Death Mask History
THE HISTORY OF THE DEATH MASK
By Ernst Benkard
DEATH masks command our utmost reverence, for the face is symbolic and perpetuates the final impression of a human spirit whom we once knew, or who had made his mark on all men’s minds. They perpetuate whilst elsewhere dissolution is inexorably at work. But, further, they foreshadow new growth and life, and its promise is graven upon them. Thus they stand instinct with mystery between two phases of existence, of one of which we believe that we have knowledge, whilst the other we recognize only as we believe.
Death masks are works of art from Nature’s workshop: yet they are at the same time transcendental objects.
The worth of every death mask is in itself. There can be no question but that it owes its existence to pure reverence. Thus we judge, and never suspect how comparatively recent is this attitude of mind.
Death masks are akin to their master. Death, himself, and this kinship is, I think, the reason why no special book has yet been devoted to them. If the attempt is now to be made, it will have all the defects of a first endeavor: an endeavor which claims as its principal merit the assembling and collating of material from the widest possible field.
And yet if the reader glances through our illustrations, he will at once notice a limitation. There is no mask dating from antiquity, and the question of the use of death masks in those ages is not dealt with. The material as such obliged the author to adopt this restriction in order to confine the subject within some bounds. It therefore embraces only the Christian culture of the West, and of that only the period from about 1400 up to the present day. Secondly, a glance through the illustrations leads to the observation of a fact which for the moment we will state quite baldly.
In the series presented, masks from the nineteenth century are in a striking majority. Almost every decade of that century can supply five or more examples, whereas in the eighteenth century the modest total of ten masks has to serve for the whole hundred years. In the seventeenth, sixteenth, and fifteenth centuries not more than three or four examples are to be found for each hundred years.
Without doubt the relative numbers may be accounted for in part by the fragile material of which death masks are made and the violence accompanying particular historical catastrophes. But this explanation will not suffice alone. For even if we possessed all the death masks of earlier centuries, they would still be far fewer in number than those shown by the nineteenth.
In order to arrive at the real cause of these relative numbers, we must examine objectively the material which we still possess, and at the same time classify it according to the several countries of origin.
Three countries have handed down to us incunabula of death masks, some extant, some only in literary form: Italy, France, and England.
In Italy from the earliest times we find death masks not only of saints and princes, but also of private individuals who had won distinction by their talents or activities.
In Northern Europe it was otherwise. Here for centuries no death masks were made but of kings and great lords, and it was not till the approach of the rationalist era and the French Revolution that any considerable change began. Before that upheaval, therefore, we may regard the death mask as a prerogative of the privileged classes.
And the following pages confirm our supposition that especially in France and England the death mask was associated with an artistic practice closely connected with the funeral ceremonies of kings and queens in those countries.
Whenever a king of France died, the court painter was summoned to the palace to take a cast of the monarch’s features even before the corpse was opened and embalmed by the court physicians and surgeons. There is nothing surprising in the artist’s action, for we assume that his skilful and was guided by a feeling of reverence. But this modem interpretation of the court intentions with regard to the king’s death mask is misleading.
For it was one of the most important duties of the painctre et de chambre du Roy to make a life-size wicker puppet resembling figure of the dead king, to clothe it first in a shirt of Dutch linen, then in silken garments, and lastly to array it in the ermine-trimmed coronation robe of the French kings. A final touch of lifelike reality was given to the puppet by the addition of wax hands, whilst the king’s head, carefully modeled in wax, gazed forth from the neck of the garments. Casts of the face and hands were taken from the corpse and from these moulds the corresponding parts of the puppet were modeled; and here we may observe that real hair and a real beard were attached to the wax mask, so that the effigies, as it was officially called, can only be compared with a waxwork figure.
This comparison is none too strong. For the face of the effigies was not that of the dead; the eyelids were raised, eyes painted or inserted, the rigidity of the death mask softened, and every effort made to reproduce the expression of the deceased in his lifetime.
And now, whereas the corpse had long been laid in the closed coffin, this image of a king was crowned and its hands were folded over the breast; models of the royal sceptre and the Main de Justice were laid to the right and left of its head on cushions of of gold. It lay in state about a week in the Salle d’honneur, first station in the prolonged funeral ceremonies usual at the French court.
The Salle d’honneur was a rectangular hall, brilliantly decked hung with tapestries, violet-coloured velvet, silks, and Oriental carpets; all round the walls were benches for the watching monks the high nobility, and the courtiers; nor were altars for the celebration of mass wanting. At the end of the hall under a canopy a rectangular stand was erected, upon which a straw mattress and pillow were laid. Over these, however, costly stuffs were spread so as to give the impression of a raised bed of state. It was upon this Lit d’honneur that the effigies of the deceased king rested (Fig. I.).
The curious acts of homage paid later to the effigies in this Salle d’honneur, and the subsequent rites before the coffin in the Salle en deuil, cannot unfortunately be discussed here. On the other hand, it is relevant to our subject to say that when the corpse was conveyed to Notre Dame de Paris, and finally to the Abbey Church of St. Denis, the effigies was brought out once more.
In the funeral procession which set out from the house of death through the streets of Paris, the figure either lay on a bier by itself, or it was placed upon the coffin, arrayed precisely as it had been before upon the Lit d’honneur, with the sole difference that it now held the sceptre in its right hand and the Main de Justice in its left. This change in the position of the arms implies that the limbs of the mannequin were movable, and the new function of the hands explains why the court painter had to prepare quatre mains spoken of in records of payment that have been preserved. For it is evident that this new attitude of the effigies could only be possible if there were a second pair of hands to exchange with the first.
The interior of Notre Dame was hung throughout its vast breadth and height with black cloth; in the chancel the Chapelle ardente, a catafalque beneath a canopy surrounded by countless lighted candles, awaited the coffin and the effigies. Here, and laterin St. Denis, the last religious rites were performed in the presence of the corpse and the wax figure. But at the actual burial the effigies had at last fulfilled its functions, and had already found its way to the sacristy of St. Denis, where it was carefully preserved in the company of its predecessors, and in expectation of others to come.
We find in France, then, as part of this elaborate cult of the dead the practice of forming a death mask of the deceased king. Nor did the death mask serve directly to hand down to posterity the features of a great man. The death mask is simply a technical aid in modelling the face of the effigies. It is this, the wax image of a living man, contrasting strangely with the mortal remains of the dead, which interests alike the artist and the public.
But the death mask is a mere by-product in the concern of the survivors for the dead. It was not till the beginning of the fifteenth century that the grasp of reality was accepted as the aesthetic norm in the artistic production of Europe. It is therefore almost safe to assert that we shall not meet with the death mask before that period.
In fact it is on the death of Charles VI. of France in 1422 that we first hear how Maitre Francois d’Orleans, court painter since 1408, made a death mask, as well as models of the hands and feet, from the corpse for the purpose of a magnificent image. Thus it is possible to prove by means of written records the use of the death mask in the preparations for the strange funeral ceremonies of all French kings of the Quattrocento, with the sole exception of Louis XI. (1461-83).
Also at the obsequies of the widow of Charles VI., Queen Isabeau (Elizabeth ofWittelsbach, d. 1435), known to the world as the adversary of her son Charles VII., the coffin with the effigies was borne to Notre Dame de Paris escorted by a great retinue.
Concerning Charles VII. himself [d. 1461), we learn from contemporary records of payments that “Jacob Lictemont, painctre, pour avoir moule et impreint Ie visage dudict feu Seigneur pour servir a 1′entree de Paris” received a certain sum.
The last French king of the fifteenth century, Charles VIII., died far away from Paris at Castle Amboise in 1498. Although on that occasion the corpse itself, and not the effi.gies, lay gorgeously arrayed on the Lit de parement before being taken in the coffin to the Salle en deuil and later to St. Florentin d’Amboise, we nevertheless found again, at the lying-in-state in Notre Dame des Champs, a “Statue du Roy” which was conveyed as usual to Notre Dame in Paris and St. Denis. Nothing is recorded of the artist who made this Statue; but we may assume that it was the work of Jean Perreal (Jehan de Paris, d. 1528), who as court painter to Charles VIII. from 1483 is not unknown in the history of art. This assumption is the more probable as this same Jean Perreal is mentioned as the maker of the death masks of Louis XII. (1515) and of Queen Anne of Brittany (1513), the consort of Charles VIII. and later of Louis XII.
In the sixteenth century the death mask still remains in use as a preliminary stage of the puppet. On the very day of Francis I.’s death (March 31, 1547), Francois Clouet, his famous court painter (1510-72), was summoned to the Castle of Rambouillet by special courier in order to draw the king’s portrait on his death-bed, to take’a cast from the corpse, and to prepare the effigies.
Now the Dauphin Francois, this king’s eldest son, had died suddenly on May 10, 1536, at the Castle of Tournon on the Rhone; the king had also lost his third son, Charles d’Orleans, on September 9, 1545. For these two princes, who had simply been laid in their coffins, the one at the Castle of Tournon, the other in the Abbey of St. Lucian near Beauvais, the present heir to the throne, Henri II., was minded to prepare a funeral fitting their high rank and that of their father. And so we see the strange spectacle of three coffins displayed in the choir of Notre Dame des Champs on May 22, 1547, with three effigies upon them lying in state; they were then carried in solemn procession to Notre Dame in Paris, where all three were assembled in an ostentatious Chapelle ardente before the final ceremonies in St. Denis.
These events make it more and more certain that no funeral of crowned heads and princes of the blood was conceivable without the presence of an effigies. If, however, such figures could be made years after death, we cannot reject the possibility that death masks of the princes had long been in existence and could be relied upon in all cases for the construction of the effigies at any time apres Ie vif et naturel, as the contemporary phrase ran.
When Henri II. entered the lists on the forty-first year of his age, on June 30, 1559, during the festivities at the double wedding of his daughter and his sister, his opponent, the Earl of Montgomery, struck him such a deadly blow through his right eye with the stump of a broken lance that after several days of agony the king died of the wound on July 10. The death mask of Henri II. (Plate 8 - Below), likewise the work of Francois Glouet, is the only unquestioned, one of the masks of the kings of France which has been preserved to the present day. It is of quite exceptional importance, because for once we find literary tradition actually confirmed by the visible object. But nothing would be more mistaken than to assume that this deeply moving image of release from suffering owed its origin to any reverential feeling. This mask of Henri II. simply served as a convenient help in the modeling of the features of the wax image; no value was attached to it on its own account.
Similar proceedings are recorded later of the funeral ceremonies for Charles IX. (1579) and for Catherine de Medici (1589).
I should, however, like to dwell shortly on the Service for Henri IV., and this for a definite reason. That admirable monarch fell a victim on May 14, 1610, to the dagger of the fanatic ‘Ravaillac. Immediately after the assassination two artists were summoned to the Louvre to take a cast of the dead king’s face; a third joined them on his own initiative, though not officially commissioned to do the work.
There ensued a strange rivalry between the three artists in the construction of the effigies. These three were the renowned engraver of medals Guillaume Dupre (1576-1643) and the two painters Jacquetde Grenoble (d. after 1636) and Michel Bourdin d’Orleans (traceable in Paris from 1609 onwards). All three laboured at the same time at a wax model of the deceased king’s head, and waited in eager suspense to hear which figure the appointed jury would choose for the honour of representing Henri IV. on the Lit d’honneur. The award fell to Jacquet de Grenoble, whose wax bust is preserved among the treasures of the Landes-Museum at Cassel: the other two models can also be traced, Michel Bourdin’s in the Musee Carnavalet in Paris, and that of Dupre in the collection at Chantilly.
Fig II (above) shows the model at Chantilly, of which, however, only the head can be regarded as genuine, the bust terra-cotta having been added in the eighteenth century. At all events it is a valuable document for our purpose; unquestionably modeled from a death mask, the face has been completely transformed into the portrait of the living man. Here, too, the death mask was a mere aid to the artist, and was not felt to be a witness from a loftier sphere. To the mind of that age the desire to possess an ancestral portrait of the king was much more urgent than any idea of the value of a death mask as a human document. The same applies to the heads modeled by the other two artists.
Shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, an eighteenth-century German traveller and man of letters, Johann Jacob Volkmann (1732-1803), saw amongst the treasures of the Abbey Church of St. Denis “the succession of French kings, life-size, modelled in wax, robed in red and sitting on chairs with sceptres and crowns”. He relates that at that time all were present, from Charles VIII. to Louis XIII. From this report it seems to me probable that a death mask was likewise made ofthe last-named king [d. 1643).
But the year of Louis XIII.’s death brings us already to the moment when the traditional ceremonies, in the form in which we have seen them, begin to go out of fashion. One of the last occasions on which they are mentioned is on the death of the great Conde (1646); and on the death of Maria Theresa of Spain (1683), the consort of Louis XIV., they were certainly no longer performed.
That, no doubt, is the reason why Johann Jacob Volkmann does not mention an effigies of Louis XIV., for evidently at the death of that monarch (1715) none was made. This assumption seems at the first glance to be contradicted by an anonymous etching of the period (Fig. III. below); for it portrays the Salle d’honneur as we have seen it before, and it seems that contemporary taste and style and changing forms have not succeeded in altering much in its appearance. Not belonging to any time, it preserved for ever the same unchanging character.
This is certainly true of the decorations in the state apartment, but not of the figure which we see upon the Lit d’honneur. According to the legend of the etching, there lay in state on this occasion in place of an effigies the embalmed corpse of Louis XIV., and this is important as an example of how the distinction between the effigies and the body had vanished, so that the death mask was no longer needed as a by-product.
As soon, however, as a puppet was once more taken into use, we again meet with the death mask. When Charlotte Corday murdered Jean Paul Marat on July 13, 1793, the National Convention devoted its chief attention to measures for the maintenance of order and security. Marat’s corpse lay, therefore, for forty-two hours uncared for by anybody. When the famous painter and revolutionary, Jacques Louis David, was commissioned by the Convention to arrange for Marat’s representation and burial, it was still found possible to embalm the corpse, but the disease from which Marat suffered (leprosy) made its public display unthinkable.
A very simple way out of the difficulty was found by reviving a tradition which had not yet fallen into oblivion. David himself, Jacobin and adherent of the Goddess of Reason, proposed to the Convention to exhibit to the people a mannequin instead of the corpse, showing Marat in the attitude in which Charlotte Corday had struck him down. And this was done. We must imagine this waxwork horror as resembling David’s well-known picture of the murdered Marat.
So far as I know this was the last occasion on which a kind of effigies was made in. France with the assistance of the death mask (Plate 28 below). I say a kind of effigies: for this figure of Marat showed the popular hero as he was assassinated and cannot be called a peaceful image of the living man, as were the effigies of the kings. Its propaganda purpose is unmistakable. Nevertheless, it fits into the succession of phenomena which we have hitherto been considering.
In brief outline we have traced the existence of the death mask from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century in France. It seems, however, but a shadowy existence. For the many details included in our description referred almost more to the effigies than to the death mask. And this impression is true to the facts, seeing that so little importance was attached to the death mask for its own sake.
If we return to the starting-point of our deliberations, the question arises whether it is not possible to trace the death mask with certainty, in its known association with the effigies, earlier than the fifteenth century. With the death of Charles VI., that is, with the year 1422, all definite records cease as to the manner of paying homage to the French kings after death. But a custom that is described at the beginning of the fifteenth century without any word of surprise or any comment on its novelty, must doubtless have come down from earlier days, and may therefore be assumed to have obtained at least in the second half of the fourteenth century. This assumption is supported by the fact that in 1383 the painter Colart de Laon was entrusted with the representation of the Count of Eu, and that in 1380 there was an effigies shown at the funeral of the Gonnetable de Gueslin.
But here I would warn the reader against the erroneous assumption that wherever a representation or effigies is mentioned, as in the references just cited from the end of the fourteenth century in France, the employment of a death mask follows as a matter of course. The effigies or imago (a term which we shall shortly encounter) implies primarily no more than ceremonial in honour of the dead. We can only definitely assume the existence of a death mask where some document or receipt of payment clearly states that an artist did actually take a cast of the features of the deceased. As already stated I have not been able to find convincing proof of this process before the fifteenth’ century in France. In that country at least we must not, therefore, regard the effigies and the death mask as inseparable from the earliest times; rather we must understand clearly that one of the two takes precedence@both in importance and in date. If we continue to trace the life-history of the show-puppet, we shall see that such a claim cannot be made on behalf of the death mask.
In the fourteenth century France remained silent on the subject in general, a fact which may be partly due to the fateful events of the Hundred Years War. But another country throws itself into the breach instead: England.
It may be recalled that the English dynasty of the period, the house of Anjou-Plantagenet, was French by descent and upbringing, and no doubt brought French ceremonial with it to the island kingdom. In the Islip Chapel in Westminster Abbey the astonished spectator may still contemplate a group of figures known, on account of the condition to which they have been reduced by the lapse of time, by the nickname of “the ragged regiment”. These figures, puppets or mannequins as one may choose to call them, are the last relics of a custom likewise known in mediaeval England by which an “imago, picture, or representation” (three terms used alternatively) of the dead was carried upon the sealed coffin in the funeral procession of kings and queens. But the “funeral effigies” are somewhat different from their lightly constructed French counterparts. The latter were made of wickerwork like the dummies at a costumier’s, whereas the English types were like solid statues, carved from a single block of wood, including the head and hands; but here, too, all the resources of waxwork art were employed to give an illusive semblance of life.
In the very same year in which King Charles VI. of France died, his great adversary. King Henry V. of England, closed his eyes at Bois de Vincennes on August 31. In vain did the people of Paris and Rouen offer immense sums for the honour of seeing Henry V. buried within their city walls; the corpse was conveyed to England and reached London on November n, 1422.
Thomas of Walsingham in his Historia Anglicana tells how an imago lay upon the sealed coffin, made to resemble as nearly as possible the figure and face of the dead hero: clothed in a purple robe bordered with ermine, it wore a crown on its head, and held the sceptre in its right hand and the imperial orb in its left. We are not at present able to give further details as to the construction of this puppet, unless we trust to a contemporary French account according to which the figure was made of hardened leather and was pleasingly painted. At any rate, no trace of it has been preserved. But mere written record is of value, for it proves, even standing alone, that this kind of imago was not unusual at that period.
Nor is this view an empty supposition. For we need only go back to the period of Edward III. to obtain confirmation. Immediately upon his death (June 21, 1377) Edward III’s corpse was embalmed and laid in its coffin. But at the same time the artist Stephen Hadley was commissioned to prepare an Imago ad similitudinem Regis, which was carried upon the coffin in solemn procession from Sheen (near Richmond, Surrey) - where the king died, to London. In London, the coffin with the imago was exhibited on -a catafalque in St. Paul’s and in Westminster Abbey before the king was laid to rest on July 5 in the Confessor’s Chapel.
Face to face with this royal imago in Westminster Abbey we can to-day still call up a vivid picture of this custom of a past age. We find there a primitive life-sized wooden puppet carved from the trunk of an oak-tree, hollow at the back; the feet close together; the arms, slightly bent at the elbow, are somewhat raised; the hands are broken off, but gimlet holes in the forearms suggest that they were separately attached, of whatever material they were made. The head is likewise carved in wood from the same block as the body; there are still traces of painting on the face and signs that a beard was attached to the cheeks and a wig worn on the head.
If we examine the expression on the face of this imago, it seems most improbable that it was modelled from a death mask. When a death mask is used the result is of course an almost terrifying approach to nature. But just this is completely missing in Edward III.’s features; there is instead the formalism of a general type remote from reality, in harmony with the artistic ideas of the age. Moreover, we are able to compare the head of the effigies with that of the gilded bronze statue of the same king on his tomb in Westminster Abbey; we have no choice but to pronounce in favour of the workmanship in bronze, whereas the contrary must have been the case if Stephen Hadley had modelled his imago from a death mask.
This case proves quite plainly that the effigies was known long before the aid of the death mask was called in. The English documents bear witness to “a wooden effigy” already for Edward II. {d. 1327), and suggest the probability of a wax imago for Henry III. {d. 1272), made by one Magister Robertus de Beverlaco; but there is no word of a death mask at this early time. I am therefore of opinion that death masks were unknown in England in the fourteenth century, and this view is supported by artistic considerations based on direct ocular evidence. But I am not even disposed to concede the existence of a death mask for the imago of Henry V. {d. 1422), and will allow myself a short digression in support of my contention.
In England, as in France, the use of effigies had become customary also for the queens. Richard II.’s wife, Anne of Bohemia {d. 1394), is the first example. (The head other imago is still in the Islip Chapel.) The next, however, is Catherine of Valois, the consort of this very Henry V. She survived her illustrious husband by more than ten years {d. 1437), and honour was paid to her mortal remains by a state funeral in which the imago was exhibited upon the coffin in St. Catherine’s Church near the Tower, before she was buried at Westminster. The puppet representing this queen (Fig. IV. a Below) is a robed figure carved from head to foot from a single block of oak; the back is hollowed to an unusual depth, so that we might almost call it a figure cut in half. The robe, painted bright red and cut square at the neck, clings closely round the outlines and form of the body down to the ankles. The right arm is broken off at the shoulder; the left is still there, but the hand is missing. Neck and head are finely modelled, but treated entirely in Gothic taste; there is no trace of the naturalism of the death mask.
Returning now to the imago of Henry V., if in 1437 the art of sculpture was still trammelled by the style of the period, it is not likely that in 1422 a death mask was employed. I must express the same doubt regarding the whole of the fifteenth century in England, although it is true that it included the funeral of King Edward IV. (1483). As we do not know what has become of his imago, the case is of no decisive importance.
But there is a change with the beginning of the sixteenth century; for at this point the interesting effigies of Henry VII. (d. 1509) at Westminster provides us with an object lesson. The life-sized, solid, upright figure (Fig. IV. b Above) of this slender and graceful man consists of a massive block of wood covered with linen and stucco; though the hands are lost, the position of the arms suggests that his right held the sceptre and his slightly raised left the orb. There are still traces of painting on the face; the cap on the head shows that here once a wig sat. But what most strikes us is the king’s expressive head, in which already developed appears the type of the English gentleman. (Fig. V Below).
It is safe to assert that this plastic portrait was produced by the artist with the help of a death mask, partly in view of the developed technical process of the period, but even more on account of its impressive realism. It is difficult to speak positively, for here, too, it was the artist’s design to produce the semblance of waking life by opening the eyes and other retouching. If we examine the profile photograph of Henry VII.’s head (Fig. V Above), we find a certain hardness of the flesh drawn tight over the cheek-bones and a withered appearance of the lips, which might convince any spectator that a death mask had been used.
This would give us something to go on in determining at what date the death mask came into use in England, though here, again, it is merely as a speedy and convenient aid in the modelling of effigies. So matters continued far beyond the end of the sixteenth century, indeed up to the close of the seventeenth, and I assume, therefore, that the death mask never again fell into oblivion in England. It is true, we cannot prove this; for though we possess documents concerning Henry VIII. (d.1546) and Jane Seymour, Edward VI. (1553) and the Catholic Queen Mary (1558), the famous Elizabeth (1603) and her successor James I. (1625), there is nowhere an allusion to the taking of a mask.
In this dilemma, our doubts are answered by a monument rising from the dark past which puts an end to our groping uncertainty; the death mask of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, the only one of its kind and as such, apart from all else, of great historical value (Plate 10 - Below). Oliver Cromwell died on September 3, 1658, in London; three weeks later his mortal remains were quietly interred in Henry VII.’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey. But in Somerset House a wax effigies of this remarkable man was exhibited for several months, in state robes, with crown and sceptre, in accordance with English royal ceremonial. It was not till November 23 that the official funeral was celebrated with extravagant royal pomp.
It is surely not against the logic of historical facts when I conjecture that Cromwell’s death mask simply provided the model for the face of the Lord Protector’s imago which, following the lines of tradition, we may picture to ourselves as a likeness of the living, active man. On the other hand, it is certain that this auxiliary purpose of the death mask was not specially invented for Cromwell’s effigies’, this example furnishes us, then, with direct proof that at any rate by the seventeenth century the effigies and the death mask were as closely connected in England as the bozzetto and the completed statue.
The comparison is wholly in place and correct. For, as our detailed examination of the origin of the death mask has shown, it is primarily only a studio-property, adapting itself to its subordinate task in the artist’s work on the effigies, which had a long career behind it before its stepchild, the death mask, saw the light.
There could be no emancipation for the death mask in France or England until the customs associated with the imago had fallen into disuse. And indeed towards the end of the seventeenth century we see also in England the effigies falling into disfavour. For it seems that a figure of this kind was last used at the lying-in-state of the notorious kingmaker. General Monck (d. 1670). But well into the eighteenth century we find traces of this court ceremonial hallowed by the use of centuries, and can follow them during the absolutist era in Germany. But before we turn to that subject, I should like to interpose a few brief remarks on the purpose of the death mask in countries where the effigies was not in general use. In order to get a clear opinion on this subject we must look to Italy.
In Italy the history of the death mask is far simpler than in France and England, at least if we ignore Venice. In that conservative republic, as Julius von Schlosser has shown, we find “at any rate from the seventeenth century onwards a quite similar ritual, particularly in the funeral ceremonies of the Doges; it was observed with increasing pomp till the fall of the Republic in 1797″. We must refrain from entering into the history of the Venetian effigies and death masks; there, too, the latter were in all probability taken for the purpose with which we are sufficiently familiar in France and England.
Nowhere else in Italy is the death mask associated with the ritual of the imago; it is used simply and directly as an aid to the art of sculpture. At any rate, the material contained in our illustrations admits of no other interpretation. (Compare the notes to Plates 1-7.) An artistic rage for extreme naturalism is sometimes carried so far as to evade the roundabout method of modelling a bust from the death mask. We still have none too attractive examples of the death mask joined to a modelled bust of the artist’s fancy, or cases where the death mask, transformed into a living face, is affixed to a sort of bust. This latter bears a remote resemblance to the effigies, with the purpose of which it has nothing whatever to do.
Giorgio Vasari is of course mistaken when he says in his Life of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488) that that artist first reintroduced the practice of making a plaster cast from nature; his error is overwhelmingly refuted by the monuments still preserved (St. Bernardino and Brunellesco). Nevertheless, there underlies Vasari’s statement the true belief that the death mask (and the life mask) did not come into use even in Italy before the Renaissance. Indeed we may regard it as a very characteristic example of the technique of the early Renaissance in Florence. It was not only that contemporary artists learned the technique of the death mask anew by reading the art literature of antiquity; they themselves must have welcomed it as satisfying most happily their craving for realism and their cult of the individual.
In Italy, then, unlike France and England, the death mask was never encumbered with the associations of superstition and ritual; its associations were purely those of an artistic form, connected, perhaps, at times with ideas of the “gloria dell’ umane posse”. As soon as the ancient pomp of the effigies vanishes from the countries beyond the Alps, the Italian use of the death mask begins to establish itself there too. The earliest and quite isolated example of this change that it seems possible to cite is the mask of Blaise Pascal (d. 1662), which was taken simply in order to serve as a model for a posthumous portrait of the great thinker (Plate 11 - Below).
The next example, the death mask of Isaac Newton (Plate 15 - Above) already brings us to the beginning of the eighteenth century. When he died all the honours formerly reserved for kings and great lords were paid for the first time to an ordinary citizen. After Newton’s body had lain in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, that is to say, in a royal palace, it was laid to its eternal rest in the pantheon of England’s heroes, escorted by the Lord Chancellor and followed by a retinue of dukes and earls. All this is testimony of a more reverent homage paid to human genius than would have been conceivable in any other country of Northern Europe at this time.
But the hour of the final emancipation of the death mask had not yet struck. For Newton’s mask was taken by the French sculptor, Louis Francois Roubillac (1690-1762), then resident in London, simply in order that he might make from it a terra-cotta bust of the great scientist (in the British Museum), a bust in marble, and the face of a marble statue for Trinity College, Cambridge. How little the sanctity of Newton’s death mask was respected is proved by its subsequent fate, described in the Notes (compare Plate 15 - Above). The same is true of Jonathan Swift’s mask (Plate 17- Below) as of Newton’s.
In France, however, the death mask was not really freed from the bonds of the effigies until the Revolution. When Mirabeau died in 1791 his death was felt to be a national calamity. The people clamoured for the closing of the theatres and places of amusement, and the National Assembly immediately began to consider how to pay fit homage to the dead man. In the course of the debate Citoyen Goupil recalled the example of Newton, and what the English had done in honour of their great countryman. This precedent was followed, and Mirabeau’s body was borne with all the pomp of a national funeral to the new church of St. Genevieve, consecrated after the manner of Westminster as pantheon of the heroes of liberty by receiving the mortal remains of this tribune of the people. Mirabeau’s death mask (Plate 27 - Below) was, however, only regarded as the best possible model for the bust that was to adorn his tomb.
And here it must be added that Marat’s death mask served the same purpose. The transitional character of the seventeen-nineties is clearly marked by the fact that in this case we know of a twofold purpose served by the death mask, the one pointing back to the past, the other in harmony with more modern usage. So at the end of the eighteenth century the Italian, purely artistic, view of the death mask comes to prevail and may be traced far into the nineteenth century. Therefore I refer to the separate Notes on the death masks of that era where, as far as possible, the subject has been adequately dealt with.
I cannot, however, conclude my introductory remarks without a final reference to a late and degenerate revival of effigies modelling, and in its train of the death mask, in a land which did not rank among European kingdoms till the eighteenth century: Prussia.
From the end of the seventeenth century a funeral ceremonial had developed at the court of Berlin which could hardly belie its connection with the French ritual. But whereas at the death of the Great Elector (1688) and of Frederick, the first king of Prussia (1713) the embalmed corpses themselves lay in state, just as we have seen to be the case with Louis XIV., the funeral ceremonies for Frederick William I. displayed a degree of pomp which can only be regarded as out of date and alien to the spirit of the age.
Frederick William I. died on May 31, 1740, in the “Stadtschloss” at Potsdam. He himself, a sturdy, narrow-minded, and blunt paterfamilias, gave orders before his death that “as for the rest, no fuss is to be made about me”. But it was not at all in accordance with Frederick II.’s idea of the dignity of a king of Prussia to respect this wish of his father’s. It is true, that on June 4 the corpse was “laid in its oak coffin in full regimentals wearing the ribbon of the Order of the Black Eagle”; it lay publicly in state in the palace for a day, but towards ten o’clock in the evening the coffin was sealed and taken to the “Hof- und Garnisonskirche” for final burial.
The “solemn funeral”, on the contrary, only took place three weeks later, on June 22, at Potsdam. Between the lying-in-state and this second mock burial a so-called Castrum doloris was held in the apartments of the palace. (Fig. VI. Below) shows what this meant. The large central marble hall of the palace at Potsdam was hung throughout with black velvet; it was lighted by chandeliers, brackets, and candelabra: at the narrower end of the room, on a dais covered with violet velvet beneath a canopy of gold brocade, lay the show coffin decked with drap d’argent. To the right and left on each side of the coffin we see four tabourets upon which were placed the crown, the sceptre, the orb, the sword, and other insignia. Above the coffin — and that is important — on the back of the canopy hung a portrait of the king, who was thus represented alive at this lying-in-state. Nor was it enough that the effigies should here be displayed in effigy; in the sealed ceremonial coffin lay a wax puppet intended to represent the dead king himself. In all probability the death mask was used for the face of this most extraordinary representation (Plate 16 - Above). But before entering the Castrum doloris it was necessary to pass through the mourning chamber; in it stood an arm-chair in which was set “the image of His late most blessed Majesty, modelled in wax”. I do not think it impossible that the death mask served for this figure also.
The death mask had therefore a double purpose on this occasion; in the first place it provided the model for an image of the living man, after the Anglo-French pattern, and secondly it was used directly as an artificial imitation of the dead. But in both instances we find it closely interwoven with a bygone cult; it arose from no motive of an emotional nature as we should understand it.
“Je rends de bongre et sans regret ce souffle de vie, qui m’anime a la Nature bienfaisante, qui a daigner me Ie preter, et mon Corps aux Ellements, dont il a ete compose. J’ai vecu ‘en filosofe et je veux etre enterre comme tel, sans appareil, sans faste, sans Pompe, je ne veux etre ni disseque, ni emboume, qu’on m’enterra a Sanssouci au haut des terrasses dans une sepulture, que je me suis fait preparer.” These opening words of Frederick the Great’s will breathe the spirit of enlightenment and the mood of a nature lover almost akin to Werther. With such sentiments we should not expect to find on this occasion an effigies or a wax figure in the coffin.
And yet that is what happened. It seems like a judgement upon Frederick II.’s action in the case of his own father, when we hear that his nephew and successor did not choose to respect his uncle’s last will in any single point. The reason was assuredly no Lack of reverence; the ceremonies decreed by Frederick William II. were due precisely to his desire to omit nothing of the hallowed customs of courts.
On the very day of his death the corpse of Frederick the Great lay in state in the “Stadtschloss” at Potsdam, but already on August 19 he was buried in the vault of the “Hot- und Garnisons-Kirche”. The small regard paid to the mortal remains shows how fundamentally the conception of reverence for the dead differed in those days and in our own.
But at the real funeral ceremony, appointed for September 9, nothing was omitted of the rites observed at the death of Frederick William I. Thus we find again a ceremonial coffin in a Castrum doloris; this time, too, the king’s portrait, painted by Franke, appears on the canopy above the coffin; whence we cannot summarily dismiss the possibility that a dummy of the dead lay in the ceremonial coffin and served later as a substitute for the corpse at the state funeral. I cannot, however, find any record in the case of Frederick II. of a mourning chamber arranged with a seated figure of the late king.
The existence of the death mask gives positive proof that a dummy corpse of Frederick II. was laid in the coffin, following the precedent of Frederick William I.’s Castrum doloris. For it is really misleading to speak of a death mask on this occasion. No doubt a cast was taken of Frederick the Great’s features by the sculptor Johann Eckstein, and that before the lying-in-state in the “Stadtschloss” at Potsdam. But what has come down to us as Eckstein’s work is not a true mask, but a complete head of the deceased king modelled in wax, the mask only serving as the facial shell (Plates 25 and 26 - Below). This, then,-is a clear example of how again and again conceptions connected with the effigies force themselves between the actual death mask and the product made from it.
Now, in the Hohenzollern Museum in Berlin there is, together with the wax head of the dead king, a similar wax head, modeled with the aid of the death mask, but coloured, and having glass eyes and eyelashes; further, we know of two waxwork figures of Frederick II. with faces also modelled by Eckstein from the death mask. I do not, therefore, consider it altogether unlikely that the mourning chamber formed part of the funeral ceremonial for Frederick the Great.
This Prussian epilogue to the history of the death mask as appendage to the effigies must in fact be regarded as merely a remnant. A primeval custom, inherited from antiquity, drags on through the centuries, and as soon as realism and realistic methods became the order of the day, they make use of the death mask as the most reliable artistic aid, though in course of time it lost its original meaning and survived in a form bordering on caricature. There was no way of escape; a cultural form had exhausted its vitality.
And here Frederick the Great’s will throws valuable light. JUST as that monarch by his epigram regarding the first servant of his state placed his absolutism upon a more responsible basis than Louis XIV.’s “L’etat c’est moi”, so his idea of death and burial foreshadows a new outlook which we may boldly describe as pantheistic in contrast to the obligations of traditional custom. it is an example of historic irony that when the philosopher of Sanssouci died, tradition proved stronger than progress.
Nevertheless, Frederick the Great’s words and his desire remain a landmark, even in connection with our subject. The twilight of the idols ushered in by the rationalist era was inevitably followed by the disappearance of the time-honoured ceremonial of the effigies, and the birth-hour of the death mask, as we know it, struck.
But the new attitude towards the death mask, which I will designate as one of humane enlightenment, could not assert itself for the first time on the death of a prince; for the traditional deifying of the Anointed by God’s grace was too deeply rooted in the general ideas. There arose, however, at the end of the eighteenth century a new outlook. We need not first cite the obvious achievements of the modern spirit of 1789 in order to prove that a new age was dawning. Already before the outbreak of the Revolution the citoyen had become the centre of interest and intellectual activity–not merely the citizen in a political sense, but in the world of feeling. The mass of the people, beginning to overcome their sense of inferiority to the privileged classes inherited from the period of absolutism, clung to the symbol of great national heroes of spirit.
Perhaps it is only because these pages are written in Germany and by a German that I believe myself to have discovered in our country the first and earliest example of a death mask taken purely in reverence. At any rate, that decisive fact can be recorded even before the death of Frederick the Great and before the Revolution had proclaimed its rights of man.
When Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died in 1781 all relations hitherto so firmly established were reversed. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel, ordered that the poet’s funeral expenses were to be borne by the court treasury; he allotted to him a special burying-place, which was unusual in those days; he caused the corpse to lie in state in a magnificent coffin surrounded by wax candles, and finally to be conducted to its last resting-place in a state carriage drawn by four horses. Measured by the standard of a small German court, it is as significant as what was done in Newton’s case some fifty years earlier, that a gentleman of the bedchamber, a count, and the court officials should have escorted Lessing’s coffin to the grave. An enlightened sense of the dignity of a human being, whom God’s grace has favoured, found eloquent expression in this ceremony.
But it was Lessing’s friends who had his death mask (Plates 23 and 24 - Below) taken from his transfigured face, simply in the desire to share this last memory, to cling to what it was possible for love to keep of the departed. And thus the death mask becomes symbolic of the faith that death, though it parts us, can never dissolve a spiritual bond. Freed from superstition, witchcraft, and magic–for all these are involved in the existence and survival of the effigies–we see our brother in the dead lineaments; our clear vision grows familiar with the mystery of his features; we salute in it the iron laws of Life and Death.
With this result, which may be considered relatively clear in view of the mass of material to which so little study has been devoted, we may close our historical introduction. We first saw the death mask as a by-product in death rites of kings; at the same time it was used in the sculptor’s studio as a simple technical aid which remained when effigies and imago had long been relegated as dusty stage properties. It was not till towards the end of the eighteenth century that the death mask was released from its servitude, since when it has asserted its independent existence.
It is remarkable how long a time elapsed before the death mask came to acquire its present significance. To earlier generations the effigies, that is, a lifelike figure of the dead, was clearly more essential than the death mask, from which they shrank. That, however, is only partially true. For both in France and Italy early death masks have been preserved, which proves that they cannot have been regarded with complete indifference. But the contrast between our own attitude towards death masks and that of earlier periods can only be explained by a change in our ideas of death itself.
As long as after the death of great men witchcraft was openly practised, and amidst the Christian culture of the West the pagan habits were pandered to, men remained inevitably blind to the majesty of the dead. The healing scepticism of the eighteenth century liberated the peoples of Europe from the toils of magic, the last remnant of the Middle Ages, in spite of the Renaissance and by virtue of the Baroque. But the crystal clear atmosphere of the rationalist age was stirred already towards the end of the eighteenth century by a tender breath of early romanticism, and the almost genre-like attitude towards death and the dead belongs, I think, to this bourgeois mood. The historical picture with its brilliant, formal pomp fades away–a new melody is heard in the warmth of human relations: liberte, egalite, fraternite.
The result is that to-day we are merely interested in the genealogy and ancestry of death masks, without any sentiment of affinity with such things: for the death mask itself appeals at once to something within us different, more profound, something linked to it as if by ties of blood. While being moulded, some-thing of the mystery of death passes into it and remains inseparable from it, whether or not those who needed it and made it for quite different purposes were at all conscious of this. Defying all history, the death mask remains spellbound and unchanging in a world where “None can descend into the same stream as the same man”. And that is its strange and mysterious quality, that it remains constant, outside all that is transitory.
We know that what now is, will some day be effaced and withdrawn from our grasp. Youth and beauty, radiance and mirth yield inexorably to the impress of time and fade to gloom and sorrow, and at the end of all the passage into the unknown awaits us, no longer unwelcome. In this succession of the seasons of life the death mask is a persisting residue of organic substance, yet far removed from breath and the beating pulse; it is erected as a boundary mark at the parting of the ways of reason and faith, an un-likeness and yet the countenance of the man, freed at last from the passing grimace. For the daemons, our cruel masters, make up our faces for many and various parts on the stage of life. But just as the many coloured light is united in the rays of the sun, so in death at last the white radiance of the soul lights up in truth from the face, at last at peace. Yet the very cessation of eternal change indicates the passage to a new phase of existence which we fear.
And because the death mask stands and admonishes us at the gateway between what we call life and what we call death, it will always bear a supernatural character, as something which cannot be gauged by our experience of sunrise, night, and another day.
It is the last symbol of a man, his undying face.
E.B.