Why Cover the Face of the Dead? Portraits Made for Nobody Living

A funerary mask is an object placed over or near the face of a body at burial, and the category covers things made for very different reasons. Some are portraits, reproducing the features of the individual. Some are idealised, presenting a perfected or generic face rather than a likeness. Some are protective, covering the face to guard it or to prevent something entering or leaving. Some identify the dead person's status or role rather than their appearance. Materials range from beaten gold to painted plaster, carved wood, jade mosaic and cloth, and the choice generally reflects what the culture valued most rather than what was easiest, which is why gold is so common among them.

The practice appears across regions with no contact between them:

• •Egyptian burials, where the mask forms part of a larger arrangement protecting the body
• •Mycenaean shaft graves, where beaten gold masks were found by Schliemann in 1876
• •Mesoamerican burials with jade mosaic masks, including several Maya royal tombs
• •Andean burials with metal masks and false heads on bundled bodies
• •Roman practice of keeping wax likenesses of ancestors and wearing them at funerals
• •Death masks cast in plaster in Europe from the medieval period into the twentieth century

These objects carry unusual quantities of information. They are frequently the most elaborate item in a burial, which marks the individual's standing directly and allows social hierarchy to be read from a cemetery. The materials indicate trade, since gold, jade and turquoise were carried enormous distances and their sources can be determined chemically. The manufacture reveals technique, with beaten gold, lost wax casting and mosaic inlay all represented. Where a mask is a portrait, it supplies an image of a specific person from a period with no other images. And where a series exists, changes in style track changes in convention and in who was being buried that way, which is social history recoverable in no other form.

The discovery of a mask changes how a whole site is interpreted, which creates its own problems. Schliemann announced in 1876 that he had found the grave of a Homeric king, and the mask he named after him is dated centuries too early for any such identification, which did not prevent the name sticking and being reproduced ever since. Spectacular finds attract attention and funding, which shapes where excavation continues. They also attract looting, since a single mask is portable and enormously valuable, and several are known only from the antiquities market with no recorded context, which destroys most of their information value. Museums holding such objects increasingly face claims for return to their countries of origin, and several have been repatriated.

The practice of casting a mould directly from a dead face has its own distinct history. It developed as a means of preserving a likeness accurately for use by sculptors producing tomb effigies, since a cast is exact where a memory is not, and it was used from the medieval period for royal and noble funerals where an effigy was carried in procession. It became a scientific and commercial practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with masks of famous individuals cast and sold, and with collections assembled for the study of physiognomy and for phrenology, which was a pseudoscience. Casts of many well-known figures survive. Photography displaced the practice almost entirely within a generation of becoming available.

Masks over the faces of the dead appear in Egypt, Mycenae, Mesoamerica, the Andes and Europe with no contact between them, made as portraits, as idealisations or as protection. They are frequently the most elaborate object in a burial, which reads social standing directly and traces trade in gold and jade over long distances. Photography ended the European practice of casting from the face within a generation.