OBJECT
Immediately after the death of an important personality, a professional sculptor would create a mold of the dead poet’s face and create a limited number of wax or plaster casts. The death masks would then be used (and in some cases still are) to commemorate the person both in public (tombstones, monuments and commemorative exhibitions or museum installations) and in private (kept by the heirs, family members and the sculptors who made the molds). They used to hire renowned sculptors to make the molds, who would not object to making some extra money on the side. So, the order of the deceased’s last visitors would be the following: the doctor, the priest, the sculptor, the funeral director. In this sequence, the artist’s role as someone with the skills to immortalize the deceased, is indisputable. Although the complex phenomenon of death masks is known in most civilizations and is usually associated with the hereafter, the above variant is specific to the secular Western society. Molding the visages of the deceased served mainly to exploit the deceased for different, carefully structured social projects.Author of the cast: Svitoslav Peruzzi, 1906
