Death Doesn't Lie
by David Jays
JULY 6, 2009 TAGS:
It’s hard to believe that this face once made Europe quake. I’m standing in front of Napoleon – or at least his death mask, in the British Museum in London. His steely determination and spark of dynamism have dissolved. His eyes are sunken, his cheek hollow, his lips hang slightly ajar. It’s a fallen face, and the story it tells is of defeat and exile.
Death doesn’t lie, so death masks – a cast of the face in wax or plaster, taken just hours after breath has gone – promise truthful representations of the departed. In an era before photography, these masks give us each beauty and blemish, a living presence in unchanging material. But how were they made? And what is their uncanny allure?
The most extensive American collection was donated to Princeton in 1897. Laurence Hutton, literary editor of Harper’s Magazine, had become enthralled by these remnants of the great when stumbling across a cast of Benjamin Franklin’s ruminative potato face. “While rummaging among the relics of an old curiosity shop,” (reported the New York Times), he caught the desk-mask bug, and travelled across Europe to cull casts from junk shops and major museums. Princeton’s (all-male) worthies include Washington and a whittled Lincoln, not to mention Tom Paine’s startlingly pugnacious conk.
It’s an exciting thought: We’re just a thin layer of plaster away from greatness. Wax, with its sheen of skin, brings us even closer, so it is hardly surprising that the great caster was also the waxwork entrepreneur, Mme. Tussaud. She was schooled in the waxen arts by her uncle, Philippe Curtius, a Swiss physician who turned his hobby into a lucrative trade.
Curtius moved to Paris with Marie, his niece and apprentice. They had a fashionable practice and opened a popular waxworks (the tableaux included the royal family at dinner in Versailles), but come the revolution they were commissioned to cast aristocratic heads fresh from the guillotine. When Marat was stabbed in his hip-bath, Marie was immediately summoned to immortalise this hero of the republic. Although she later claimed that only armed guards kept her casting “the demon’s features,” the resultant waxwork was displayed to the Parisian crowds. The painter David used Marat’s corpse for his own stark canvas, until the July heat necessitated its burial and he then painted from Tussaud’s waxwork.
One person’s bereavement is another’s opportunity. The sculptor Joseph Nollekens was known for mixing his plaster as soon as he noticed a notable death in the newspaper. Such masks made ghoulish souvenirs: Napoleon’s proved so popular that it could be bought with a collectible carrying-case. Even today, Keats House in London’s Hampstead sells a replica of the young poet’s life mask: My friend Tracy will tell you it remains the best gift I ever bought. Serene, full-lipped, the poet had a strong nose that leads like a prow into eternity (even though artist Benjamin Haydon despaired of setting the cast, as Keats would keep giggling).
Want to try this at home? To make a death-mask, the head is oiled (take care with the hair). Threads are often embedded in the wax or plaster, to help remove the mold in neat sections. Life-masks use the same process (Renaissance sculptor Cennino Cennini prescribed rosewater to add a pleasant perfume). Samuel Pepys, dedicated follower of fashion, described how it felt to be cast in 1669: “I was vexed to be forced to daub all my face over with Pomatum [scented ointment],” he told his diary, “but it was pretty to feel how soft and easy it is done on the face, and by and by, by degrees, how hard it becomes, that you cannot break it, and sets so close that you cannot pull it off, and yet so easy that is as soft as a pillow.”
For Pepys, curiosity overcame claustrophobia: Other living subjects disliked the oil, close-setting darkness, and breathing through straws stuck up the nostrils. The dead, of course, rarely complain. Curtius and Tussaud worked at unsentimental speed through the French revolution. Although Mme. du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, met the guillotine with an unsightly grimace, in the cemetery Curtius pinched her lips into a charming smile. Then he poured warm wax onto the graveside turf, and rolled the head into it. Grisly job done.
Before they were used for art and sensational shivers, death masks had a funereal function. In patrician Rome, for example, a wax mask was worn by someone who closely resembled the deceased, while others wore masks of his forbears. According to Pliny, these masks were kept in a special cupboard, an ancestral congregation awaiting the next funeral. Effigies of British monarchs were also displayed at their funerals: As a child I was fascinated by the proximity to these foreboding models in the vaults of Westminster Abbey.
To look closely at these masks is to see the mighty fall. Napoleon’s great adversary, the Duke of Wellington, looks equally diminished in death, a quavery old man (though with an undeniably smug grin). In the library of London’s National Portrait Gallery, staff puckishly directed me towards their “box of death”: a file box full of matters morbid. Underneath a fat folder of widows, I found the death mask photos. Some are truly startling – the painter J.M.W. Turner looks less a prophet than an old loon, his mouth dwindling in its last exhalation, the eyes that apprehended sea and sunset sunken.
Other collections are more particular: The Midland County Historical Museum offers up outlaws like Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, caught in abrupt death. As with so many relics, doubts remain about their authenticity, as they do with a supposed Shakespeare unearthed in Darmstadt, Germany. American artist William Page, commissioned to paint heads of Christ and Shakespeare in the 1870s, convinced himself that this was the Bard’s true visage, but few scholars concur.
Death masks fix the short period between last breath and visible decay. The body molders, but the face remains forever, though lacking life’s vital spark. Some artists disdained the use of face casts when preparing a portrait: David d’Anger said loftily that “molding from nature never renders the man. It has to be molded through the brain of the artist.”
For the Victorians, the masks were less about art than a pseudo-scientific cousin to phrenology – the study of physiognomy and the skull’s lumps and bumps that were thought to unlock the essential personality. Andrew Combe (later Queen Victoria’s physician) and his brother assembled a collection in Edinburgh that pursued a bifurcated notoriety: split between revered artists and scientists, and lurid felons like the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. You could gaze at Newton’s noble brow, then a murderer’s thuggish frown, and imagine the genius or malignancy clustered within. The so-called “Black Museum” in Scotland Yard, closed to the general public, similarly gathers heads of the wicked among its grim artifacts designed to inform and intimidate new police recruits.
Few celebrities, whether admired or infamous, are cast nowadays – a rare late example was George Bernard Shaw in 1950. His friend Lady Nancy Astor arranged his mask while he was lying in the chapel of rest, dressed in mauve pajamas. She had already invited reporters to view the body, declaring, “I think you ought to see him, he looks so lovely.” In his death mask, Shaw’s whirring mind will look beatific for eternity.
David Jays writes on books, film and performance. For more details, see www.artsjournal.com/performancemonkey
Death doesn’t lie, so death masks – a cast of the face in wax or plaster, taken just hours after breath has gone – promise truthful representations of the departed. In an era before photography, these masks give us each beauty and blemish, a living presence in unchanging material. But how were they made? And what is their uncanny allure?The most extensive American collection was donated to Princeton in 1897. Laurence Hutton, literary editor of Harper’s Magazine, had become enthralled by these remnants of the great when stumbling across a cast of Benjamin Franklin’s ruminative potato face. “While rummaging among the relics of an old curiosity shop,” (reported the New York Times), he caught the desk-mask bug, and travelled across Europe to cull casts from junk shops and major museums. Princeton’s (all-male) worthies include Washington and a whittled Lincoln, not to mention Tom Paine’s startlingly pugnacious conk.
It’s an exciting thought: We’re just a thin layer of plaster away from greatness. Wax, with its sheen of skin, brings us even closer, so it is hardly surprising that the great caster was also the waxwork entrepreneur, Mme. Tussaud. She was schooled in the waxen arts by her uncle, Philippe Curtius, a Swiss physician who turned his hobby into a lucrative trade.
Curtius moved to Paris with Marie, his niece and apprentice. They had a fashionable practice and opened a popular waxworks (the tableaux included the royal family at dinner in Versailles), but come the revolution they were commissioned to cast aristocratic heads fresh from the guillotine. When Marat was stabbed in his hip-bath, Marie was immediately summoned to immortalise this hero of the republic. Although she later claimed that only armed guards kept her casting “the demon’s features,” the resultant waxwork was displayed to the Parisian crowds. The painter David used Marat’s corpse for his own stark canvas, until the July heat necessitated its burial and he then painted from Tussaud’s waxwork.
One person’s bereavement is another’s opportunity. The sculptor Joseph Nollekens was known for mixing his plaster as soon as he noticed a notable death in the newspaper. Such masks made ghoulish souvenirs: Napoleon’s proved so popular that it could be bought with a collectible carrying-case. Even today, Keats House in London’s Hampstead sells a replica of the young poet’s life mask: My friend Tracy will tell you it remains the best gift I ever bought. Serene, full-lipped, the poet had a strong nose that leads like a prow into eternity (even though artist Benjamin Haydon despaired of setting the cast, as Keats would keep giggling).
Want to try this at home? To make a death-mask, the head is oiled (take care with the hair). Threads are often embedded in the wax or plaster, to help remove the mold in neat sections. Life-masks use the same process (Renaissance sculptor Cennino Cennini prescribed rosewater to add a pleasant perfume). Samuel Pepys, dedicated follower of fashion, described how it felt to be cast in 1669: “I was vexed to be forced to daub all my face over with Pomatum [scented ointment],” he told his diary, “but it was pretty to feel how soft and easy it is done on the face, and by and by, by degrees, how hard it becomes, that you cannot break it, and sets so close that you cannot pull it off, and yet so easy that is as soft as a pillow.”For Pepys, curiosity overcame claustrophobia: Other living subjects disliked the oil, close-setting darkness, and breathing through straws stuck up the nostrils. The dead, of course, rarely complain. Curtius and Tussaud worked at unsentimental speed through the French revolution. Although Mme. du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, met the guillotine with an unsightly grimace, in the cemetery Curtius pinched her lips into a charming smile. Then he poured warm wax onto the graveside turf, and rolled the head into it. Grisly job done.
Before they were used for art and sensational shivers, death masks had a funereal function. In patrician Rome, for example, a wax mask was worn by someone who closely resembled the deceased, while others wore masks of his forbears. According to Pliny, these masks were kept in a special cupboard, an ancestral congregation awaiting the next funeral. Effigies of British monarchs were also displayed at their funerals: As a child I was fascinated by the proximity to these foreboding models in the vaults of Westminster Abbey.
To look closely at these masks is to see the mighty fall. Napoleon’s great adversary, the Duke of Wellington, looks equally diminished in death, a quavery old man (though with an undeniably smug grin). In the library of London’s National Portrait Gallery, staff puckishly directed me towards their “box of death”: a file box full of matters morbid. Underneath a fat folder of widows, I found the death mask photos. Some are truly startling – the painter J.M.W. Turner looks less a prophet than an old loon, his mouth dwindling in its last exhalation, the eyes that apprehended sea and sunset sunken.
Other collections are more particular: The Midland County Historical Museum offers up outlaws like Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, caught in abrupt death. As with so many relics, doubts remain about their authenticity, as they do with a supposed Shakespeare unearthed in Darmstadt, Germany. American artist William Page, commissioned to paint heads of Christ and Shakespeare in the 1870s, convinced himself that this was the Bard’s true visage, but few scholars concur.
Death masks fix the short period between last breath and visible decay. The body molders, but the face remains forever, though lacking life’s vital spark. Some artists disdained the use of face casts when preparing a portrait: David d’Anger said loftily that “molding from nature never renders the man. It has to be molded through the brain of the artist.”For the Victorians, the masks were less about art than a pseudo-scientific cousin to phrenology – the study of physiognomy and the skull’s lumps and bumps that were thought to unlock the essential personality. Andrew Combe (later Queen Victoria’s physician) and his brother assembled a collection in Edinburgh that pursued a bifurcated notoriety: split between revered artists and scientists, and lurid felons like the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. You could gaze at Newton’s noble brow, then a murderer’s thuggish frown, and imagine the genius or malignancy clustered within. The so-called “Black Museum” in Scotland Yard, closed to the general public, similarly gathers heads of the wicked among its grim artifacts designed to inform and intimidate new police recruits.
Few celebrities, whether admired or infamous, are cast nowadays – a rare late example was George Bernard Shaw in 1950. His friend Lady Nancy Astor arranged his mask while he was lying in the chapel of rest, dressed in mauve pajamas. She had already invited reporters to view the body, declaring, “I think you ought to see him, he looks so lovely.” In his death mask, Shaw’s whirring mind will look beatific for eternity.
David Jays writes on books, film and performance. For more details, see www.artsjournal.com/performancemonkey
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COMMENTS (1)
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Dominique H. Vasseur wrote on July 13, 2009 9:26am
For the record, Madame Dubarry was Louis XV's mistress, not Louis XVI's. Louis XVI, who was married to Marie Antoinette, was reportedly a devoted husband and had no mistresses. [Report Comment]
