A death mask is created from the face of an individual who recently died.
Mortuary masks or death masks are created from the face of a recently deceased person, with the intention of preserving their portrait in the most realistic way possible. They were very common during the 18th and 19th centuries in the Western world, especially with recognized personalities. In any case, this practice had its origins in Roman and Egyptian times.
It should be noted that a mask is a piece of material (it can be cloth, plaster, wood, plastic, gold, fur or others) that is used on the face , covering it. The word comes from the French term masque or the Italian maschera , although its most remote ancestors are the Latin ancestors mascus ( "ghost" ) and Arabic maskharah ( "jester" ).
Mask functions
Masks fulfill various functions: rituals , social , religious , entertainment and others. They can be used in plays , as part of carnival celebrations or to imitate certain characters. They can also serve as protection in the middle of a confrontation or to hide identity .
In some cultures , there is a belief that the use of a mask will allow the wearer to acquire the qualities of the representation of said mask. For example, a lion mask will induce the wearer to acquire characteristics of that animal and behave as such.
Tutankhamun is one of the historical personalities who has a death mask.
The death mask throughout history
The Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa , the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte , the Argentine politician Eva Perón , the German composer Ludwig Van Beethoven , the British poet William Shakespeare and the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun are some of the historical figures who have their death masks.
It is worth mentioning that the death mask does not offer us a look at these and other prominent personalities in history , but at their faces once they had died. There are many people who consider this practice macabre, in bad taste and unnecessary, since many of them lived in times when portraits and sculptures already existed, so it was not even the only way to immortalize their aspects.
In fact, if we are a little meticulous, how do we immortalize someone who has already died? The death mask is for many another example of our fear of death, one of the many negative consequences of having distanced ourselves from nature. The rest of the animal species accept death completely naturally, and make the most of their lives, two things that we human beings should learn.
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy tells us that the most appropriate term to mention the death mask is actually funerary mask , although it is not the most used in everyday speech.
Preparation procedure
Regarding the procedure for making the death mask, it can be obtained through a technique known as casting , which must be carried out in several phases and is very common in the field of sculpture, both for individual parts and for complete pieces, and It can be made with various materials. In this case, plaster was used.
In short, casting is carried out through the use of a mold into which a pour of a liquid plastic capable of solidifying, molten metal or plaster is poured. The mold is filled as a result of the material used to fill it. After having applied this technique, the copy of the face was reproduced using fluid materials such as beeswax, whose melting point is especially low, or it was combined with resins to achieve the best results. We must not forget that in this case two reverse processes must be carried out: the mold is made with the face of the deceased, which is finally filled to reproduce its original shape.