Anatomical Models: A History of Disappearance?

Abstract

In her introduction to Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, Roberta Panzanelli presents the history of wax as “a history of disappearance—transformed, softened, liquefied, and sometimes lost forever”. Wax objects are today seldom part of our environment. Apart from some popular museums, such as Tussaud’s, wax models are no longer used, no longer in vogue, and this is most particularly the case for wax anatomical models which used to be the pride of eighteenth- and nineteenth-...