Ephemeral bodies : wax sculpture and the human figure

Los Angeles, Calif: Getty Research Institute, 2008. Hardcover. VG, dj shows minor wear. Mylar covered pictorial dj; maroon convers. (vii), 327 pages : illustrations (some color). The material history of wax is a history of disappearance--wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since ancient times--from phallic amulets offered to heal distressing conditions and life-size votive images crammed inside candlelit churches by the faithful, to exquisitely detailed anatomical specimens used for training doctors and Medardo Rosso's "melting" portraits. The critical history of wax, however, is fraught with gaps and controversies. After Giorgio Vasari, the subject of wax sculpture was abandoned by art historians; in the twentieth century it once again sparked intellectual interest, only soon to vanish. The authors of the eight essays in Ephemeral Bodies--including the first English translation of Julius von Schlosser's seminal "History of Portraiture in Wax" (1910-11)--break new ground as they explore wax reproductions of the body or body parts and assess their conceptual ambiguity, material impermanence, and implications for the history of Western art. Contents as follows: Introduction : the body in wax, the body of wax / Roberta Panzanelli --; Compelling presence : wax effigies in Renaissance Florence /; Roberta Panzanelli --; Wax fibers, wax bodies, and moving figures : artifice and nature in eighteenth-century anatomy /; Joan B. Landes --; Almost alive : the spectacle of verisimilitude in Madame Tussaud's Waxworks /; Uta Kornmeier --; On waxes and wombs : eighteenth-century representations of the Gravid Uterus /; Lyle Massey --; Wax tokens of libido : William Hamilton, Richard Payne Knight, and the Phalli of Isernia /; Whitney Davis --; Fleeting revelations : the demise of duration in Medardo Rosso's wax sculpture /; Sharon Hecker --; Viscosities and survivals : art history put to the test by the material /; Georges Didi-Huberman --; Appendix :; History of portraiture in wax ("Geschichte der Porträtbildnerai in Wachs" 1910-11) /; Julius von Schlosser.