Five Famous Death Masks
And the secrets they reveal…
The sun beat down on the square de l’Île-de-France as lines of Parisians wrapped around the glass viewing area of the Paris Morgue. The smell of rising yeast wafted out of a nearby boulangerie and mixed with the River Seine’s ancient cool air.
This was a typical day for the Paris morgue in the late 1880s. Before reality tv, viewing corpses through the morgue’s plate glass window was a favorite pastime. But today’s corpse was a special one.
An unknown girl had been fished from the River Seine and put on display. The pathologist had been so taken with her beauty that he made a death mask of her face. But her serene visage and coquettish smile belied the painful death she most likely experienced before drowning.
Or perhaps after the wax had hardened around her delicate features, the pathologist used some artistic license.
Art is often created from life, but sometimes it can be created from death. This particular death mask stands out for that reason. It was reproduced repeatedly, eventually becoming an objet d’art that hung in fashionable drawing rooms throughout Europe. The mysterious…
