Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature

Wax Works

Lynn M. Maxwell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030169329
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

This book explores the role of wax as an important conceptual material used to work out the nature and limits of the early modern human. By surveying the use of wax in early modern cultural spaces such as the stage and the artist's studio and in literary and philosophical texts, including those by William Shakespeare, John Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, and Edmund Spenser, this book shows that wax is a flexible material employed to define, explore, and problematize a wide variety of early modern relations including the relationship of man and God, man and woman, mind and the world, and man and machine.

© The Author(s) 2019

L. M. MaxwellWax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern LiteratureEarly Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16932-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Wax Concepts

Lynn M. Maxwell¹

(1)

Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, USA

Lynn M. Maxwell

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In Tintoretto’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1577), the Savior swoops in to rescue the beleaguered saint from the devils who tempt him.¹ While the painting captures all of the figures in suspended motion—Anthony reaches up toward heaven, as the devils clutch at him and simultaneously twist away from the light—it is the Christ figure that arrests the viewer’s eye. The foreshortened form seems on the verge of soaring through the canvas; arms outstretched with mercy and radiating light, he is a figure of hope and power for saint and viewer alike (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Tintoretto, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1577–1588, San Trovaso, Venice (photographed by Didier Descouens / https://​creativecommons.​org/​licenses/​by-sa/​4.​0/​legalcode)

At first glance, this masterpiece of oil and canvas seems to have nothing to do with wax; yet wax played an integral part in Tintoretto’s process. As Carlo Ridolfi explains in Le Maraviglie dell’arte (1648), Tintoretto learned about perspective and light through wax. He discovered that:

by making little models out of wax or clay and dressing them in scraps of cloth and carefully draping them so that the folds emphasized the shape of the limbs. These small models he placed in little houses and perspective boxes. He would place little lights in the windows so that light and shade would be produced. Still other models he suspended from the beams of his ceiling. This enabled him to observe the effect they made when seen from below, from which he learned how to make foreshortenings for ceiling frescoes.²

Tintoretto’s models provided him with perfectly manipulable subjects, figures that he could push beyond the limits of human models and view from unlikely and extreme angles. Lightweight enough to seem unaffected by gravity, such figures might have allowed Tintoretto to study the possibilities of a human body in flight and ultimately convey the Savior’s power and dynamism. Tintoretto’s dramatic forms in flight were technical achievements, as Marco Boschini remarks in Ricche Minere della Pittura Venezia (1674): “difficult as foreshortening is on a flat surface, it is still more difficult to do in the air. Nor can one make statues fly. But our learned Venetian painters make human figures fly.”³ By freeing his figures from the constraints of gravity, Tintoretto pushed the limits of perspective and canvas, conveying truths about the human form in motion that revolutionized the visual arts.

Almost a hundred years later, at a crucial moment in the Meditations (1641), René Descartes takes up wax to discover what it is possible to know about it as a material object. What starts as a seemingly insignificant inquiry into the nature of wax becomes an investigation into the nature and limits of the human mind and by extension the human. He begins by describing a specific piece of wax in detail; the wax “has just been taken from the honeycomb; it has not yet quite lost the taste of the honey; it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered; its colour, shape, and size are plain to see; it is hard, cold and can be handled without difficulty.”⁴ He then applies fire to the wax and registers how completely the wax has changed in every material attribute: “the residual taste is eliminated, the smell goes away, the colour changes, the shape is lost, the size increases; it becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly touch it, and if you strike it, it no longer makes a sound.”⁵ The experiment has transformed the wax and his knowledge of it, leading Descartes to conclude that the true nature of wax must inhere in those qualities that remain once you “take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible, and changeable.”⁶ Since these qualities of extension, flexibility, and changeability can only be comprehended in the mind and reveal more about the nature and existence of the mind than of the wax, his consideration of wax leads to his cogito, a foundational moment for philosophy that severs subject from object and establishes the priority of the individual mind.

These two uses of wax are fundamentally different from each other—one involves actual wax models, the other uses wax metaphorically; one seeks to understand the human body, the other the human mind—and yet both artist and philosopher seem to be using wax to discover on some level the nature and limits of humanity. Together they begin to suggest the power of wax as a conceptual material in the early modern period. This book is about that power. With Tintoretto we will consider how wax figures can teach us about human ones, with Descartes we will contemplate the nature of wax and what it might teach us about the human mind and the relationship of man and God, man and woman, mind and the world, and man and machine. We will read wax in a variety of early modern cultural spaces such as the stage and the artist’s studio and in literary and philosophical texts, including those by William Shakespeare, John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, and Edmund Spenser, ultimately discovering that just as wax was vital to the projects of both Tintoretto and Descartes; it was also integral to early modern attempts to understand human relationality and what it might mean to be human.

1.1 Conceiving Wax

First though, we must pause over wax itself and consider, like Descartes, what kind of a material it is. Descartes begins to answer that question when he defines wax as an “extended, flexible, and changeable” substance.⁷ This definition highlights wax’s malleability, perhaps its most salient quality, and without a doubt the quality that matters most for Descartes’ own project. Indeed, wax has a long history in philosophy as a material to model the mind, in part because of wax’s capacity for change. Similarly, as we saw with Tintoretto, wax proves useful in the artist’s studio because it can be easily molded into different shapes. Throughout this book, we will think about the importance of wax’s malleability. For now, it is enough to register the importance of the simple fact that wax waxes.

Descartes’ narrative also reveals wax’s status as a natural material. Again, as we saw earlier, the wax that he holds in his hand has “just been taken from the honeycomb; it has not yet lost the taste of honey; it retains some scent of the flowers from which it was gathered.”⁸ As Descartes’ brief description begins to reveal, early modern ideas about wax production do not align perfectly with modern science. While we now know that wax is produced by bees whose glands convert sugar into little white flakes which are secreted, masticated, and then used to construct honeycomb, early moderns followed Aristotle in believing that wax was gathered by bees.⁹ In his History of Animals, Aristotle writes, “the honeycomb is made from flowers, and the materials for the wax they gather from the resinous gum of trees, while honey is what falls from the air, and is deposited chiefly at the risings of the constellations or when a rainbow is in the sky.”¹⁰ Later in the same volume, Aristotle revisits the question of wax, explaining “Bees scramble up the stalks of flowers and rapidly gather the bees-wax with their front legs; the front legs wipe it off on to the middle legs, and these pass it on to the hollow curves of the hind-legs; when thus laden, they fly away home, and one may see plainly that their load is a heavy one.”¹¹ We can hear echoes of Aristotle in early bee-keeping treatises. In Thomas Hill’s A pleasaunt instruction of the parfit ordering of Bees (1568), he glosses over the details, writing that on “a cleare and fayre morning … [The bees] flye forth and returne againe to their hyues, laden with the substance of the flowers on their legges.”¹² Rev. Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie (1609) is more detailed in its treatment. According to Butler, “the wax they gather with their fágs” or flaps.¹³ Once they have gathered it, the same “being kept soft with the heat of their little bodies, of the aire, and of their hiues is easily wrought into combs.”¹⁴ While the difference in believing wax to be a product gathered from flowers, or produced by bees might seem subtle, it impacts literary representations of wax in the early modern period. For example, In The Second Part of Henry the Fourth , King Henry likens fathers to bees:

Our thighs packed with wax, our mouths with honey,

We bring it to the hive; and, like the bees

Are murdered for our pains.

¹⁵

Shakespeare depicts worker bees as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Wax Concepts
• 2. Wax Seals: Gendered Relations in Shakespeare
• 3. Wax Minds: Writing Subjectivity and Agency in Hamlet and The Atheist’s Tragedy
• 4. Wax Patterning: Cavendish and the Physics of Wax
• 5. Wax Arts: Projects of Transformation in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Donne’s Sappho to Philaenis
• 6. Wax Hybrids: Re-thinking Subjects and Objects in Ovid, Paré, Descartes, and Spenser
• 7. Epilogue: A Figure of Wax
• Back Matter