How a 3D Model Helped an Artist Capture Light and Movement

Nicolas Poussin’s paintings often began inside a box.

He’d mold his subjects out of wax or clay and place them inside a wooden box—a diorama with miniature windows and shutters. Like a choreographer, Poussin arranged the wax figures in various positions, trying out different compositions and studying how light fell on them. In this way, his ideas sprang to life in three dimensions before the first drops of paint even touched the canvas.

For the new Getty Museum exhibition Poussin and the Dance, Los Angeles-based artist Alexander Mihaylovich set out to make a beeswax model based on a drawing Poussin made in preparation for his paintings of The Abduction of the Sabine Women. This model, along with the drawing on which it was based, and Poussin’s 1633–34 painting of the same theme, will go on display in the exhibition to show visitors how Poussin’s artistic process flowed from wax diorama to drawing, to painting.

Poussin was part of a long tradition of artists who created three-dimensional models to prepare for their paintings. Unlike many other artists, however, Poussin created models consistently, for almost every picture he made starting in the 1630s. He also seems to have started with wax sculptures, rather than drawings.

Mihaylovich not only discovered firsthand the challenges and fun of reverse-engineering a beeswax model from a 400-year-old drawing, but he also got an inside look at how Poussin’s artistic process infused his paintings with life and depth.

“I was always fond of Poussin. He’s one of my heroes,” Mihaylovich said. “I learned to appreciate his work far more by understanding how he thought in 3D.”

Trial and Error

Mihaylovich had created didactic reproductions of various ancient objects (replicas that can be touched and used for teaching) for past Getty exhibitions and had even painted his own spin on Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds featuring Getty staff as the shepherds for exhibitions at the National Museums of Stockholm and Helsinki, so he was a natural choice to tackle this project.

After about a year of delays due to COVID-19, he began by creating beeswax figures that demonstrated how he envisioned the model. But curator Emily Beeny explained that these figures were too detailed—they didn’t need facial features, fingers, or toes, just simple shapes. After all, Poussin wasn’t a particularly skilled sculptor, and these models were meant to help him work out composition and lighting, not meticulous details of the figures themselves.

So Mihaylovich got to work with beeswax, a notoriously difficult medium Poussin himself used. It must be heated in order to make it malleable, otherwise it’s rock-hard.

“I first used my oven at home, which proved to be a little nasty because when I popped in a casserole later, it smelled like beeswax,” he laughed. “It was awful.”

He adopted a different strategy, wrapping the wax block in foil and putting it out on his terrace in the sun to gently warm it up. That worked like a charm. He also bought a few different colors of silk from a fabric store in Santa Monica, and used tiny pieces moistened with water to mold drapery around the figures. Finally, he drew a backdrop on 17th-century paper he found in Paris at a flea market in ink wash, imitating the background on the original drawing.

Revising the Diorama

After creating a “first draft,” Mihaylovich invited Beeny to his studio to provide feedback. Beeny suggested removing some of the fabric to expose more of the figures’ bodies, which she felt was more authentic. However, she liked to be able to see the butterfly pins holding the fabric in place, which could help viewers understand how Poussin pieced together his models. She also proclaimed that the horse, rising on its hind legs as it charged forward, was “too good.”

“I said, ‘Emily, I had so much fun doing this horse, what am I supposed to do?’” Mihaylovich said. “I made a few changes, but she said, ‘You know what, I’m going to give you that.’”

The violence depicted in The Abduction of the Sabine Women also needed to translate to the wax figures. Poussin based the painting on a violent story from Roman mythology. In an effort to build the population of the newly founded Rome, the Roman leader Romulus invited the neighboring Sabine people to a festival; then, he and his soldiers forcibly took the women as wives. The painting captures that brutal moment. Beeny felt that some of the women in the model didn’t appear to be as fearful as they should be as one of the male figures runs towards them, so Mihaylovich reheated the figures and pushed them forward a few millimeters, creating a greater sense of panic and struggle.

“Poussin perfectly illustrated their fear and terror in his rough sketch,” Mihaylovich said. “It’s a terrible scene, but we had to approach it from a different, less emotional standpoint to get it right as to how he saw it.”

Bringing the Exhibition to Life

After making the suggested revisions, Mihaylovich brought his wax model to the Getty Center. Getty carpenter John O’Bright built a wooden box to house the backdrop, wax figures, and pedestals, just as Poussin did for his wax models. The box features shutters and an LED light that help demonstrate how Poussin studied the way light fell upon the model. There was an accident or two when a few appendages fell off, but luckily Mihaylovich brought his mini torch so he could reheat and fix the models.

After placing himself back in time and into the middle of Poussin’s artistic process, Mihaylovich came to appreciate how Poussin used models to create the illusion of depth in his paintings, while also working out the lighting, the colors, and the choreography of his subjects’ movements. Mihaylovich challenged visitors to look at the drawing, then the model, and imagine the 17th-century sun coming through the window and notice the sense of three-dimensionality of The Abduction of the Sabine Women.

“My hope is that people walk around it and see it for what it is: a brilliant compositional tool for these master works,” Mihaylovich said. “I hope the public reacts how I reacted: that it will inspire them to look at these works a different way.”

See the wax model and The Abduction of the Sabine Women in Poussin and the Dance at the Getty Center from February 15-May 8, 2022. The exhibition was organized with the National Gallery of London, which tapped British artists Andrew Lacey and Siân Phillips to make their own wax model of a different Poussin painting.