PLEASE NOTE: Orders placed between November 8 to November 17 will NOT be fulfilled or shipped until November 18-20th. We appreciate your understanding



Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure by Roberta Panzanelli

Regular price $200.00

Shipping calculated at checkout.

Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure
Edited by Roberta Panzanelli
Text by Roberta Panzanelli, Joan B. Landes, Uta Kornmeier, Lyle Massey, Whitney Davis, Sharon Hecker, Georges Didi-Huberman & Julius von Schlosser

4to. pp. 328. 40 colour & 87 b/w illustrations. index. hardcover. dw. (near fine - some light wear to bottom edge of binding & dw.). [Los Angeles]: The Getty Research Institute, [2008].

ISBN-10: 0892368772 / ISBN-13:9780892368778 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________


The material history of wax is a history of disappearance—wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since ancient times—from phallic amulets offered to heal distressing conditions and life-size votive images crammed inside candlelit churches by the faithful, to exquisitely detailed anatomical specimens used for training doctors and Medardo Rosso’s “melting” portraits.
The critical history of wax, however, is fraught with gaps and controversies. After Giorgio Vasari, the subject of wax sculpture was abandoned by art historians; in the twentieth century it once again sparked intellectual interest, only soon to vanish. The authors of the eight essays in Ephemeral Bodies—including the first English translation of Julius von Schlosser’s seminal “History of Portraiture in Wax” (1910–11)—break new ground as they explore wax reproductions of the body or body parts and assess their conceptual ambiguity, material impermanence, and implications for the history of Western art.