“Something more than a portrait”: Antoine Benoist’s wax sculpture in Louis XIV’s France

Something More than a Portrait": Antoine Benoist's Wax Sculpture in Louis XIV's FranceNothing remains of Antoine Benoist's Cercle royal, a display of life-scaled wax figures, bewigged and clothed, on view in Paris over the course of Louis XIV's reign.Only one of Benoist's wax fabrications survives, a profile relief depicting Louis XIV in old age (Chateau de Versailles, c.1705).This singular royal portrait has fascinated and confounded commentators for its seemingly irreverent depiction of the king's scarred and wrinkled skin in the visceral particularity of polychrome wax.This dissertation examines the reception of Benoist's waxworks, which were alternately celebrated as vivid miracles or derided as deceitful trivialities.The contested verisimilitude of Benoist's sculptural practice provides an informatively problematic case for considering complications of replicative materiality for both art theory and royal representation under absolutism.In his seemingly commonplace account of melting wax, Descartes was also writing himself into the lineage of canonical philosophical inquiry.Aristotle's model of wax impression as a metaphor for sensory perception was repeated and developed by a series of prominent thinkers over centuries.4 Aristotle presented wax at key moments in his treatise on the soul, De Anima, to characterize the mind's fluctuating streams of thought and perception.He compared the intellect's latent potential to a yet untouched grammateion, a writing tablet painted with a layer of wax, designed to be etched with a stylus.This metaphor was sublimated in subsequent philosophical tradition through the Latin translation of grammateion as tabula rasa.5 The material specificity of Aristotle's image for sensory perception, of a signet ring impressed in wax, was the subject of prominent interest and commentary for subsequent generations of readers.6 Within this sequence of citations, however, Descartes inverted the analogy.It was not the mind that was impressionable as warm wax, formed in relation to the world perceived, but objects of apprehension that were given shape by the mind's schemas of comprehension.Wax's vulnerable solidity rendered it a potentially persuasive model of uncertain physicality.Toward the meditation's conclusion the narrator states that all observations on wax "may be applied to "everything else that exists outside of me." 7 Descartes's piece of wax is a metonym of materiality, in the sense that it is a small fragment that encapsulates a wide associative sphere.8 In this case, the sample is apt for demonstrating broader contradictory dynamics underlying our perception of matter.Like Descartes's scrutiny of one piece of wax (albeit hypothetical) as an informative, problematic sample of the material sphere, this dissertation concentrates on one wax object to investigate problematics of early modern materiality.My primary focus is Antoine Benoist's 1705 wax profile relief depicting Louis XIV (fig.0.1).It is the only surviving wax fabrication of a portraitist who 4 Didi-Huberman, "Wax Flesh, Vicious Circles," 64; Hecker, "Sealed between Us," 17. 5 Agamben, "Bartleby, or On Contingency," 244-45.6 Thomas Aquinas, for example, referenced Aristotle in comparing visual perception to the transfer of a seal's metallic image to wax.See Camille, "Before the Gaze," 209-10.7 Descartes, Meditations, 30.8 Susan Stewart demonstrates the referential dynamics of metonymy in On Longing, 136.

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