No less than a century after Julius von Schlosser published his History of Portraiture in Wax (1911), historians of visual culture have been in the grip of a new interest in the medium. The exhibition Avere una bella cera at the Palazzo Fortuny, the first scholarly exhibition dedicated exclusively to wax portraiture, marks the coming of age of this fledgling field of research.
Often omitted in references to it, Schlosser qualified the title of his work so that it read, in full, Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs. Ein Versuch (an ‘attempt’ or ‘experiment’). The frequent omission of this modest subtitle speaks volumes about the work’s towering significance as what is today appreciated as the seminal work on wax portraiture; it endures as the indispensable point of reference for all scholars of the topic even one hundred years since its publication.
Yet the qualifying ‘An Attempt’ – at once subtitle and disclaimer – is also a knowing acknowledgement of the precariousness of his project. As Schlosser himself lamented, the medium of wax had suffered a ‘philosophical excommunication’ from the discipline of art history as it emerged in the nineteenth century, sacrificed as ‘the corpus vile that was to serve as demonstration of the difference between art and non-art.’
The current exhibition was conceived by its curator, Andrea Daninos, as a tribute to Schlosser’s pioneering efforts. Daninos recently published an Italian translation of Schlosser’s History (Officina Libraria, 2011), accompanied by an augmented catalogue of works, complementing the 2008 English translation that was incorporated into the outstanding Getty Research Institute publication Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure. Certainly, as such publications demonstrate, recent scholarly interest in the medium of wax has already very quickly made up for lost time and made significant inroads towards writing the medium back into the history of art. The Italian title of the exhibition translates in English as ‘in the pink’ – an apposite assessment of the current scholarly enthusiasm for the medium.
All the while however, what has been lacking, rather conspicuously – and of particular urgency given the investment in the materiality of wax by contemporary scholarship – is a cohesive exhibition in which the physical objects of this hitherto lost chapter in the history of portraiture may be viewed quite literally in the flesh. The exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny does exactly this. While its scope may be limited to the Italian context, its treatment of it is comprehensive, surveying almost all the life-size wax portraits extant today in Italian collections, public and private, and broaching private and commemorative, religious and quasi-scientific applications of wax portraiture. A notable absence in this survey of Italian wax portraiture would be the work of Medardo Rosso, however Schlosser, too, chose not to extend his exploration of the topic into the modern age. It was the eighteenth century that witnessed an expansion of wax portraiture on a scale incomparable in other periods, and the majority of portraits on display are eighteenth-century works.
Just as the subjects of the portraits on display are returned through the medium of wax from the dead (to rehearse a familiar trope in readings of wax portraiture), so this exhibition reanimates a history that could easily have been left unwritten, its evidence sentenced to remain forgotten indefinitely in storage. Indeed, it was only in the late 1970s that the harrowing portrait of Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, was rediscovered as a disheveled hunk of flesh in the storerooms of the Palazzo Reale in Naples. Similarly, the Palazzo Fortuny exhibition was triggered by the recent rediscovery in the storerooms of the Palazzo Mocenigo of the enchanting full-length portraits from the 1790s of two toddlers, evidently brother and sister and presumably belonging to a noble Venetian family. Although mentioned by Schlosser, they had gone unseen for decades. A whole room is dedicated to these diminutive beings, where they are complemented by a delightful anonymous portrait in oil paint that presents a compelling mirror to the wax figure of the young boy, prompting the suggestion that the sitter in each portrait is one and the same.
This juxtaposition of portraits in wax and oil is only one reminder of many afforded by the exhibition of just how incomplete our understanding of early modern portraiture could have been (and perhaps still is). That is, of course, were it not for Schlosser’s instinct – and that of his generation, most notably Aby Warburg, whose 1902 foray into the topic of wax portraiture, Bildniskunst und Florentinisches Bürgertum (‘The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie’), must also be acknowledged alongside Schlosser’s longer contribution – to salvage those elements of visual culture that had passed under the radar of the art historical canon.
The exhibition is not arranged chronologically, perhaps a nod to the anachronistic quality of the wax medium, the double-edged sword that provides answers both to why the medium has captivated the human gaze since the very first Ancient Roman imagines, and why it was excommunicated from a history of art that privileged stylistic progression. Instead, it loosely groups the works according to the various contexts in which they were created.
The exhibition opens by invoking the ancient association of wax portraiture with funerary ritual, aptly introduced by the haunting description of Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo’s fragile complexion as recorded in his death mask, his eyes fused closed for eternity. This essential prelude in the history of wax portraiture is thoughtfully counterbalanced with portraits of royal and aristocratic sitters that in the eighteenth century cohabited their patrons’ domestic interiors. These likenesses present a take-no-prisoners rendition of the stately portrait, as testified by the warts that decorate the temples of the aforementioned Queen of Naples, and the ponderous chin of Victoria of Savoy-Soissons.
The second space in the exhibition considers the application of wax portraiture in both religious and quasi-scientific contexts. The installation hinges on a juxtaposition of twelve Capuchin saints from the Redentore on the Giudecca with twelve portraits of criminals created as fodder for Cesare Lombroso’s atavistic approach to forensic anthropology, inviting comparison of the role of wax portraiture in these respective epistemologies.
The exhibition continues with a section that showcases portraits created by wax modellers whose primary stock in trade was the production of anatomical models. Among the works on display in this section is the only example of a portrait that exists by Clemente Susini, revealing another side to a wax modeler most famous for his Anatomical Venuses. In doing so, this section acknowledges the close relation between wax portraiture and anatomical models that enjoyed tremendous popularity among medical professionals and the general public alike in eighteenth-century Europe.
Following the final room, occupied by the pendant portraits of the anonymous Venetian boy and girl, a post scriptum to the exhibition awaits the more intrepid visitor. Off the end of a suitably atmospheric corridor that gapes out onto a canal, visitors can sit down to Paul Leni’s silent film Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (‘Waxworks’, 1924). This is clearly intended to round off the greeting offered in the opening wall text of the exhibition: ‘Welcome to the wax museum’. However, these references to the wax museum seem somewhat superfluous, not least in light of the fact that, as we learn from the catalogue, unlike in other European territories the phenomenon of the popular wax exhibition never really took hold in eighteenth-century Italy, despite a longstanding tradition of wax figures in religious contexts (for example, the tableaux at the Sacro Monte di Varallo and the Neapolitan presepi tradition). There is no doubt that the history of the popular wax exhibition is a fundamental facet of the history of the medium of wax, and certainly a history of wax portraiture cannot and must not be entirely divorced from it. Nonetheless, perhaps there is a reason why Schlosser touches on the topic only insofar as it is necessary to map out the broader narrative of what he terms the ‘democratization’ of wax portraiture, and no more. To venture into the extensively documented history of wax museums is to open a Pandora’s box that threatens to overshadow the much more obscure history of wax portraiture that falls beyond this framework, and which is represented by the majority of portraits in this exhibition. More to the point, what this exhibition so successfully demonstrates is that the latter can hold its own.
A crowning achievement of the exhibition is the accompanying catalogue, available in both Italian and English, and gloriously illustrated with lavish colour images of all the works on display. An eclectic collection of four essays – an historical overview of early modern wax portraiture from the Italian perspective, a vivid account of the materiality of wax in its manifold applications during the same period, as well as brief examinations of the tradition of funeral effigies and the engagement with wax sculpture in literature – provide a broad cultural-historical backdrop to the ensuing catalogue entries. Each entry is accompanied by an enlightening commentary and meticulous bibliography. In some cases this is the first time that photographs, let alone colour photographs, of the portraits at hand have been published, immediately securing this publication’s status as an invaluable resource for scholars of wax portraiture for years to come. In raising the profile of wax portraiture as a field of research, perhaps more institutions will be encouraged allow their wax portraits more frequent airings. There can be no more fitting gratification of Schlosser’s Versuch than that.
‘Avere Una Bella Cera: Le Figure in Cera a Venezia e in Italia’ is at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice from 10 March to 25 June 2012.