Material, deformation and European art history: A note on “The Wax Person” by Yuri Tynianov

Abstract

In his theoretical works, Yuri Tynianov described the creation of an artistic work as an almost violent deformation of the material by a semantic construction invented by the author. Nevertheless, study of literary texts written by Tynianov shows that in his own artistic practice he used to find in the material itself a kind of “clue” that made the material suitable for deformation. One of these “hints” is analyzed in this article. This is one of the initial fragments of his well known novella “The Wax Person” (published in 1931), where the author uses a famous episode from the history of Renaissance archeology — the discovery in 1485 of the corpse of a young Roman woman which astounded contemporaries with its amazing state of preservation. In the fragment, analyzed in the article, Tynianov introduced an important motive — the body was so perfect that “some thought” it was a wax statue made by Raphael, Verrocchio or Orsino Benintendi, which is clearly the prefiguration of the fantasmatic posthumous presence of the deceased Peter the Great in the form of his wax effigy — that is, the most important part of the plot structure of the novella. However, in the evidence of the 1485 find there is nothing of the kind — that is why this motive requires interpretation. My analysis shows that the story of 1485 was embedded in Tynianov's novella due to an article published in 1883 by the famous Viennese art historian Henry Thode. In his article, Thode suggested that two portraits, a drawing of a female head from Vienna's Albertina (attributed to Raphael) and a wax portrait from the Lille Museum of Fine Arts (also attributed to Raphael, and. in addition, associated in some way with the works of Andrea Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi), were based on the body of the Roman woman found in 1485. It was in this study by Thode that the author of “The Wax Person” discovered the possibility of the semantic ambiguity which is most important for his novella and on which the story is based — a kind of confusion between the original and its wax image.