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Dec 17, 2020 · Martin Luther King, Jr. Getty Images. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his body was laid in an open casket in Atlanta on April 9, where over 1,000 mourners came to pay their respects to the civil rights leader. While the body lay in state in Memphis days earlier, the wound in King's neck was still visible, and many ...
Oct 31, 2017 · Death masks date back to ancient Egypt, where creating a sculpted mask to put on the deceased's face was very fashionable. Many famous names have had their faces cast, like actor James Dean.
May 2, 2024 · Death masks are an eerie glimpse into the final moments of life. These detailed sculptures of prominent historical figures were made immediately after death to capture the face’s exact likeness. Death and mourning rituals can be strange. For example, in the 19th century, people practiced weird mourning rituals, such as wearing jewelry made ...
Apr 24, 2024 · 18. L'Inconnue de la Seine (Late 1880s) While this death mask is not of a well-known person, it has become famous in its own right. Legend has it that the mask was cast from the face of an unidentified young woman whose body was found in the Seine River in the 19th century.
- King Henry IV of France, Died 1610
- Oliver Cromwell, Died 1658
- Peter The Great, Died 1725
- Jean-Paul Marat, Died 1793
- Napoleon Bonaparte, Died 1821
- Aaron Burr, Died 1836
- William Tecumseh Sherman, Died 1891
- Bonus: L'inconnue de La Seine, Late 19th Century
Most death masks are cast as soon as possible, before decay distorts features and makes applying plaster a slippery proposition. Henry IV, on the other hand, had been dead for nearly 200 years when his mask was made. It was July of 1793 when the National Convention, in anticipation of the first anniversary of the abolition of the monarchy and the c...
When Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, died on September 3, 1658, the trappings of monarchy that he had rejected in life were showered upon him in death. He was given nothing short of a royal funeral, and Thomas Simon, medalist and chief engraver of the Tower Mint, was engaged to take his likenes...
After Peter the Great of Russia died on February 8, 1725, his wife and successor Empress Catherine I ordered court sculptor Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli to make a death mask and molds of his hands and feet. Rastrelli carefully measured the late emperor's body so that he could create a wood and wax effigy that would be accurate in every detail. The ef...
Jean-Paul Marat, doctor, journalist, and radical firebrand of the French Revolution, was plagued with a chronic skin disease so severe that by the end of his life he spent most of his time in a bath, warm towels draped over his painful scabs and lesions. That's where he was when Charlotte Corday gained entry on the pretext of having information abo...
The circumstances behind the casting of Napoleon Bonaparte's death mask are murky, to put it mildly. The former emperor died on the remote island of St. Helena on May 5, 1821, with French and English doctors attending him. At first the making of a death mask seemed an impossible task—plaster was hard to come by on St. Helena—but on May 7 a mold was...
Brothers Lorenzo Niles Fowler and Orson Squire Fowler were phrenologists, founders of the American Phrenological Journal, and largely responsible for popularizing phrenology in mid-19th century America. In 1836, when they were just starting out, Lorenzo opened offices in New York, where he performed readings on clients, trained students, and wrote ...
William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army, scourge of Georgia and the Carolinas, whose scorched earth campaign through the Deep South crippled the Confederacy's war-making ability, died in New York City on Valentine's Day, 1891. Two days later, famed Beaux Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens arrived at Sherman's home to oversee the casting of ...
Every other death mask in this list was cast from a famous person whose name and face have gone down in history. But L'Inconnue de la Seine (the Unknown of the Seine) doesn't even have a name. It's her face alone that has gone down in history. The story goes that an unknown young woman, purportedly a suicide by drowning, was fished out of the Seine...
Death masks were popular before the photography process. Cameras killed this ritual in the late 19th century. It was considered an honor for famous people to have a death mask before the burial. Wax, plaster, or mud is applied to their faces to create the mask. It was a way for the living to reconnect with the past or to memorialize the dead.
Oct 31, 2017 · The death mask of a notorious Victorian murderer, Benjamin Courvoisier, hanged in 1840 (and witnessed by a crowd of 40,000 including Charles Dickens), was recently found in an outbuilding on a ...
