We have heard of many curious deceptions occasioned by the imitative
powers of wax-work. A series of anatomical sculptures in coloured wax
was projected by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, under the direction of
Fontana. Twenty apartments have been filled with those curious
imitations. They represent in every possible detail, and in each
successive stage of denudation, the organs of sense and reproduction;
the muscular, the vascular, the nervous, and the bony system. They
imitate equally well the form, and more exactly the colouring, of nature
than injected preparations; and they have been employed to perpetuate
many transient phenomena of disease, of which no other art could have
made so lively a record.[61]
There is a species of wax-work, which, though it can hardly claim the
honours of the fine arts, is adapted to afford much pleasure--I mean
figures of wax, which may be modelled with great truth of character.
Menage has noticed a work of this kind. In the year 1675, the Duke de
Maine received a gilt cabinet, about the size of a moderate table. On
the door was inscribed, "_The Apartment of Wit_." The inside exhibited
an alcove and a long gallery. In an arm-chair was seated the figure of
the duke himself, composed of wax, the resemblance the most perfect
imaginable. On one side stood the Duke de la Rochefoucault, to whom he
presented a paper of verses for his examination. M. de Marsillac, and
Bossuet bishop of Meaux, were standing near the arm-chair. In the
alcove, Madame de Thianges and Madame de la Fayette sat retired, reading
a book. Boileau, the satirist, stood at the door of the gallery,
hindering seven or eight bad poets from entering. Near Boileau stood
Racine, who seemed to beckon to La Fontaine to come forwards. All these
figures were formed of wax; and this philosophical baby-house,
interesting for the personages it imitated, might induce a wish in some
philosophers to play once more with one.
There was lately an old canon at Cologne who made a collection of small
wax models of characteristic figures, such as personifications of
Misery, in a haggard old man with a scanty crust and a brown jug before
him; or of Avarice, in a keen-looking Jew miser counting his gold: which
were done with such a spirit and reality that a Flemish painter, a
Hogarth or Wilkie, could hardly have worked up the _feeling_ of the
figure more impressively. "All these were done with truth and expression
which I could not have imagined the wax capable of exhibiting," says the
lively writer of "An Autumn near the Rhine." There is something very
infantine in this taste; but I lament that it is very rarely gratified
by such close copiers of nature as was this old canon of Cologne.