HISTORICAL WAX MUSEUM
The idea of theatres of spectacle in which, usually on market days, people could see horrible stories, ill-famed crime stories, and other historical stories "worth remembering", performed with the help of wax statuettes in costumes and still lives, originates from the popular culture of the early modern period. The forerunners of museums, apart from real relics of the natural and human world, also applied statues as copies after nature. The celebrated wax statue collection of the Russian tsar represented various monstrosities of his own time (killers, freaks of nature, the smallest and biggest man on earth, etc.). Wax museums are the modern products of theatres of spectacle. In them we find intertwined the didactic need to transmit historical traditions, the smuggling of spectacular theatrical show-elements into the museums, and the creation of the atmosphere of a historical era with 3D-technology. This otherwise static scenery at time helps to fill a medieval site with "life", or at least the authors think so. In Hungary there are wax museums evoking Hungarian kings and rulers in Visegrád, Esztergom, Keszthely, Eger, Tihany, and Nagyvázsony, while in Székesfehérvár there were plans to revive the coronation and burial site of Hungarian kings as a wax museum. A similar motive lies behind the creation of the Belgrade wax museum presenting the Serbian Orthodox saints and rulers, and that of the wax pantheon in Prague depicting the Czech rulers. |
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