Still Need a Halloween Costume?

Considering we are so close to Halloween, I decided that the most fitting subject for my first post should be something creepy:

Death and beauty have always had a tense but entangled relationship.  In ancient Egypt, if a particularly beautiful woman died her body would be left out in the desert heat for 3-4 days before being given to the embalmers to stay any temptation for necrophilia, Georges Bataille wrote that thanatos and eros could never truly be separated, and of course it’s been the subject of countless cult horror films.  This strange attraction to the visual side of mortality has been, possibly most poignantly, encapsulated in the tradition of death masks.  The tradition of the death mask began in ancient Egypt and continued through the Roman Empire, wherein a prominent person’s face would be duplicated in a stone carving shortly after death and the resulting mask would be placed over the deceased’s own face during funerary proceedings.  In Middle Ages Europe the technique was switched over to a casting process, where immediately after death the mask would be made of a plaster type material.  These masks were usually used in effigies and not kept with the dead person after burial.  The Medieval French had a somewhat unsettling tradition of using the death mask of a recently dead king to create a puppet-like figure with movable limbs.  Death masks were almost exclusively used for identification and scientific purposes starting in the 19^th Century, but the new subversive Bohemian artists emerging mid-century saw merit in the unique realism and individuality of the death mask.  One particular mask, titled L’Inconnue de la Seine, was adopted above all others by the Parisian avant-garde as the ideal of tragic beauty.  The legend goes that in the late 1880’s the body of a drowned woman was pulled out of the Seine and the pathologist at the Paris Morgue was so enchanted by her loveliness and soft smile that he had a mask made of her face which fell into the hands of a manufacturing company who reproduced large numbers of L’Inconnue.  Her image became the paradigm for misunderstood beauty and the spectacle surrounding death, with sophisticated Europeans hanging copies of it in their houses and writers like Albert Camus and Rilke hailing L’Inconnue’s smile to be as alluring as the Mona Lisa’s.

The art of the death mask lies in the shocking reality that it isn’t simply a sculpture but an impression of the moment almost directly after the subject passes from life to death.  The fame and public interest that it found in the late 19^th Century coincides with the beginnings of modernism’s move toward capturing the everyday and the objective, which death masks like L’Inconnue are reflective of.