Deep inside Princeton University's Firestone Library is the largest known collection of life and death masks in the United States.
THE TWO FACES of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sit in a white box, nestled on a bed of pink foam peanuts. One of them, smooth and stately, stares at the ceiling with wide, blank eyes. The other is shrunken and webbed with wrinkles, its eyes closed.
The first is a life mask, showing Goethe as he looked in the prime of his life.
The other is a death mask -- a portrait of the German poet's face not long after he died.
Both masks and almost a hundred others just like them make up the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks. Stored deep inside Princeton University's Firestone Library, it's the largest known collection of life and death masks in the United States, and one of the biggest in the world. It is also a testament to one man's decades-long obsession with a practice that was once common but is now an eerie remnant of a bygone era.
HOW TO SEE THE DEATH MASKS
The Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks can be viewed online at http://library.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/C0770/.
As the name implies, life and death masks are plaster casts made directly from a person's face, either during their lifetime or soon after their death. Before the rise of photography, the practice was used to preserve the likenesses of kings and presidents, artists and writers, statesmen and scholars. Portraits might have been easier and more common, but nothing was as accurate as a three-dimensional cast of someone's features.
"There's something about looking directly in someone's face that is captivating," says Julie Mellby, graphic arts librarian in Princeton's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, where the masks are housed.
Perhaps no one was more captivated than Laurence Hutton. A notable theater critic and literary editor in the late 1800s, he had a wide circle of friends that included Samuel Clemens, more commonly known by his pen name -- Mark Twain. He was fascinated with life and death masks, and spent decades scouring curiosity shops and museums around the world in search of them. Included in Hutton's collection were masks of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and
Walt Whitman.
Back in Hutton's day, this wasn't as strange as it sounds. Death masks were reproduced in the same way photographic prints are distributed today. Many were intended to be decorative items and were hung on the walls in people's homes.
"In the 19th century, some artisans were renowned for making death masks," Mellby says. "It was considered an art form."
In 1897, Hutton, a longtime associate of Princeton University and the recipient of an honorary degree, donated his prized collection to the school. For years, the masks were displayed in an alcove at Princeton's former library -- macabre curios that anyone could see. When the Firestone Library opened in 1948, the masks were transferred there and placed in the care of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
Wear and tear of the fragile plaster, not to mention the sheer size and value of the collection, prevent the masks from being displayed. ("They've been used a lot over the past 100 years," Mellby says.)
Currently, the masks are individually removed from storage only at the request of library visitors who wish to view them under strict supervision. This mostly means scholars and historians who, according to Mellby, travel around the globe to gaze upon the faces of some of the most famous men in history.
"They are, for whatever reason, the closest you can get to that visceral, physical replica of someone's face," Mellby says.
Although the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks is off-limits to casual library visitors, photos of the collection have been posted online so that everyone from amateur historians to the morbidly curious may take a peek.
There's much to be curious about, says Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. A repository for all things strange and macabre, the museum has one death mask in its collection -- a plaster bust of an unknown man that was once used to study phrenology.
"There's a curiosity about them because it seems so bizarre to our contemporary sensibilities," she says.
Like other mourning customs of the 18th and 19th centuries, death masks have become all but obsolete. Today, an occasional class on how to make life masks, such as ones the Morbid Anatomy Museum sponsored several years ago, are the closest people can come to seeing the once-common practice.
"Time passing has rendered it strange and exotic," Ebenstein says, although she understands Hutton's fascination with desk masks. "There's a magical meaning from having come into physical contact with the subject."
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