HISTORY |

The human nature has a special approach to the perception of the images of historical characters as well as celebrities of today. One can either hear of them or read on them, but it is far more interesting to see them for yourself, to come closer, to touch the person and to feel oneself in a real conversation with the object of one’s interest. As early as in the ancient times this transparent wish gave birth to a singular genre of the round plastic – the wax human models.

The use of wax is known from the ancient times. People of Ancient Egypt made amulets and small figures for ritual burial out of wax. In the Ptolemaic Egypt (305-30 B.C.) people used fruits and flowers made out of wax to ornate the houses. In Greece and Rome the statues of gods, game figures, wreaths and toys were made out of this fragile matter. Since that times wax was used in the process of creation of copper or bronze statues: a wax sculpture was daubed by a thick clay layer, then using high temperature the wax was melted out of the form and the cavity was filled with a liquid metal.

Wax was widely circulated in the Middle Ages, though, according to various sources, it was very expensive. In the list of present offered to kings wax is often mentioned.

A very special branch of the wax plastic is the art of human portrayal in wax. In the Occident the custom of taking a mask from the face of a dead man or making wax portraits existed in Ancient Rome as was tightly connected with the veneration cult for the dead. The wax masks, called carae, were made with the help of casts taken from the face of a dead man. Then they were painted. In the funereal processions the wax portraits were carried near a dead body, and then they were stored in the atria of the dead man’s house. When a Roman emperor was dead, a life size wax figure was made and then clothed in a real life clothes. These wax models were transferred in the family from generation to generation.

With the contention of Christianity at the Apennine peninsula the wax portraits of dead nobles were devoted to the Church, so they were usually places inside the temples in the niches or along the walls. In the Middle Ages in Italy and other countries the faces for the statues of saints were made of wax, as well as various offerings to the saints for the recovery of diseases. The latter were made in the form of hearts, arms and legs and were hung along the temple walls. By that time together with already existing portrayals used for cults, burials or devotions, people start to make out of wax relatively small figures used in quotidian life: puppets, flowers and fruits. These figures were made scrupously. The masters of Florence were the most remarkable in this art.

The custom to create the wax portraits of the dead went from Italy to France, England and Germany, where much persons of the aristocratic milieu ordered to create models like these for the next generations.

In the XIV-XVII centuries there was a custom in France to create a glamorous wax figure after the death of a king, a prince or a noble man. This figure was clothed in a deceased man's clothes, was lain on a parade bed and during forty days the figure was venerated as the corresponding person was during his lifetime.

From the XVII century, people started to produce wax portraits during the lifetime of the persons portrayed. Among these works, widely spread in the aristocratic milieu, were life size statues, busts and medaillons. One of the most remarkable masters of that period was Antoine Benoît of Paris (1632-1717). He worked at the court of Louis XIV and held a pretty high position of the "first sculptor of toned wax of the King". It was him who created a series of quality portraits of The Sun King.

In the XVIII century the wax exhibitions (mostly movable) came into light. In 1770 Philippe Curtius from Switzerland opened his first wax museum in Palais Royale, near Paris. At that museum one could see all the famous contemporains. In 1793-1794, the period of Jacobinism rule, Curtius had much work: he took masks from many remarkable people guillotinned following a sentence of a revolutionary court of justice (among others, the King and the Queen) and exposed those masks in his own museum. That’s when he invited his niece, Marie Tussaud, née Grosholtz (1761-1850), to his business. In 1794 Marie Grosholtz took over Curtius and in 1802 left for Britain, taking some thirty wax models with her. Her life in Britain became a long adventure, for she had to leave one city after another. By 1835, when her exhibition included more than 120 models, she established herself at Baker Street in London, where the famous Tussaud’s museum stands up till now.

The art of wax portraits in Russia dates back to 1698, when Peter the Great, going back from his first foreign voyage, took home his own head made of wax as well as seven wax busts of the participants of the Great Embassy (1697-1698). The busts among other “rarities and curiosities” were installed in the Fun palate. The interest for the wax blendes Peter expressed was quite natural, considering that this spectacular, complicated and laborious art was at his time completely unknown in Russia. The interest of Tsar was constant. During his second voyage in Europe (1716-1717) he ordered a wax portrait of Abraham Hannibal and dwarf Luke to Johann Kolm, a sculptor of Amsterdam.

A series of wax portraits was made in the first quarter of XVIII century by a celebrate Italian sculptor Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1675-1744). The earliest of his wax portraits is the bust of Peter I in plate armor. The bust was completed by Rastrelli in 1719. Now it is stored in the Hermitage.

The first reliable information about a wax museum in Saint Petersburg dates back to the 1738, when two Savoyards (entertainers from Savoy, Southern France) opened “a cabinet made in Versailles” in the Neumann’s house, near the Green bridge.

Wax galleries like that often visited Saint Petersburg in the second half of XVIII century. Their typical content often included the portrayals of contemporary kings or high ministers. The spectacle was meant to be an entertainment for respectable public. The entrance ticket was quite expensive.

In XIX century the sculpture of tone wax becomes a regular view in Russian cities. The shop windows are regularly decorated with quality mannequins. Wax models were also displayed in the barbershop windows to promote new haircuts; in the windows of popular bookshops one could see the wax portraits of renowned Russian writers.

Towards the second half of XIX century the wax museums were incorporated in the panoptica. A panopticum was a moving entertainment cart where rare or unnatural thing and creatures were exposed. Together with this one could see illusionists, weightlifters and equilibrists.

It has to be mentioned that in this time the wax cabinets were dramatically changed from the past times. Instead of contemporary persons one could more often see mythological, literature and allegoric characters.

In that time one could see in some wax cabinets of Saint Petersburg a wax model of Peter I, giving a low bow. Models like these gave fuel to an urban legend, according to which a Rastrelli’s statue in the Hermitage has a secret mechanism that can make a model bow. This legend become even more wide-spread after a novel “A wax person” by Yuri Tynyanov was published. Evidently, this type of irreverent behavior towards Peter I, whose model was obliged to bow before the public, was unthinkable for the contemporaries of the frightening Emperor.

According to the information we have, in the last quarter of XIX century quite a lot of cities of the Russian empire had wax panoptica. In Moscow there was a museum of F. Petac, in Kiev there were museums of Botsov and Yakubosky, Odessa had a wax museum of Bakhtin, there were also wax museums in Kaluga and Nizhny Novgorod. Though the audience was at most part not aristocratic, the wax museums were often visited by elite visitors. In 1877 Alexander Benoit visited a wax booth in the Kronverk park in Saint Petersburg and left a vivid description of his experience in the memoirs. In 1907 Alexander Blok frequented a Petersburg panopticum on Nevsky 86, where among others he spotted a figure of Cleopatra dying. Korney Chukovsky, telling of his meetings with Blok there, remembers “a black rubber snake”, twisting in the hands of a queen made of wax, “that, being moved by a inelaborate mechanism, bites her head and breast, again and again, a thousand times, to the pleasure of some bawdy persons. Blok watched her with stupefaction and sorrow”.

In the beginning of the XX century the figure of Cleopatra dying became a prominent guest in the panoptica: one could find the figure of the Egyptian queen in nearly every one of them.

The genre, loved and respected by the public, passed away after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Decades passed before this long-forgotten art was reborn in order to entertain modern public, more demanding and more enlightened, and in order to give the public the opportunity to travel in the past.