I find death masks incredibly creepy. They remind me of those forensic reconstructions that police artists will sometimes make out of plaster, applied over the recovered skull of an unidentified victim, to show what that person looked like while alive. Major creep factor. Death masks are made by pouring plaster over the face of someone recently deceased, as a way of preserving that person’s appearance after their body has returned to the dust. Same kind of creepiness. And I sure wish we had more of them.
With so many historical figures who died before the invention of photography, we have scant evidence as to what they really looked like. My beloved Vlad Dracula’s actual face is known to us only from caricaturist woodcuts, one vague written description, and, thankfully, that one famous painting, but most historical personages have left us with far less in the way of visual evidence for gauging their looks. Wouldn’t it be cool to know what Attila the Hun actually looked like? And I DO wish we had a death mask for Vlad III, so that we could compare it to the one taken of Bela Lugosi. I bet they would have born a resemblance, don’t you think?
