Death Mask
Life Mask
Death Mask After Autopsy
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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.