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– MARINA WARNER – in a very different way. The absent state of the transi might figure a condition of receptivity, like trance. Waxen verisimilitude lends itself naturally to depicting the transitional state, suspended in the no-time and elsewhere place between life and death.12 It is difficult to find good photographs of these predecessors of Snow White in their glass coffins, because they are considered sacred relics, still venerated, beyond blasphemous handling and investigation. According to the beliefs which invest them with this numen, they are furthermore natural wonders, bodies suspended in time; hence they cannot be defined as objets d’art because they prolong the material presence of real people. So such effigies have not made their way into the art history books – even into the most scholarly accounts of the history of wax, as far as I can see. The illusion of permanent sleep is invoked to deny the reality of death; with her rising and falling breast, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ functions as an anti-memento mori, positioned in the antechamber of the Great Hall where the images of great men (and a few women) appear to have conquered death through glory and fame. Sleep is a refuge from death; a deception which can cheat death itself. ‘The Sleeping Beauty’s’ false flesh offers a lens to the visitors through which to look at the waxworks to come. While these serve as eerie reminders that all flesh is grass (unless it be wax), and that even the most accurate and lifelike simulacra can never 116
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– On the Threshold – possess vitality itself, she promises immortality as the suspension of time. Hypnos, the god of sleep, was depicted winged; he offered imaginative flight; his presence evoked a journey to an elsewhere beyond the moment and the place. In this sense the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ waxwork is a vehicle of fantasy into which visitors step in order to travel to wonderland. More particularly, the sculpture was made during the rise in interest in states of unconsciousness, in suspended animation, neither sleep nor waking nor indeed coma, as under hypnosis. The theorist, magician, and healer Anton Mesmer enjoyed huge social esteem at the time, and when a commission was set up to investigate his theory and practice of mesmerism, no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin chaired it. The commission reported in 1784 that there was no foundation to Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism, but it allowed that therapeutic benefits could be achieved through the powers of the imagination. (Coincidentally, Franklin was one of the many Great Men who sat for Curtius for his portrait in wax.) The hypnotists who came after Mesmer in the late nineteenth century took the word over from the Greek word for sleep because they perceived a similarity between sleep and the form of suspended consciousness which their subjects experienced. The mind lowered its guard and became both suggestible and guileless; sensitivity to pain decreased, or even disappeared. A photo­graph, taken in 1845, shows a travelling 117

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– MARINA WARNER –

in a very different way. The absent state of the transi might figure a condition of receptivity, like trance. Waxen verisimilitude lends itself naturally to depicting the transitional state, suspended in the no-time and elsewhere place between life and death.12

It is difficult to find good photographs of these predecessors of Snow White in their glass coffins, because they are considered sacred relics, still venerated, beyond blasphemous handling and investigation. According to the beliefs which invest them with this numen, they are furthermore natural wonders, bodies suspended in time; hence they cannot be defined as objets d’art because they prolong the material presence of real people. So such effigies have not made their way into the art history books – even into the most scholarly accounts of the history of wax, as far as I can see.

The illusion of permanent sleep is invoked to deny the reality of death; with her rising and falling breast, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ functions as an anti-memento mori, positioned in the antechamber of the Great Hall where the images of great men (and a few women) appear to have conquered death through glory and fame. Sleep is a refuge from death; a deception which can cheat death itself. ‘The Sleeping Beauty’s’ false flesh offers a lens to the visitors through which to look at the waxworks to come. While these serve as eerie reminders that all flesh is grass (unless it be wax), and that even the most accurate and lifelike simulacra can never

116

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