Wax figure

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A wax figure is an effigy, usually of a notable individual, which is modeled of wax.

Beeswax is possessed of properties that render it a most convenient medium for preparing figures and models, either by modeling or by casting in moulds. At ordinary temperatures, it can be cut and shaped with facility; it melts to a limpid fluid at a low heat; it mixes with any coloring matter, and takes surface tints well; and its texture and consistency may be modified by the addition of earthy matters and oils or fats. When molten, it takes the minutest impressions of a mould, and it sets and hardens at such a temperature that no ordinary climatic influences effect the form it assumes, even when it is cast in thin laminae. The facilities that wax offers for modeling have been taken advantage of from the remotest times.

1 Wax figures in the Middle Ages
2 Wax figures in the Renaissance
3 Wax figures in the Modern Age
4 Wax figures and the art of moulage
5 Wax museums
6 References

The practice of wax modeling can be traced through the Middle Ages, when votive offerings of wax figures were made to churches. The memory and lineaments of monarchs and great personages were preserved by means of wax masks.

During this period, superstition found expression in the formation of wax images of hated persons, into the bodies of which long pins were thrust, in the confident expectation that thereby deadly injury would be induced to the person represented. This practice was considered more effective when some portion of the victim's hair or nails were added to the wax figure, thus strengthening the connection with its actual subject. This belief and practice continued until the seventeenth century. The superstition survived into the nineteenth century. In the Scottish Highlands, a clay model of an enemy was found in a stream in 1885, having been placed there in the belief that, as the clay was washed away, so would the health of the hated one decline.

During the Italian Renaissance, modeling in wax took a position of high importance, and it was practiced by some of the greatest of the early masters. The bronze medallions of Pisano and of the other famous medalists owe their value to the properties of wax: all early bronzes and metalwork were cast from wax models first. The famous wax bust attributed to Leonardo da Vinci acquired in 1909 by the Museum of Berlin is the work of an English forger who worked about 1840. The wax model of a head, at the Wicar Museum at Lille, belongs probably to the school of Canova, which robs it of none of its exquisite grace.

Image:Dalai Lama Wax.jpg

A wax figure of the Dalai Lama at Madame Tussauds in New York.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, modeling of medallion portraits and of relief groups, the latter frequently polychromatic, was in considerable vogue throughout Europe. John Flaxman executed in wax many portraits and other relief figures which Josiah Wedgwood translated into pottery for his Jasperware.

Wax-works, on a plane lower than art, subsequently became popular attractions, consisting principally of images of historical or notorious personages, made up of waxen masks on lay figures in which sometimes mechanism is fitted to give motion to the figure. Such an exhibition of wax-works with mechanical motions was shown in Germany early in the eighteenth century.

The most famous modern waxwork exhibition is that of Madame Tussaud, where the technology of robotics and audio-animatronics brings the wax figures to life.

The modeling of the soft parts of dissections, teaching illustrations of anatomy, was first practiced at Florence during the Renaissance. The practice of moulage, or the depiction of human anatomy and different diseases, utilized wax as its primary material (later to be replaced by latex and rubber). During the nineteenth century, moulage evolved into to three-dimensional, realistic representations of diseased parts of the human body.

Two tourists standing next to wax figures of the Beatles at Madame Tussauds in London.

A wax museum or waxworks consists of a collection of wax figures representing famous people from history and contemporary personalities exhibited in lifelike poses. Wax museums often have a special section dubbed the "chamber of horrors" in which the more grisly exhibits are displayed.