Wax doll making evolved from the art of sculpting religious figures and statues of wax to represent characters in a nativity scene, saints, and revered martyrs and clergy. Sculptors also used wax to represent people who had died. In the late 1700s, the uncle of Madame Tussaud in Paris made figures of the first victims of the French Revolution, and for centuries, bereaved parents with means commissioned artists to make wax figures resembling their deceased children. It is perhaps the eerie lifelike properties of wax that draw millions of visitors to wax museums all over the world.