Death: might as well face it
If this really is the death mask of James Dean, he looked a lot like Brad Pitt, wouldn’t you say?
I was thinking about having a death mask done (after I’m dead, of course) when all of a sudden I heard some horrifying news: JMW Turner’s death mask had been stolen!
Well, actually, the “news” was that it still hasn’t been recovered four years after it was reported missing, and furthermore, it probably went missing sometime in the mid-1980s, and anyway, there’s another one in safe keeping.
If all this sounds stupid, don’t blame me, because the Royal Academy of Arts in London started it. It finally dawned on the people who run the place – where old Turner once held sway as president 150-odd years earlier – that they hadn’t seen his ugly mug in ages.
Evidently they were tidying up, “cataloguing 17,000 artworks, a process which will be completed in 2007″, and realised the mask was last on the books way back when disco was a boy, “when it was moved between store rooms at the academy’s base at Burlington House, Piccadilly”.
A spokeswoman told the press that the Royal Academy “was confident the mask would be found”. That was in 2003.
Fortunately, a second cast of the mask is over at the National Portrait Gallery, so I e-went over to have a look at it, and found loads of other famous faces ghoulishly stashed there.
Interesting business, this death maskery. I’ve read that Virginia Woolf once made folks afraid of her by publishing a book on the subject called “Undying Faces”, which ought to be a perennial Hallowe’en favourite, except that people seem incredibly blase about such things. The BBC’s Cardiff factory has a death mask of Dylan Thomas at the reception desk.
It wasn’t always such a dead end, topic-wise. Making death masks started to get popular in the 1600s to create a memento or a model for a posthumous portrait (though portraits thus inspired sometimes included the distortions typically caused by the wax or plaster mould). For famous types, the mask would top an effigy on display at the funeral.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, before somebody invented photography, they used death masks for corpse identification.
Since people keep telling us that no one knows what Shakespeare really looked like, what are we to make of the fact that his death mask is right here on the Internet? And Queen Elizabeth I as well? Here they are with Ollie Cromwell, saying “Take a good look!” (Gosh, she was ugly.)
And it’s similarly puzzling, having been oft assured that no one today knows what George Washington actually looked like either, to come across a perfectly good depiction of him in plaster, and this is from life.
The sleep-around Father of His Country twice had his face done, and it took some doing because the original plaster-caster clumsily broke his 1783 creation before it was even dry, and the Prez swore, quite literally and with vigour, that he wasn’t going to go through that again.
Somehow the French sculptor Houdon talked him into it two years later, and from that mask posthumously came the famous bust of the great man.
Houdon also gets likely credit for a life mask of Benjamin Franklin, from which his bust was also derived. It looked exactly like one of his great-granddaughters in 1892, when Harper’s magazine wrote about it, showing an early predilection for celebrity images.
Plasterman Leonard Volk reported that Abe Lincoln “sat naturally in the chair” watching him in a mirror while he spent an hour giving the Pretty Great Emancipator a facial in 1860. “Mr Lincoln himself bent his head forward and worked it off gradually and gently, without injury of any kind, not withstanding the fact that it clung to the high cheekbones, and that a few hairs on his eyebrows and temples were pulled out by the roots with the plaster.”
Thanks to death masks as well, we have a pretty good idea that those old paintings and busts and statues of Beethoven (left) and Isaac Newtown (centre) were on the money, and we can still have a chuckle over Nietsche’s moustache (he must have been dead when they slathered papier mache on that walrus).
And look, here’s Gericault (he had TB, poor fella) and Gauguin (he was just crazy).
It’s in modern times that things get a little freaky, as is their wont. The death mask of Alfred Hitchcock holds no surprises, nor the fact that someone made one either. Peter Lorre was plastered too.
But the one of John Dillinger doesn’t seem right at all. He looks like Duke Ellington.
Here’s Noel Coward (in whose suite at the Oriental Hotel I once infamously stayed). Somebody’s actually painted him up.
And check out Bruce Lee!
These mugs and many more at
Princeton U’s website and the cheerfully death-friendly Thanatos.net.
