creating a stacked and stocked “breathing” organism, multiples of organic refuse, or delicate and precious bags of unknown content.

Kahn:
A Momentary Universe

Ellen Kahn also envelops each of her objects and environments in a wax membrane. Ambiguously organic and intimately tangible, her small-scale sculpted multiples create a variable landscape of symbolic connections, without offering explicit meanings. Kahn’s expressive forms, colors, and textures suggest living presences that function as metaphors for human, plant, and animal life. Some of her larger pieces function as loose renditions of housing pods, shelters, home bases for the smaller pieces, parts of some alternative environment, both built and natural.

Bowlby:
Brimmer

Astrid Bowlby’s objects rely on the wax’s affective properties—viscous, fluid, solid, encrusted, gooey, gleaming. They recall both anatomical models and rubber food for restaurant display. Like Hyrtle’s corrosional preparation of the kidney of a bull (ca. 1874), they are finely crafted but difficult to recognize. In Bowlby’s hands, the wax is both realistic and fantastic, the sculptures complex in their ability to create association, and to successively attract and repulse the viewer. Like Kahn’s pieces, Bowlby’s appear inescapably organic and enigmatically palpable.

The artists in “Waxwork” have made a commitment to the material as a source for their inspiration and as an essential part of their working process. It informs, coats, protects, intercedes, or bonds—shaping subject, narrative, and form by its presence. It provokes both sensual reaction and symbolic inquiry.