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At the end of the 17th century, working in Bologna’s hospital morgues, the Sicilian sculptor Gaetano Giulio Zumbo became the first artist to make anatomical teaching models using coloured wax. The head of an executed criminal, his mouth open and eyes frozen in the final spasm of death, is rendered in wax moulded over a real human skull, the epidermis removed to show the man as machine beneath. Until then, waxworks were largely confined to life-size effigies of saints and anatomical ex-votos, sometimes depicting limbs and organs. The art historian Aby Warburg thought that the individualised portrait that emerged in the Renaissance built on this ‘fetishism of the waxwork cult’. In the 18th century wax began to be used by artists working in tandem with anatomists for scientific purposes.