Posthumous Reproduction

In Western culture, the practice of creating a likeness of an individual's face and/or body after death through media such as photography, drawing, painting, wax, or plaster can be traced back to at least classical antiquity. These images of ordinary individuals as well as the rich and powerful had a variety of overlapping functions. They reminded the living of the brevity of life, provided a record of death, preserved the features for posterity, and assisted in the rituals of grief and mourning. Although the practice waned considerably in the early decades of the 20th century, it has revived in recent years.

The “death mask” is perhaps the oldest method of preserving the features of the deceased. An exact copy of the face was made by covering it with plaster or wax and allowing it to harden thus creating a mold. A “mask” or bust could then be prepared from this mold. In Roman culture wax masks, called imagines, made from death masks of the deceased were displayed in the home and used in funeral rituals. The masks were important particularly for the patrician classes as they established the lineage of an individual, separating him from the lower classes below and those of wealth and power with less established ancestry. When a member of the family died, hired actors would wear the masks and march in the funeral procession, reviving not only the likenesses of the ancestor but also reviving his virtues as well.

The use of death masks continued into the medieval and Renaissance eras during which time they were also used as aids for sculptors creating tomb effigies for the aristocracy and for the lifelike funeral effigies for the lying-in-state of monarchs and other national figures. The best preserved examples of these effigies are in Westminster Abbey. The bodies of these figures were often fashioned of wood, or leather stuffed with hay, with faces and hands made from plaster, wood, or wax. The features were painted or tinted with added facial hair and eyelashes to appear as lifelike as possible. Often dressed in the deceased's own clothing, the effigies provided not only a facial likeness of the dead, but a reproduction of the entire body around which appropriate mourning rituals could be performed as the effigy would not suffer the physical corruption of the deceased's actual body.

Death masks continued to be made well into the 19th century affording posterity with an opportunity to look into the faces of the famous, such as Walt Whitman and Frederick Chopin, years after [Page 816]their deaths. The masks could also provide more ordinary families with comfort and solace in their grief. Although the practice of making death masks seems to have waned in the early 20th century, it has made a resurgence in recent years as British artist Nick Reynolds and groups such as the Association of Lifecasters International in Summit, New Jersey, continue to receive requests for the masks.

In addition to the death mask, painting and drawing were also popular methods to preserve the likeness of the recently deceased and examples survive from at least the 15th century. These images served a variety of functions. Paintings such as John Souch's Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of His Wife (1635) record not only a specific death but also depict the family's mourning, demonstrating their love and participation within accepted societal codes of grief and mourning. Drawings not only recorded the physical features of the deceased for the family, but they also could be used as a model from which the artist would fashion a painting showing the deceased as if alive, such as Ralph E. W. Earle's portrait of Sarah Louise Spence, circa 1833. Although Earle clearly depicts Sarah looking out at the viewer, he communicates the young girl's true state by depicting her holding a rose cast downward, a symbol of a young life cut short.

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