Death Masks: Tutankhamun's Gold, Roman Wax Ancestors and the CPR Dummy Face

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The face on the standard CPR training mannequin comes from a plaster cast of an unidentified girl, believed to be about 16, who drowned in the Seine in the 1880s. This episode traces the long history behind that cast. Egyptian burial masks like Tutankhamun's were stylized spiritual armor rather than casts of the face. In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann found gold masks over skulls at Mycenae and claimed them for Homeric heroes, though dating showed they were centuries older. Etruscans fixed bronze faces to cinerary urns, and Roman elites made wax life masks of the living, displayed them in household atria, and had actors wear them at funerals.

From the Middle Ages to the 19th century, death masks served as sculptors' references for funeral effigies and marble tombs, then became prized objects in their own right. Casts survive of Henry VII, Peter the Great, Oliver Cromwell, and Napoleon on St. Helena, along with Dante, Voltaire, Keats, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt. Scientists used masks to study physiognomy, and morgues cast unclaimed bodies so families could identify them later. A Paris morgue worker cast the drowned girl because of her peaceful expression, and in 1960 her face became Resusci Anne.

Roman sculptors used life masks to carve accurate stone busts
Peter the Great's mask was taken by Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli
Nikola Tesla's mask was commissioned by his friend Hugo Gernsback
Abraham Lincoln sat for life masks by Leonard Volk in 1860 and Clark Mills in April 1865
Copies of the Seine girl's face, compared to the Mona Lisa, hung in bohemian Paris homes

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