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Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc

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Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc

Learn: Wikipedia entry for Franz Liszt

Learn: Notes on mask from “Talks in a Library…”:

FRANZ LISZT.–We may assume that Liszt’s significance is generally realized. As a youthful prodigy of twelve he won  Beethoven’s recognition, and afterwards spent an active and creative life as virtuoso, composer, and impassioned partisan of Richard Wagner. It may be noted that on April 25, 1865, he was ordained in Rome as a priest. Liszt was born on October 22, 1811, at Raiding in Hungary, and died at Bayreuth on July 31, 1886. The mask was taken by the moulder Weissbrod of Bayreuth on the morning after the master’s death. Our reproduction was taken from a specimen in the Landesbibliothek at Weimar. Photograph by Berger, Weimar.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Death mask (2 copies), from the original by D. Brucciani. See Hutton, Portraits…, pp. 86-92; Moore, Talks…, p. 207. [Boxes 50, 62]

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Learn:  Wikipedia entry for Felix Mendelssohn

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 FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, and died on November 4, 1847, at Leipzig, the famous centre of his labours. The death mask was taken by his friends, the artists Hiibner and Bendemann. The specimen that we have reproduced is probably the first cast, for the dead man’s hairs are still adhering to the beard; it is in the possession of Dr. Eduard von Bendemann of Berlin-Friedenau, a grandson of the Diisseldorf painter Eduard von Bendemann, from whom the family inherited it. There is a second specimen in the hands of Mendelssohn’s granddaughter. Miss Marie Wach, in Leipzig, the daughter of Wach, the great professor of civil law who was Mendelssohn’s son-in-law.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Death Mask

Life Mask

Death Mask After Autopsy

Learn: Wikipedia entry for Ludwig Van Beethoven

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, born on December 17, 1770, at Bonn on the Rhine, died March 26, 1827, in Vienna. On March 27, one day, that is, after the decease of the great master, a post-mortem was held by the Viennese anatomist, Dr. Johann Wagner, Rokitansky’s predecessor in office; special attention was paid to the organs of hearing. In order to do this it was impossible to avoid cutting through the skull at ‘the glanoid cavities of the lower jaw, whereby the lower half of the face was deprived of its original support. The following passage from a letter of Stephen von Breuning to Schindler shows that the death mask was not taken till March 28, that is, a day after the post-mortem on the skull: “To-morrow morning a certain Danhauser wants to take a plaster cast from the body; he will be finished in five minutes, or eight at most. Write to me to say Yes or No, whether I am to consent. Such casts of great men are often permitted, and if we forbade it our refusal might afterwards be regarded as an encroachment upon the rights of the public. Vienna, March 27, 1827. Breuning.” Because of this sequence of events the mask portrays the distortion of Beethoven’s features resulting from the preceding postmortem. But in any event the master’s appearance had changed greatly during the four months of agonizing pain which preceded his death. Ferdinand Rausch, in a letter to Moscheles of March 17, 1827, describes the dying Beethoven as follows: “I found poor Beethoven in the most pitiful condition, more like a skeleton than a living man”. Only the upper part of the face, especially the forehead and nose, is of some value in considering its formation as the head of a genius. We realize fully the startling change in Beethoven’s face (per- haps due to his illness) when we compare the well-known life mask, of which casts arc everywhere to be seen. This life mask was taken from Beethoven’s face in Teplitz in 1812, that is, fifteen years before his death, by the sculptor Franz Klein as an aid in modeling his Beethoven bust; the contour of the profile is entirely different from that of the death mask. {Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, Vienna, 1909, vol. xxxix. p. 272; Th.von Frimmel: Beethovenstudien, Munich, 1905, vol. i. pp. 42 and 149 ff.; Waldemar Schweisheimer: Beethovens Leiden, Munich, 1922, passim; Orlik: Kleine Aufsdt^e, Berlin, 1924, p. 14; Stephan Ley: Beethoven, Berlin, 1925, p. 144.) Josef Danhauser (born 1805, died 1845), the maker of the death mask, was a painter celebrated at a later date as the principal representative of the bourgeois genre school in pre-revolutionary Vienna. There is also a lithograph by him of Beethoven’s head as he lay on the bier. (Compare Th. v. Frimmel: Josef Danhauser und Beethoven, Vienna, 1892, pp. 10 and 14.) I have unfortunately failed to discover anything further about the subsequent fate of the death mask. In 1870 it was presented to the Bonn University library on the occasion of the Beethoven centenary. There it was discovered by Professor Schaafhausen in a corner of the library covered with dust. Since then it has been transferred to the Beethovenhaus in Bonn. [Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespearegesellschaft, 1875, loth year, p. 45.) Photograph by H. Rose, Bonn on the Rhine

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Learn: Wikipedia entry for Napoleon I of France

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NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, born on August 15, 1769, at Ajaccio; died on May 5, 1821, at St. Helena. When we enumerate all the tortures and sufferings that Napoleon had to undergo and endure at Longwood for five and a half long years from October 16, 1815, we must not forget that the sufferer had not even a friendly and conscientious physician beside him in his last dying distress and agony. Dr. F. Antomarchi, a Gorsican by birth, physician at the Spedale di S. Maria nuova in Florence, Vice-Chancellor of Pisa University, went from Rome to London on the recommendation of Cardinal Fesch and Madame Mere, and thence, as Napoleon’s future physician in ordinary, he set sail for St. Helena, arriving on September 18, 1819. Although Antomarchi made careful entries in his St. Helena diary (published in 1825) regarding his treatment of Napoleon and described his relation with the great Emperor as friendly, his words are not wholly in accordance with the facts. We know from the statements of the devoted Count Montholon that up to a few months before his death Antomarchi believed Napoleon’s illness (cancer of the liver) to have been feigned; nor did he in a general way carry out his important duties with an adequate sense of responsibility. Thus he was often in Jamestown amusing himself with the officers of the English garrison when his illustrious patient had need of him. On the very day of Napoleon’s death Antomarchi took the death mask of the great Emperor after his head had been shaved, for his hair was to be sent to members of his family as a memento. As we gaze at the mask we involuntarily call Heine’s words to mind: “Napoleon was not of the stuff that kings are made of– he was of the marble from which gods are hewn”. The mask remained for the time being in Antomarchi’s possession, and is now in the Musee de 1′armee in Paris, together with other relics of Napoleon. The Musee Carnavalet has a bronze cast of the mask. Napoleon’s body, as is generally known, was transferred from St. Helena to Paris in 1840, and buried on December 15 under the dome of the Invalides. Photograph by Giraudon, Paris.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Death mask, from the original by J. W. Jarvis. See Moore, Talks…, p. 209. [Box 41]

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Reuters Story: Mystery deepens over German poet Schiller’s skull

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

JONATHAN SWIFT was born in Dublin on November 30, 1667, and died there on October 19, 1745; during the last five years of his life his mind was completely overcast. The death mask (compare the Note on Newton) was taken as a model from which the sculptor Roubillac was to make a bust of Swift in London for Dublin University. The original mask was formerly in Trinity College Museum, Dublin, but early in the eighteen-forties it was broken in two by clumsy handling. Our plate was made from an old (probably the only) cast in the Hutton Collection in Princeton University library, N.J. The soft, blurred appearance of the plate shows how important it is to reproduce from the earliest cast of a death mask, or one of the earliest. (W. R. Wilde: The Closing Tears of Dean Swiffs Life, Dublin, 1849.)

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

ISAAC NEWTON. — “This great man envisaged and established the image of the universe presented to the modern world by natural science. He led us out of the mists of hypothetic speculations to a clear vision based upon empirical reasoning and mathematical calculations. Just as he had the courage to advocate the truths discovered by his researches and to stand up for them in the conflict of opinion, never shrinking from the labour involved, so as a politician and representative of Cambridge in Parliament he did not cling to outworn forms, and played an important part in the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty. Newton was born at Woolstrop in Lincolnshire on December 25, 1642, the year, that is, of Galileo’s death; his principal spheres of activity were Cambridge and the learned company of the Royal Society in London, of which he was President from 1703 till his death (March 31, 1727). After Roubillac’s death Newton’s death mask came into the hands of a London art dealer, from whom it was bought in 1839 by Professor Samuel Hunter Christie, secretary of the Royal Society, on behalf of the Society. It is still kept on their premises. There is a cast made from the mask in the Hutton Collection in the Princeton University library, N.J. Our reproduction was made in London by permission of the Royal Society. (William Huggins: The Royal Society, London, 1906, pp. 14 and 129.) Photograph by Millar & Harris, London.”

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN was born at Stockholm on June 27, 1682. He became king at the age of fifteen, and on May 8, 1700, he left his capital for his northern campaign, never to see it again in this life. At an age when ordinary men are in a state of half-conscious development he defeated his chief adversaries, the Danes, Peter the Great, and Augustus the Strong, driving the last-named from his throne as king of Poland; so overwhelming was his victory that between 1704 and 1707 he could regard himself as lord and arbiter of northern Europe. An unbridled imagination and fantastic megalomania led him into the error of a war in Russia and the Ukraine, where a shattering blow struck him and his army at Poltava. There the world power of Sweden descended to its grave, and there Russia was born as a Great Power. It only remains to tell the king’s personal fate, and that, indeed, reveals a character that will never fail to stir adventurous interest. After five years of exile and captivity in Turkey, he succeeded at last in reaching what was then the Swedish garrison town of Stralsund, on November 21, 1714, riding for sixteen perilous days through Hungary and right across Germany. His desperate flight from besieged Stralsund, his reappearance in Sweden, and his war against the Danes in Norway, were mere preliminaries to vaster and vaster enterprises, to which the passion for glory tempted this extraordinary man; but whilst he was inspecting the defenses of Frederickshald on December 11, 1718, an enemy bullet struck him and killed him on the spot. “Almost all his actions, including those of his simple and private life, were far beyond the bounds of probability. . . . He carried all the heroic virtues to a pitch of exaggeration at which they become as dangerous as the opposing vices. A unique rather than a great man, to be admired rather than imitated” (Voltaire). The king’s body was brought from the army headquarters at Tistedahlen to the Swedish city of Uddevalla, where it lay embalmed, awaiting the funeral ceremony. Here in Uddevalla the death mask is said to have been taken on December 13, but on an engraving of it by Angelica Clarke of the year 1823 the more probable statement appears that it was made four hours after the king’s death. The funeral ceremony did not take place till February 26, 1719, in Stockholm; the dead king was buried in the Rittersholm church, in the so-called Caroline choir of tombs, in a black marble sarcophagus covered with a gilded lion’s skin. There are several casts of the death mask itself; that belonging to the Military Association in Stockholm has probably the strongest claim to be regarded as the original. Our plate is from the cast in the British Museum (Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities), obtained from the collection of Henry Christy, who purchased it in Stockholm from the estate of the deceased Swedish sculptor Baestrom. On the right temple of the mask the mark is clearly visible where the fragment of case-shot penetrated the head and cut short the king’s life so suddenly. In considering the features it is not without importance to remember that Charles was not of the Vasa dynasty but belonged to the house of Pfalz-Zweibriicken. Voltaire, whose Histoire de Charles XII is still well known, remarked that the expression of the lower half of the face was disagreeable. (Charles XII. Was frequently cruel and despotic.) A third cast of (lie death mask, formerly in the University library at Cambridge, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum there. (Voltaire: Histoire de Charles XII, Oiuvres***** de Voltaire, Gotha, 1785, vol. 23; G. A. Nordberg: Leben Karls XII., translated by I. H. Heubel, Hamburg, 1745-1751, vol. ii. pp. 750 ft.; A. Fryxell: Lebensbeschreibung Karls XII., freely translated by G. D. von Jensen-Tusch and L. Rohrdantz, Brunswick, 1861, Part V. pp. 239 ff.; Oskar II. of Sweden: Karl XII., Berlin, 1875; Laurence Hutton: A Collection of Death Masks, Harper’s new Monthly Magazine, November 1892, p. 907.) One more point may be mentioned. Rumours that Charles was the victim of an assassin from among his own men became current soon after his death and were never really silenced. King Charles XV. therefore had the sarcophagus in the Rittersholm church opened on August 31, 1859, and a careful examination made of the wound in Charles XI I.’s head; this proved once for all that the rumours were without foundation. The interesting protocol of this proceeding is contained in the last volume of Fryxell’s book on pp. 294-301. Photograph by messrs. Fleming, London.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

OLIVER CROMWELL — “The death mask is of wax and is in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities at the British Museum; it belongs to the oldest treasures of the Museum, and I could learn nothing there concerning its origin. The National Portrait Gallery in London has another specimen in plaster, not absolutely identical. A third, likewise in plaster, is kept in the famous collection of death masks in the library of Princeton University, N.J., and belonged formerly to Laurence Hutton. According to an unauthenticated tradition this last-named mask is said to have formed part of the estate of the Cromwell family. Richard Cromwell, the son of the Lord Protector (d. 1712), left it to his daughter Elizabeth, who bequeathed the relic to her cousins Richard and Thomas; after the death of Thomas we hear of it in the possession of his three daughters, Anne, Elizabeth, and Lucretia. In 1802 it is known to have been in the hands of Oliver Cromwell, junior (1742-1821), who entrusted it to his daughter Elizabeth Oliveria; she married Thomas Artemidorus Russell in 1801, and he sold the mask to America in 1859. (Laurence Hutton: A Collection of Death Masks, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, New York, November 1892, pp. 904-906.)”“Some facts concerning the subsequent fate of Oliver Cromwell’s mortal remains are not without interest. After the restoration of the Stuarts, under Charles II., the House of Commons resolved unanimously that Cromwell’s body (and those of his most faithful followers, Ireton and Bradshaw) should be torn from their graves on January 30, 1661, the twelfth anniversary of King Charles I.’s execution; it was dragged on a sleigh to Tyburn, the place of execution in ancient London (somewhere about the situation of the Marble Arch), wrapped in a shroud and hanged on the gallows by the executioner. After the body had swung there for a whole day it was taken down the following day, the head was cut off, the trunk buried beneath the gallows, but the head stuck on a pole on the battlements of Westminster Hall, where it is said to have remained on view for thirty years.”

“(John Morley: Oliver Cromwell, London, 1919, pp. 507 ff.) Photograph by Messrs. Fleming, London.”

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Crowmwell’s Famous Warts:

http://www.worldmedicalguide.com/medical-treatment/warts/famous-warts/ 

 Mask up for sales!

http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/Oliver-Cromwell39s-death–mask.4948110.jp

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1134828/Yours-1-000–Oliver-Cromwells-death-mask-warts-all.html

HENRI IV. OF FRANCE. — Wax death mask in the library of St. Genevieve in Paris. It is a posthumous mask and was taken in St. Denis from the forcibly disinterred body during the outbreaks of the summer of 1793. This gives us some idea how remarkably well, apart from the shrivelling, the embalmed body was preserved. For, as we can tell from Dupre’s effigies bust, Henri IV.’s face directly after death was only rather fuller and broader than in this mask. Henri IV.’s original death mask, like all the death masks (and effigies) of the French kings except that of Henri II., was destroyed by the fury of the revolutionary mob.

(See the Note to Plate <8>.) Photograph by Giraudon, Paris.

Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.