A Guide to Eighteenth Century Art

subjects. This “naturalism” was often acknowledged as an artifice, due to the fact that living flesh was
represented in hard marble, but one that required great skill on the part of the sculptor. Wax busts were
also renowned for their realism, which often attained the level of trompe l’oeil. They were often used in
funerals or, in the Revolution, to record the severed heads of guillotine victims: they conveyed
associations of an eternal alertness that upset conventional distinctions of the real and the represented
(Goudie, 2013, 57–74).