Five Famous Death Masks

And the secrets they reveal…

The sun beat down on the square de l’Île-de-France as lines of Parisians wrapped around the glass viewing area of the Paris Morgue. The smell of rising yeast wafted out of a nearby boulangerie and mixed with the River Seine’s ancient cool air.

This was a typical day for the Paris morgue in the late 1880s. Before reality tv, viewing corpses through the morgue’s plate glass window was a favorite pastime. But today’s corpse was a special one.

An unknown girl had been fished from the River Seine and put on display. The pathologist had been so taken with her beauty that he made a death mask of her face. But her serene visage and coquettish smile belied the painful death she most likely experienced before drowning.

Or perhaps after the wax had hardened around her delicate features, the pathologist used some artistic license.

Art is often created from life. But sometimes it can be created from death. This particular death mask stands out for that reason. It was reproduced repeatedly, eventually becoming an objet d’art that hung in fashionable drawing rooms throughout Europe. The mysterious drown girl became known as l’ Inconnue de la Seine — the unknown woman from the Seine, and Albert Camus called her his “drowned Mona Lisa.”

In the late 1950s, Austrian doctor Peter Safar and toymaker, Asmund Laerdal, used l’ Inconnue de la Seine as the model for Resusci Anne — the most popular CPR doll today.

So yes, you have probably kissed a dead french girl.

Death masks are often confused with life masks — masks taken while the sitter was alive to record their likeness. The process of creating a life mask could be arduous. The sitter had to stick straws up their nose while someone poured plaster on their face. Thomas Jefferson almost suffocated when his life mask was being created.

Related posts:

The famous brand guru, Seth Godin, began his career path with unlikely degrees in computer science and philosophy. Like Godin, I didn’t set out to be a brand strategist either.

For all this administration’s chauvinistic posturing, it appears that the approval rating of the current president between the sexes has varied by no more than 7% throughout his career’s run. In…

The day after we got our backpacks back, the weather turned out to be good with only a few scattered clouds. We now had clean clothes, snorkels, and our GoPro so we were ready to actually do some…