Ceroplastics – Wax Anatomy

This book will follow the history of wax modelling (or ceroplastics) with its changing fate through the centuries and artistic taste. Re-discovered in the 13th – 14th centuries in Florence with the cult of votive offerings, the art of wax modelling has an ancient origin. It reached its artistic peak during the Renaissance when it was considered the material par excellence for the representation of portraits, sketches and funeral masks. With the advent of Neoclassicism, ceroplastics, now deemed artistically unpleasant, survived in a scientific environment, where it flourished in the study of normal and pathological anatomy, obstetrics, zoology and botany. Changes in taste transformed the status of wax reproductions through history. As a rich and complex medium, wax lends itself in a very natural way to reproductions of the human body. Hyperrealism is most evident in moulages, a technique widely used as early as the Renaissance that consisted of making cast of the object to be reproduced in wax. The uncanny response to the notion of the double, condemned by art historians, became a positive and eagerly sought-after feature in the case of later scientific collections where the reproduction had to look exactly like the original.