Roman Death Masks and The Metaphorics of PDF

Man Ray.
Death Mask of
Amedeo Modigliani, 1929.
64 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00197
Roman Death Masks and
the Metaphorics of the Negative
PATRICK R. CROWLEY
The first stage of the photograph is the negative; every photographic

picture has to pass through the negative process, and some of those neg-
atives which have held in good examination are admitted to the positive
process ending in the picture.
Sigmund Freud, Notes on the Concept of the Unconscious in
Psychoanalysis (1912)1
Modest proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. . . . The very contours

of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is
set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value
solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is
therefore of decisive importance that a partition be applied to this initially
excluded, negative component so that, by a new displacement of the angle
of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges in it too
something different from that previously signified.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (192740)2
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the postmortem portrait
was a common genre of Euroamerican photography. Death-stilled bodies were
ideal subjects for photographic technologies still sensitive to movement.
Thousands of these images surviveas daguerreotypes, tintypes, and negative-
printed paper photographs.3 But if the photography of the dead took advantage
of one of the liabilities of a then-new medium, it also extended, in a transformed
fashion, an older commemorative technology: the making of plaster death
masks. This ancient Mediterranean practice was still very much alive in the
nineteenth century, and casts were lifted from the faces of cultural and politi-
cal luminaries such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Benjamin Disraeli,
Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. Sometimes the two media came together in
the subgenre of death mask photography. Laurence Huttons 1894 Portraits in
Plaster includes dozens of examples, some taken from masks in his own collec-
tion and others taken by colleagues in the context of the museum.4 These newly
Grey Room 64, Summer 2016, pp. 64103. 2016 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 65
parallel media histories continued into the twentieth century. When Amedeo
Modigliani died in 1920, Jacques Lipchitz hastily took a death mask of his face.
Nine years later, it was photographed numerous times by Man Ray, both with
and without his signature solarization. In 1926, Ernst Benkard published over
a hundred photographs of death masks in his Das ewige Antlitz (translated into
English as Undying Faces in 1929)asserting in the preface that Death masks
are works of art from Natures workshop [der Werksttte der Natur]; yet they are
at the same time transcendental objects [transzendentale Objekte]a senti-
ment that, in turn, prompted the philosophical meditation on death mask
photography in Martin Heideggers 1929 Kant und das Problem der
Metaphysik.5 It was no accident, then, that Andr Bazin drew an analogy
between the molding of death masks and the molding of photography in an
influential footnote to his 1945 essay The Ontology of the Photographic
Imagean analogy that has since been extended and debated by Susan Sontag
and, more recently, Peter Geimer.6
This broad media-archaeological landscape of death masks and photography
provides the context for two puzzling dirt-archaeological discoveries in 1870s
France. First in Lyon in 1874 and then in Paris in 1878, construction workers
came across an ancient Roman tomb. In each, they found a piece of plaster pre-
serving the impression of a long-dead face, its eyes closed. But because these
plaster relics were concave hollows (and not the then-familiar convex forms of
commemorative death masks), they were initially difficult to understand.
Excavators and scholars were at first unwilling to accept that these hollow
forms were intentionally made by human hands, reasoning instead that they
were natural accidents of the burial process. This question was debated in
illustrated publications in the 1870s and 1880s, leading to a second curious
response to the artifacts: none of the early representations of these objects pre-
sented the hollow object itself. Instead, plaster casts were taken from each mold,
and these modern castsnot the original ancient artifactswere used as the
basis for illustrations. Two refusals, then, accompanied the nearly simultane-
ous discovery of these ancient, deathly faces: the refusal to accept these artifacts
as human-made and the refusal to reproduce their images directly.
We now know that these artifacts were intentionally created and that they
constituted the first step in the chane opratoire of commemorative images that
were produced in a variety of media. At least five additional examples of con-
cave postmortem facial impressions have since come to light from sites in Italy,
Tunisia, and Egypt.7 But in many ways these artifacts remain elusive and are
surprisingly understudied. In the archaeological literature, the molds them-
selves are usually presented as epiphenomena of the casting process rather than
Two views of a death mask mold

from the tomb of Claudia Victoria
in Lyon, second century CE.
Muse gallo-romain de Lyon.
66 Grey Room 64
constitutive of it. Above all, scholars have been interested in what the molds
can tell us about the problem of style as it appears in other objects, such as fin-
ished portraits in plaster, wax, or marble, with the plaster mold itself having a
dubious artistic, ontological, and even historical status that lies on the knifes
edge between artifact and natural object.8 As a result, masks qua impressions or
hollow molds rarely feature in discussions of Roman portraiture as primary data
or evidence.9
The language with which these objects are now discussed is also striking.
Both concave impressions and the convex casts created from them are referred
to as death masks, confusing the distinction between direct impression and
subsequent image.10 Attempts to distinguish concave from convex death
masks have resorted to tellingly imprecise metaphors: the hollow concave
forms are said to be negatives, and the lifelike faces they produced are their
positive casts.11 This technical language is borrowed from photography. Also
borrowed are assumptions about relative value. This article makes a case for the
crucial if tacit role that photographyand, more specifically, the positive-
negative process that made possible the creation of a series of identical positive
printshas played in shaping the archaeological understanding of these molds
and the motivations for their deposition in tombs by the bereaved. The potency
of the negative as a metaphor for the procedures of molding and casting seems
to have had its genesis in the nineteenth century, derived from an implicit but
distinctly photographic way of reconceptualizing the negative matrix or mold
as, on the one hand, a site of latency and indefinite reproducibility and, on the
other hand, as a perceptual problem.
Indefinite reproducibility because, despite the fact that a photographic neg-
ative produces only a tonal reversal in the structure of the image and not a
three-dimensional matrixthere being no actual impression on the sensitized
plate, not even on the level of photonsthe metaphor of the negative has offered
a seductive means to explain the attributes of seriality and indexicality that both
casts and photographic prints have seemed to share in common.12
Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 67

Perceptual problem because, like the photographic negative, the concave
death mask is a visually challenging artifactand so (like photographic nega-
tives) is easily overlooked. Due to an effect known as the hollow face illusion,
viewers of concave death masks will initially perceive their surfaces as convex
sculptural forms. This visual instabilitya constant shifting from concavity to
convexity, depending on how the object is held and seenmakes these long-
dead faces uncanny objects indeed, and means that their evasive surfaces are all
but impossible to capture with still photography.
The archaeological understanding and historical reception of these masks
from the 1870s up to the presentmight have been very different had they been
discovered thirty years earlier. Although largely superseded by the 1850s,
daguerreotypes provided a distinct model of photographic imaging.13 Rather
than creating directly from the subject a negative image that then becomes an
easily forgotten foundation for producing a positive print, the daguerreotype
captured its subjects directly on the surface of a silvered sheet of copper. No
positive printing of a negative image was needed: instead, the daguerreotype
could appear either positive or negative depending on how it was held by the
viewer. This overlapping of absence and presence, a simultaneous yet always
shifting effect of positivity and negativity, offers an alternative model for under-
standing the relations of absence and presence in another media technology, one
that came to light two decades after daguerreotypes had fallen from favor.
Two Excavations in 1870s France

In 1874 a team of workmen in Lyon (ancient Lugdunum) made a startling
discovery during the construction of a funicular railway station on the Rue de
Trion. Near the south wall of the station at a depth of about five meters, they
unearthed a Roman funerary stele that had toppled over in front of the grave it
had once marked. The stele was furnished with the following inscription (CIL
13.2108):
D[is] M[anibus] | et memoriae | Cl[audiae] Victoriae |
quae vixit ann[os] X | mens[es] I dies XI | Claudia Severi |
na mater filiae | dulcissimae | et sibi viva fecit |
sub ascia dedi | cavit
Two views of a postmortem

portrait of a baby showing the
direct-positive and negative
aspects of the daguerreotype,
185660. The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles.
68 Grey Room 64
[To the departed spirit and memory of Claudia Victoria,
who lived 10 years, 1 month, and 11 days. Her mother Claudia Severina
made (this monument) for her sweetest daughter and for herself in her
lifetime
and dedicated (it) sub ascia .]
Fortunately, the grave itself was preserved mostly intact. According to
Arnould Locard, who was among the first to publish about it, a stone casket was
found immediately adjacent to the stele.14 Although the casketas the inscrip-
tion would seem to indicatewas large enough to accommodate two bodies
quite comfortably (a common practice in Roman burial custom), archaeologists
were surprised to discover only a single skeleton. At the foot of this skeleton
was an unusual, oblong disk that was convex on one side, hollow on the other.
So seemingly banal and dirty was this object that the untrained workman who
came upon it failed to notice that it even was an object, striking the bottom of it
with his pickax and shattering it into several smaller pieces. Subsequent reports
credited the chief engineer of the project, Ferdinand Drugeat, for having had
the laudable and intelligent insight to preserve this object that many others
would have thrown away.15
Upon closer inspection, Locard recognized with excitement what they had
found: a plaster death mask, the first of its kind to have survived from classical
antiquity.16 But the unusual concave form of the mask gave rise to further ques-
tions. What, exactly, was this lump of plaster? Archaeologists became obsessed
with the circumstances of its facture. Locard framed the stakes of the matter suc-
cinctly: Is it a natural impression [une empreinte naturelle] made fortuitously
in the manner of the moldings that the ashes of Pompeii and Herculaneum took
care [ont pris soin] to preserve for us? Or are we, on the contrary, in the pres-
ence of a true mold [un vritable moulage], made intentionally, post mortem, by
this grieving mother, eager to preserve the features of her child?17 In hindsight,
for the existence of the cast to have ever been thought accidental, natural, seems
incredible. Yet nothing then known from the ancient world quite resembled
what the archaeologists had found. The long-standing and total lack of archae-
ological evidence for such artifacts had even encouraged scholars to explain
away Pliny the Elders testimony that the credit for this technical discovery
belonged to a fourth-century
Greek sculptor named
Lysistratus (a claim that
sparked intense philologi-
cal scrutiny and debate in
the nineteenth century) and

subscribe instead to Giorgio Vasaris assertion that the practice originated with
Andrea del Verrocchio in the fifteenth century.18
In 1882 a chemical test was finally undertaken to determine whether the
plaster derived from a natural deposit of gypsum (as in the mines of Montmartre
in Paris) or was instead (as the tests proved) produced from an artificial recipe
concocted by skilled molders.19 A special session of the Acadmie des Sciences,
Belles-lettres, et Arts de Lyon on June 6, 1882, hailed the discovery of the mask
as an important event in the history of archaeology precisely because it gave
incontrovertible proof of deliberately produced death masks in antiquity.
Locard declared, We are therefore in the presence of a voluntary act, and this
impression was made intentionally, post mortem, as the eyes bear the stamp
[portant le cachet] of death.20
At the same time that archaeologists debated the evidentiary status of the
mask, they also struggled to depict it. Efforts were made to produce a concave
cast from the ancient mold. The first attempt involved a mixture of gelatin as
the casting medium and nearly destroyed the
ancient artifact. On account of its extreme
humidity, the gelatin expanded and contracted
on the surface of the fragile plaster until the
mold reached its breaking point, requiring the
painstaking touch of a conservator to put it
back together.21 Numerous plaster imprints were
eventually produced, however, and at least one
still survives. These newly created objects
were in turn used to create mass-circulated
illustrations.22 The earliest appeared in an epi-
graphic notice in 1878 by Auguste Allmer, who
originally identified his image as a photograph
but corrected himself a few months later by
clarifying that it was a photogravure produced
using a proprietary typographic process
developed in the local foundry of the Foucher
brothers.23 Four years later, as part of the
1882 publication announcing the mask as an
intentionally made artifact, Locard included a
collotype (phototypie) illustrating two versions
of the cast: the first was a modern cast whose
missing forehead and nose reflected the original
state of preservation; the second was a modern
Top: Nineteenth-century plaster
cast of the ancient mold discov-
ered in the tomb of Claudia
Victoria, Lyon. Muse gallo-romain
de Lyon.
Bottom: Photogravure of nine-
teenth-century plaster cast of
the death mask mold from the
tomb of Claudia Victoria, Lyon.
Produced by the Foucher brothers.
From Auguste Allmer, Epitaphe
dune petite fille dans la tombe
de laquelle tait dpos un
moule de son visage, Revue pi-
graphique du midi de la France 1,
no. 18 (July 1878).
70 Grey Room 64
cast with the missing parts restored by the local sculptor and portraitist tienne
Pagny. But for the archaeologist Florian Valentin, the restoration of the nose in
the second cast constituted an irresponsible and misleading intervention. In
contrast to the epigraphic evidence of the stele found above the tomb, which
memorialized the death of a ten-year-old girl, Locards restored version of the
cast gave the impression of a young woman of at least twenty years of age.24
In his own 1882 publication on the discoveries at Lyon, Valentin therefore
decided to reproduce not Locards more recent collotype but Allmers original
photogravure from 1878. This debate about the age of the masks subject
and its visual representation became a transatlantic affair when a reporter
at the Nation, looking at the 1878 image produced by the Foucher brothers,
echoed the objections of an anonymous editor of the Bulletin critique that the
features, if accurately reproduced, seemed too advanced in age to belong to
such a young girl.25 Perhaps, the editor suggested, the incongruity was due not
to the interpretation of the tomb but to distortions introduced by the photo-
mechanical process.
This visual and interpretive debate was extended four years later in an 1886
publication by Henri Thdenat, an abbot who also distinguished himself as an
archaeologist, poet, and amateur photographer. In his essay, Thdenat aban-
doned photographic imaging techniques as a means of reproducing the Lyon
mask, opting instead for a pair of drawings he had commissioned of Alexis
Housselin, an archaeological illustrator.
One drawing depicted the modern cast,
its damaged areas filled in with dark
hatch marks; the other, a reconstruction
of the deceaseds face in profile, rendered
the nose with a dotted line, thus combin-
ing the concrete facts of preservation
with the power of imagination. Thdenat,
who subscribed in his essay to the
archaeological consensus that the mask
belonged to the young Claudia Victoria,
was one of the primary bibliographic edi-
tors of the Bulletin critique and very
probably was the anonymous editor who
had previously expressed concerns about
the photomechanical reproduction of the
Lyon mask.26 This would explain why he
declined to picture the Lyon mask photo-
Collotype (phototypie) of the

plaster cast of the Lyon mask
alongside a reconstructed ver-
sion in plaster by tienne Pagny.
From Arnould Locard, Note sur
une tombe romaine trouve
Lyon et renfermant le masque
dun enfant, Mmoires de
lAcadmie des sciences et
belles-lettres et arts de Lyon:
Classe des lettres 22 (1884).

graphically, despite the fact that he was not averse to the technology, having
included in the same study a photographic image of another ancient death mask
that had recently been found in his home diocese of Paris. Thus, as the title of his
essay, Sur deux masques de lpoque romaine trouvs Lyon et Paris (On two
masks of the Roman period discovered at Lyon and Paris), suggests, Thdenat
framed his account as a comparative study of the two discoveriesone that may
be read in a double sense as both a comparison of their archaeological contexts
and the representational techniques that register their evidentiary value.
In 1878, during the construction of a new tram station in Paris, workmen
turned up a sarcophagus of small dimensions with a roughly hewn exterior that
contained the skeleton of an infant, a plaster mold of the infants face found in
place on top of the skull, and a small number of grave goods, including studded
booties, dice, and a glass nursing bottle.27 As with the Lyon discovery, the find
was met with interpretive uncertainty. In his report of the discovery for the
Revue archologique later that year, Robert de Lasteyrie offered an ingenious if
somewhat implausible theory to explain why the mask survived as a hollow
mold rather than a convex cast. Perhaps, he suggested, the mold was not really
a mold at all (at least not one that was intentionally made by human hands) but
the formation of a stray mass of excess mortar that had fallen onto the face par
un hasard singulier (by a strange chance) when the lid was squished onto the
body of the sarcophagus, thus preserving for all time the delicate features of the
infant that Thdenat would later call the petit Parisien.28 This proved to be a
compelling explanation. The most eloquent case for the accidental fabrication
of the Paris mold would appear in Thdenats Sur deux masques de lpoque
romaine trouvs Lyon et Paris. For Thdenat, the rough grain of the Parisian
plaster, along with the fact that its back was irregularly shaped and oblong on
one side, provided evidence enough that a practiced hand was not responsible
for its creation. Instead, he declared, chance [hasard] which is the author of
this work, shows itself to be an able and experienced artist.29 As with the Lyon
artifact, archaeologists immediately produced numerous casts of this hollow
mold, and these modern casts served as the basis for all subsequent illustra-
tions, the first of which was a lush, velvety heliograph published by Thdenat.30
But if Thdenat insisted, in his comparative 1886 monograph, on the acci-
dental status of the Parisian cast, the 1882 materials analysis of the Lyon cast
72 Grey Room 64
forced him to accept that artifact as intentionally made. But whose face did it
represent, and why was it left in the tomb? Thdenats response is remarkable
for the way it anticipates the distinction Walter Benjamin would draw fifty years
later between the exhibition value and cult value of photographic images, and
the crucial role that reproducibility plays in the determination of their ontolog-
ical status.31 For Thdenat, the contingency and absence generated by the hol-
low impression of the little girls features was the key to understanding the
profound nature of the mothers grief. He writes,
Claudia Severina, in depositing the mold in the tomb, obeyed a sentiment
easy to understand. She did not want to break and throw away in ordinary
trash this plaque, sacred to her, since it had touched the face of her child
and preserved its features. Nor did she want that the cherished image, infi-
nitely reproduced, should fall into the hands of strangers and be profaned
by their indifferent gazes.32
That an abbot would bring the decidedly religious language of the sacred and
the profane to bear on the status of the mold is perhaps not surprising. For
Thdenat, the profanation of the mask results not so much from the repro-
duction of its indexical, material residueeven and precisely if this is what
endows it with a cult value for Claudia Severinaas it does from its perni-
cious exposure to a strangers gaze. In an important sense, Thdenats imagina-
tive scenario reflects a decidedly photographic presumption about the nature of
exhibition value. Much as negatives had become the oft-forgotten foundation of
photographic prints, Thdenat neglected to
consider what it would mean to examine and
contemplate the hollow mold itself rather than
its (nonexistent) positive cast.
Over a century later, we are better positioned
than Thdenat to explore such questions.
The Imagines Maiorum and Other Antique Media

In the century-plus that has passed since the
discoveries at Lyon and Paris, archaeologists
have uncovered a modest yet surprisingly
understudied corpus of plaster death masks
from various sites throughout the Roman
Mediterranean.33 With one important excep-
tion from a sculptors workshop in Tunisia, all
of these plaster molds (bearing the features of
Opposite: Drawing of the plaster

cast of the Lyon mask with frontal
and profile views. From Henri
Thdenat, Sur deux masques de
lpoque romaine trouvs Lyon
et Paris (1886).
Right: Heliograph of a modern
cast taken from the ancient plas-
ter mold of an infant discovered
in Paris in 1878. From Henri
Thdenat, Sur deux masques de
lpoque romaine trouvs Lyon
et Paris (1886).

men, women, and especially children) have been discovered in nonelite funer-
ary contexts dating to the second and third centuries CE.34 It is possible that the
modified castings from such molds could have been produced for display at
home in a more or less intimate setting.35 The prevailing assumption that such
castings would have been set up for domestic display is derived not only from
Pliny the Elders testimony but from Vasaris adaptation of Pliny in his discus-
sion of Verrocchio, as Aby Warburg observes:
The workshop of Verrocchio, which seems to have pioneered a more
artistic treatment of votive figures, specialized in the art of making
plaster and stucco death masks, which Vasari tells us were displayed
in Florentine houses as true ancestral likenesses, and which so often
enabled Florentine painters to supply accurate portraits of the dead.
Verrocchios shop was like a surviving limb of pagan Roman religious
art: its fallimagini and ceraiuoli were the makers of what the Romans
called imagines and cerae.36
All of these masks survive in the form of negative molds rather than posi-
tive casts. The hollow forms of these postmortem impressions would almost
certainly never have been used to produce objects resembling the closed-eye
death masks of the modern age.37 Rather, they would have been used to produce
lifelike images of the deceasedin wax as well as painted plaster and marble
whose eyes were then opened to enliven them.38 That the very materiality of a
portrait could suggest the stillness of death as well as the spark of life is
striking. In one of his Epigrams, the poet Martial describes a face rendered in
living wax (vivida cera ), thereby emphasizing the supple (and, one imagines,
colorful) qualities of this organic substance, while in another he draws atten-
tion to the mortifying muteness of a painted picture: The painting [pictura ]
preserves Camoniuss likeness [effigies] only as a child; the babys little form
[figura ] survives. His loving father did not record his [adolescent] face with a
portrait [imagine], fearing to see lips that did not speak.39 Likewise for the
prose writer Apuleius, good Platonist that he was, all handmade portraits (in
omnibus manu faciundis imaginibus) were lacking in vigor, color, depth, and
motionthe very qualities that endowed a resemblance with lifelikeness.
Furthermore, he asserts, what is formed in clay, molded in bronze, hewn in
stone, expressed in wax, smeared in paint, or made to look similar by any other
human craft [alio quopiam humano artificio adsimilatum est], becomes dissim-
ilar after just a short interval. Like a corpse it keeps a single, immutable appear-
ance.40 That Apuleius would liken the appearance of a corpse to that of a
portrait made by human hands is remarkable, since for modern scholars the
74 Grey Room 64
comparison between a corpse (in the form of a death mask) and a portrait would
accomplish precisely the opposite. Indeed, scholars have supposed that such a
juxtaposition would register the differences between the two media and illus-
trate the transformation from real likeness into the artistic expression of like-
ness, as one specialist writes.41
Such a missing link seemed to present itself in the exceptional case of the
Tomb of the Valerii, located in the ancient necropolis under St. Peters Basilica
in Rome, where plaster molds and sculpted portraits in marble and plaster were
found together in the same assemblage of artifacts.42 Unfortunately, the archae-
ological context of the tomb as it appeared in the second and third centuries suf-
fered considerable damage in antiquity when demolition work was undertaken
for the construction of Constantines original basilica in the fourth century.
Thus, little evidence survives that would tell us anything about how the masks
were originally interred. What we do know, however, is that this remarkable
mausoleumthe largest and most lavish in the entire necropoliseventually
grew to accommodate more than 250 bodies, expanding from the original patron
and his immediate family and dependents to include a larger network of hered-
itary relations who came to visit on special feast days or anniversaries of
remembrance.43 As a result, and contrary to scholarly opinion, whether any
of the molds and portraits in other media refer to the same individual remains
impossible to determine, no matter how much they might seem to resemble one
another in a casual comparison.
Some have suggested that these postmortem images may represent nonelite
appropriations of, and developments from, earlier and better-documented prac-
tices of elite commemorative image-making.44 The Roman custom of making
and displaying the wax images of ones noble ancestorsthe imagines maio-
rumoffers an intriguing parallel in this regard, but with significant differ-
ences.45 The most important, as Harriet
Flower argues, is that the imagines were cast
from living subjects. Class- and gender-based
privileges also separate these pre- and post-
mortem traditions. While the imagines consti-
tuted the exclusive prerogative of male citizens
who had achieved a curule magistracy, the
surviving postmortem casts were molded
from the faces of individuals who were dis-
qualified de jure (whether on the basis of
sex or age) from holding political office.46
Moreover, whereas we can only speculate
Modern cast taken from ancient

plaster mold from the Tomb of the
Valerii in the Vatican Necropolis,
mid-second century CE.

whether and how the postmortem images might have been displayed at home,
the imagines had pride of place in the aristocratic household, where they were
stored in wooden cupboards (supplemented by painted labels) located in the
semipublic space of the atrium where the paterfamilias would receive his
clients each morning. Occasionally, they were even deployed in spectacular
public funerals in the Forum at the heart of the metropolitan center.47 Finally,
the imagines maiorum seem to have belonged to an earlier tradition during the
republic and the transition to empire, in contrast to the surviving death masks,
which all date from the second and third centuries.
Despite these important differences, both forms of commemorative images
were created by the same basic casting technology. Pliny the Elder, describing
the revered imagines maiorum as faces expressed in wax (expressi cera vultus),
offers our best documentation of this artistic practice:
The first person who modeled a likeness in plaster [imaginem gypso] of a
human being from the face itself [e facie ipsa ], and established the method
of expressing wax [expressit ceraque] into this plaster mold [in eam
formam gypsi] and then making final corrections on the wax cast, was
Lysistratus of Sicyon, the brother of Lysippus of whom we have spoken.
Indeed he introduced the practice of giving likenesses [similitudines],
the object aimed at previously having been to make as handsome a face
as possible.48
How did the ancient Romans conceptualize the relation between plaster
mold and the wax likeness expressed from its matrix? And how do these
ancient ideas illuminate the archaeological discoveries at Lyon and Paris? Both
Florence Dupont and Georges Didi-Huberman have taken up this question, and
the answers given by both rely on an implicit and subterranean metaphor of the
photographic negative that shapes their
different understandings of the impor-
tance of the plaster molds taken directly
from a family members face.
Duponts influential discussion of
the imagines maiorum, situated within
her larger argument about the wax
effigy of the emperor in the imperial
funeral, takes its point of departure
from Pliny. Dupont stresses that anyone
who wished to create a mask of an
ancestor had first to create a plaster
Marble bust of a man from the

Tomb of the Valerii in the Vatican
Necropolis, mid-second century
CE. Courtesy the Fabbrica di San
Pietro, Vatican City.
76 Grey Room 64
matrix from which the resulting image in wax could be withdrawn.49 For
Dupont, this meant that the wax image, although regarded in practice as a kind
of trace bearing a direct link to its own referentlike a vestigium or a footprint,
she suggestswas in fact one step removed from a strictly contiguous form of
physical contact. Accordingly, she posits a casual disregard for this intermedi-
ary stage in the process, arguing that it was tantamount to a kind of cultural
forgetting, a conceptual elision that lays the groundwork for her bolder claim
that the Romans did not distinguish, did not need to distinguish, between the
hollow form [la forme en creux] and the form in relief [la forme en relief] when
it was a question of wax impressions. This was true not only for death masks,
but for all similar techniques.50
The evidence backing her claim turns out to be linguistic in nature: Dupont
points out that the word imago in Latin can denote both the convex and concave
forms of the wax impression and the seal itself. Consequently, she explains,
they are equivalent . . . the practice of taking impressions allows an
infinite series of equivalences to be created with no loss whatsoever.
Returning to funeral images, nothing distinguishes the form of the dead
mans face from its nth [nime] wax reproduction; it is always the same
form that is transmitted from mask to mask.51
Her claim seems to turn on an unspoken photographic analogy, for it tacitly
assumes a structural dependency on a singular matrix from which all positive
casts must necessarily be drawn. Such an apparatus resembles the photographic
plate, from which n number of ostensibly identical prints might theoretically be
madethus giving rise to a condition that, as Benjamin observes, makes point-
less any attempt to locate the authentic print in a photographic series.52 That
the Romans made copies of their ancestral images is beyond doubt. The ancient
sources are clear on this point. From Cicero, we learn that duplicate sets of
masks were made on the occasion of marriage when even daughters, who were
not allowed to have masks bearing their own likenesses, were nevertheless per-
mitted to commission new sets that they could add to the illustrious ranks of
their new families like so much wedding china.53 In the case of the ancestral
image or the death mask, however, practical concerns (e.g., the fragility of the
plaster itself, the shrinkage that occurs during surmoulage, or the sculptural
process of making copies from copies) effectively ruled out the use of a single
mold for the large-scale reproduction of images of the kind that Benjamin (for
example) had in minddespite the fact that he introduces the ancient tech-
niques of molding and casting into his account of the modern age.54
Duponts reliance on linguistic forms of evidence to bolster her broader

claims about infinite reproducibility appears to raise more questions than it
ultimately answers. For even if the word imago can apply equally to the wax
impression and the engraved matrix of the seal stone, making the leap to the
conceptual equivalence of the concave and convex forms is difficult, especially
since both the physical and visual relationship between the two is correlative
but not coextensive. Moreover, imago is one of the most semantically flexible
words in the Latin language: it expands to include such manifold things as
statues, likenesses, copies, reflections, and even ghosts.55 Although a certain
family resemblance may connect all of these terms, this alone does not compel
us to say they were necessarily fungible, either in theory or in practice, to the
ancient mind. The relationship was important, but the terms themselves did not
delimit any fixed conceptual categories.
Building on Duponts work, Didi-Huberman makes the provocative claim
that the plaster molds of the imagines (which he conflates with the death mask
molds considered in this article) may even have been deemed more precious
than the wax effigies themselves thanks to the originary trace they preserve of
the ancestora trace he attributes to Plinys moral commitment to a genealogi-
cal transmission, rather than permutation, of resemblance.56 But as Myles
McDonnell argues, given the complexity of the practical logistics involved, and
the fact that the Romans had no rule of primogeniture in their inheritance law,
the first edition of the mold of every ancestor who had ever lived is unlikely to
have been prioritized, retained, and passed along not only from generation
to generation but also from extended family to extended family.57
Although Didi-Huberman explicitly links his discussion of the negative
molds of the Roman imagines and death masks (the latter of which are photo-
graphically reproduced in the text) only to Hegels dialectical negative,
photographic analogies seem to undergird his core argument (as with Dupont).
The question of reproducibility is metaphorically linked to the concept of the
negative; namely, in the work of the negative [travail du ngatif], of the counter-
form, and of the matrix.58 Yet, as Friedrich Kittler argues, these two kinds of
negativesthe dialectical and the photographicdo not rest so easily together:
The consequences of unlimited copying are clear: in a series first of origi-
nals, second of negatives, and third of negatives of a negative, photography
became a mass medium. For Hegel, the negation of a negation was sup-
posed to be anything but a return to the first position, but mass media are
based on precisely this oscillation.59
Both Dupont and Didi-Huberman, then, focus their discussion of plaster
molds and cast images in terms of a triadic relation between (bodily) source,
78 Grey Room 64
(negative) mold, and (positive) casttriadic concerns that are shaped by deeply
photographic assumptions about the relations of source, negative, and positive
print. But what happens if we suspend, for a moment, these questions of source
and reproducibility, negatives and positives, a larger chane opratoire, and
instead pay attention to the curious visual qualities of the concave casts as arti-
facts in and of themselves?60 What exactly does a (photographic) system that
produceschoose your wordtransfers, reversals, inversions, or negatives
have to do with the relationship between a mold and its resultant cast that
together suffer no such transposition or lateral reversal and can thus be perfectly
aligned like a hand that fits snugly inside a glove? By offering these objects as
grave goods, leaving them with the deceased, the ancients clearly recognized
them as valuable artifacts and not simply forgettable detritus that linked the face
of the deceased to a lifelike ancestral image.
The most recent photographs of the Lyon mold demonstrate the ineluctably
ambivalent nature of its physical appearancean ambivalence that extends to
the physical appearance of all such objects. Whether one glances at the first
photograph of the mask in a fraction of a second or examines it for several min-
utes with scrupulous care, the viewer will almost certainly see a normal face
whose features protrude from a recessed surface. In reality, however, the per-
ception of convexity is an illusion. A second photograph of the same side of the
mask introduces subtle yet crucial differences in light and shadow (in particu-
lar, around the sunken eyes) whose discernment may detract from but not quite
nullify the overall effectone that might have been significantly intensified
when viewed in the darkened space of the tomb, lit only by the flickering light
of sputtering oil lamps. In a classic study on nature and illusion coedited with
Ernst Gombrich, the neuropsychologist Richard Gregory coined this phenome-
non the Hollow Face Illusion. The brain, even if it knows intellectually that
the mask is hollow, is unable to overcome completely the countermanding sense
data until the mold is subjected to the test of touch or turned at a considerably
oblique angle.61 Even then, the face continues to befuddle the person who views
and handles the mask, for the reversal of its depth creates a motion parallax so
that the features appear to rotate in the opposite direction from which it is
turned, causing the face to seem as though it were turning to watch the observer.
So powerful is the illusion, Gregory observes, that it is best demonstrated not
with a photograph of, say, a hollow face, but with the hollow mold itself.62
Our present-day experience with these uncanny artifacts may help explain
how they were viewed in antiquity and why most of the surviving molds have
been found in tombs. Did the apparent shifting of the face in the moldthe way
in which it wavers between convexity and concavitydramatize the relation to

the deceased as a kind of ghostly presence whose susceptibility to the empiri-
cal evidence of vision and touch hangs in a state of permanent and disquieting
suspense?63 Unlike the wax, plaster, and marble images produced from them,
many of which seem to have been freestanding busts, these loosely shaped casts
had to be held to be seen, and so their uncanny effects depended on an intimate
interaction with the faces of the dead.64 We can even return to Dupont and sug-
gest that the concave plaster molds were the ultimate example of the imago:
they were seals, impressions, statues, likenesses, copies, reflections, and ghosts
all at once.
These possibilities are reinforced by ancient texts and practices. Contra
Dupont, the distinction between concave and convex forms constituted a topic
of signal importance in ancient epistemology, logic, and optics. In his critique
of the schools of dogmatic philosophy (the Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, and
Epicureans), the Pyrrhonist skeptic Sextus Empiricus (writing at the end of the
second century CE) ridiculed the simple-minded and empty metaphors his
rivals used to explain the relationship between thought and sense perception as
being two sides of the same proverbial coin orratherdrinking cup:
Yes, they say, but the same thing is thought and sense-perception, but not
in the same respect; rather, in one respect it is thought while in another
respect it is sense-perception . . . in the way that the same drinking-cup is
said to be both concave and convex, but not in the same respectrather,
in one respect it is concave (namely, the inside part), but in another
respect convex (i.e., the outside).65
For Sextus, the problem with the analogy of the drinking cup is that it cheats
and wants to have it both waysthe chief complaint being that in its aspect of
thought the analogy cannot apprehend its aspect as sense. And yet the ancients
were well aware that concavity and convexity could, even in the realm of sense
perception, be difficult to distinguish. Ptolemy, for instance, offers the follow-
ing example in his second-century CE treatise on visual perception:
80 Grey Room 64
This is why we judge a concave veil to be convex when we view it from
afar. The reason is not that the wind disposes it in such a way that sunlight
and the visual flux reach the area of concavity [blown inward by the
wind]. Rather, the reason is that the [relatively] orthogonal rays strike the
middle of the veil so that it shows forth vividly, whereas at the outer edges
either no ray at all or a somewhat oblique one strikes it, which is why it
appears dark [toward the edge]. Accordingly, then, the edges of the veil
appear depressed while the middle appears elevated, and this is how
something that is actually convex appears [to the viewer].66
For Ptolemy, the perception of convexity or concavity has nothing to do with a
sort of top-down, cognitive model for vision in quite the way that Gregory
describesa model in which the brain is biased to perceive a convex face so
that it perceives a concave face as the former in spite of itself. Rather, Ptolemy
is at pains to show how optical illusions such as this result not from tricks of
light (as we understand such tricks today) so much as the vector of the visual
flux that (according to the extramissionist theory of vision in antiquity) radi-
ates from the eyes until it reaches its target or gets deflected along the way.67 The
person who gazed at and placed these molds in the tomb was never thinking
about ancient optics and the veridicality of sight, at least not in this special,
philosophical sense. But implicitly at least, Ptolemy raises a more interesting
and fundamental problem about the relationship between illusion and self-
knowledge that has broader implications that go beyond the specific example
he adduces (and on this point he is closer to the neuropsychological point of
view): namely, that the awesome power of the illusion derives from the knowl-
edge that one is being deceived by what he or she senses and yet, like Narcissus,
one remains captivated by the illusion all the same. In a similar fashion, the
plaster molds may have dramatized the relation to the deceased as a kind of
ghostly presence whose susceptibility to the empirical evidence of vision and
touch hangs in a state of permanent and disquieting suspense.
If optical and philosophical ambiguities provide one set of explanations for
why plaster impressions lifted from the faces of the dead may have been valued
objects in and of themselves, and thus fitting offerings for interment, the details
of Roman funerary law provide another. As Yan Thomas observes, under Roman
law a corpus, a body, had to be present for a tomb to be designated as a reli-
gious place. The body literally generated the tomb and all of the legal protec-
tions to which tombs were entitled. This contrasts with the earlier Greek
category of the cenotaph or empty tomb (tumulus inanis). Furthermore, a per-
sons corporeal remains could reside in only one tombalthough different cor-
pora could rest together in the same funerary space. However, the body that
Hall of Following Faces (including

those of Albert Einstein, Nelson
Mandela, and Ludwig van
Beethoven, shown here) in Stuart
Landsboroughs Puzzling World,
Wanaka, New Zealand, 2014.

constituted the nucleus of the Roman tomb could take one of several forms; it
could be the whole fleshy person, the ashes and bones produced by cremation,
or even take synecdochic and symbolic forms. If the whole physical body were
no longer available, then the head aloneas the ultimate locus of Roman per-
sonhoodcould be used to generate a tomb. Late in the second century, for
example (i.e., at the start of the period from which our surviving molds were
created), the jurist Paul wrote,
When a burial has been performed in more than one place, the places are
not both made religious, because one burial cannot produce more than one
tomb. In my opinion, the place which is religious is the one where the
most important part of us is buried, that is, the head from which likenesses
are made, by which we are recognized [id est caput, cuius imago fit inde
cognoscimur]. But when a request for the transfer of the remains is
granted, the place ceases to be religious.68
Accounts from the same period describe the burials of decapitated persons
being delayed until heads could be reunited with bodies.
Pauls closing reference to the making of images is also significant, because
in the absence of a fleshy body, or even its head, an image (imago) could serve
as the corpus for generating a legally binding tomb. Such interment by proxy
was called a funus imaginarium: the burial of an image. The first description of an
archaeologically recovered Roman face cast in the postantique Mediterranean
involved a complicated mixture of body, head, and effigy. In 1541, Pope Paul III
set about excavating the foundations of a section of the Vatican walls that
revealed a number of funerary buildings belonging to an ancient Roman ceme-
tery.69 Of all the accidental discoveries made during this construction project,
the contents of one tomb, described in painstaking detail by the architect and
antiquarian Pirro Ligorio, stand out:
There was also a skeleton which had the skull not in its proper place, but
between the legs; and where the skull should have been, there was a form
or hollow mold of plaster [forma o cavo di gesso] in which his image [effigie]
was made, the kind that is used in the wardrobe [guardarobba ] of the Pope.70
This brings us back to the (ongoing) debate about how to interpret the rela-
tions of the inscription, body, and cast discovered in Lyon in 1874. The inscrip-
tion described how a bereaved mother, Claudia Severina, set up the tomb during
her own lifetime (viva fecit) for her ten-year-old daughter, Claudia Victoria, and
for herself. The presence of only a single skeleton (de petite taille) in the grave
suggested to nineteenth-century scholars that the mother had failed to make
82 Grey Room 64
good on her promise. Nevertheless, the first publication of the tombs contents
in 1878 tried to recuperate ancient motherly love: since the plaster molds fea-
tures were from the start identified with those of ten-year-old Claudia Victoria,
perhaps the molds presence in the tomb revealed that her mother was not so
unsentimental after all. The mold, if placed in the tomb by the mourning
Claudia Severina, offered proof of her amour maternalan archaeology of
sentimentality that would be repeated by Thdenat in his comments on the
Lyon artifacts in 1886.71
Ultimately, the stakes of the matter have tended to come down to a funda-
mental confrontation between epigraphic and visual forms of evidence, with
the former almost always prevailing over the latter. Perhaps the best example of
this is the acrimonious 1880s debates about visual restorations of the ancient
plaster cast, since those restorations presented the face of a woman, not a child,
in seeming contradiction of the funerary inscription that named the child as the
tombs primary occupant. Unfortunately, however, the casket and the skeleton
described in the excavation reports are missing today, perhaps because, as often
happened, they were reburied in the ancient cemetery soon after their discov-
ery. Even so, rethinking the relations between inscription and still-surviving
cast in light of Roman burial customs suggests a new interpretation.72 There is
clearly a major discrepancy between what the epitaph indicates and what the
tomb actually contains, at least insofar as the number of skeletons is concerned.
Nevertheless, the overall interpretation of the tomb, and the question of whether
Claudia Severina fulfilled her promise, hinges not only on the identity of the
skeletonsomething we shall never know unless it is rediscoveredbut also
on the hitherto undisputed identification of the mask. While the ultimate ques-
tion of who is buried in the tomb must remain undecided, the visual evidence of
the mold deserves another look. I find it difficult to believe that the physiog-
nomy could indicate a girl who had just barely lived past her tenth birthday (an
issue that was raised by visual reconstructions in the 1880s). Instead, I submit
that the mold must correspond to her mother, Claudia Severina, who could eas-
ily have been in her mid-twenties or later. The somewhat lumpy, subcutaneous
musculature of the face, particularly along the jaw line, seems too mature for a
ten-year-old girl, and the length of the face, which measures nineteen centime-
ters, too large.73
From a strictly archaeological point of view, one might object that the re-
identification of the Lyon mask as Claudia Severina, and by extension the com-
memorative circumstances for which the tomb was erected, introduces an
unacceptably subjective element into the equation. Admittedly, whether the
skeleton found in the tomb was that of Claudia Severina or Claudia Victoria is

by no means clear. The excavators remarked only that the skeleton was de
petite taille, a description that remains at once impossibly vague and impossi-
ble to corroborate so long as the skeleton remains missing.74 It is tempting,
therefore, to take the inscription at its word, leave the ostensibly subjective
interpretation of the mask to one side, and allow the stele itself to instantiate the
mothers presence, the question of her physical remains notwithstanding.
The workaday practices of archaeology are themselves embedded in a set of
intensely forensic, aesthetic, and ultimately connoisseurial modes of judg-
ment.75 Thus, the identity of the Lyon mask does not complicate the problem of
the tomb assemblage but constitutes it. Could the skeleton in the tomb have
belonged to Claudia Victoria? Could Claudia Severina, unable to be buried with
her daughter as she had planned, have fulfilled her promise by other culturally
and legally well-established means; namely, by having a likeness of her face
placed at the little girls feet?
Physionotypes and Other Nineteenth-Century Media

Much of the textual evidence we now use to understand the postmortem face
casts of antiquity was available in the nineteenth century. Why, then, was accep-
tance of the artifacts from Lyon and Paris as products of human intention ini-
tially so difficult? And why was their direct visual reproductionas opposed
to images of their positive castsinitially avoided? These are vexing questions,
because much about the media culture of the nineteenth century should have
made these ancient artifacts easily recognizable and reproducible.
The creation of postmortem images was an established practice in nine-
teenth-century life, whether in plaster casts or photographic plates. As one pho-
tographer described the mortuary carte de visite in 1855,
All likenesses taken after death will of course only resemble the inanimate
body, nor will there appear in the portrait anything like life itself, except
indeed the sleeping infant, on whose face the playful smile of innocence
sometimes steals even after death. This may be and is oft-times transferred
to the silver plate.76
An enterprising inventor even attempted (probably unknowingly) to revive the
ancient practice of the imagines maiorum by creating a device that could pro-
duce life casts with far greater
ease than traditional methods
and with a level of accuracy
that easily lent itself to the
scientific study of phrenol-
Left: Diagram of the physiono-

type. From Spirit of Discovery:
The Physiognotype, The Mirror
of Literature, Amusement, and
Instruction (October 1836).
Opposite: Giorgio Sommer.
Plaster casts of bodies from
Pompeii, 1874. Albumen print
from glass negative.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
84 Grey Room 64
ogy.77 The physionotype was a precursor to modern pinscreen toys; its prickly
surface could register the impression of a likeness in mere seconds, and this
ephemeral topography could then be frozen by filling it with plaster.
Unfortunately, the physionotype proved to be a failure since infants and adults
alikewho compared the experience to sticking ones face in a mound of freez-
ing snowtended to leave a horrible grimace in the pin matrix.78
Ultimately, another nineteenth-century technology was responsible for mak-
ing the artificiality of the Lyon and Paris molds so difficult for their excavators
to recognize. Thdenat and his contemporaries repeatedly turned to the nascent
corpus of plaster-encased skeletons of victims from Pompeii (recently produced
by Giuseppe Fiorellis innovative technique developed in the 1860s and repro-
duced photographically in great quantities in the form of cartes de visite and
stereo cards) to bolster the claim that the Paris mold was a natural cast that
had come about by chance.79 Lasteyries explanation of the chance formation of
the Paris mold explicitly invoked the comparison:
By a strange coincidence [par un hasard singulier], which deserves to be
mentioned here, the heavy lid, in falling on the liquid mortar at the
moment when the tomb was seated, caused a certain amount of mortar to
spill forth onto the figure of the deceased infant; as it dried, this liquid
molded the features of the poor child, and has preserved them for us until
today, just as the mud that buried Pompeii has preserved the bodies of
some of the victims of Vesuvius.80
Fiorellis casts, which by their very status as casts were never truly satisfac-
tory in their analogical appeal to the archaeologists who found the Paris mold,
have an important prehistory. In December 1772, a curious object was discov-
ered in the basement wine cellar of the Villa of Diomedes in Pompeii.81
Archaeologists quickly identified it as the distinct impression of a womans
breast, preserved in an otherwise formless chunk of hardened ash that had

flooded the room where eighteen people had taken shelter and perished by suf-
focation. After being moved several times as the collection found its way from the
royal collection to the so-called Palazzo degli Studi (the precursor of the present-
day Naples National Archaeological Museum) at the turn of the nineteenth
century, the impression quickly began to draw the attention of the general public,
even serving as the centerpiece of a romantic fantasy, Arria Marcella , published
in 1852 by Thophile Gautier. From the beginning of this short story, Gautier
establishes the impression of the breast as the titillating object of a young mans
desireone he tellingly compares to a fragment of a statue mold, broken in the
casting. More significant for present purposes is the way in which he describes,
more than two decades before the Lyon and Paris discoveries, the cause of its
creation: This mark [cachet] of beauty, stamped by chance [hasard] upon the
scoriae of a volcano, has not been effaced.82
Thdenat describes the circumstances of the Paris molds production in pre-
cisely the same terms as Gautier; namely, by focusing on the element of chance
(hasard) that the plaster/ash registers both automatically and (this being what
made the mold of particular interest) accidentally. Part of what made the
discovery of the impression of the breast so arresting in its nineteenth-century
context was its constitutive historicity in relation to a major event in the geo-
logical and archaeological record of Pompeii. With the Paris mold, by contrast,
the ostensibly aleatory nature of its formation was predicated not only on the
basis of its nonrepeatability in the material record but on a kind of historicity
that could not be attached to anything of any particular consequence. The mun-
dane quality of the circumstances in which this object was foundits senti-
mental yet simultaneously objective testimony to the everydayparadoxically
set it apart as something special. In this sense, the play of chance may have
resembled that which was perceived to play a crucial role in the formation and
look of photographic pictures, as Robin Kelsey has recently explored in relation
to some of photographys earliest practitioners, such as Henry Fox Talbot.83
By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the conceptual yoking
of chance and historicity had emerged against the background of an epochal
shift in the evidentiary status of the fragment and its materiality in the field of
historiography. For Johann Gustav Droysen, the Prussian historian who pio-
neered the concept of understanding (Verstehen) in historical research as a
critical means of interpreting human action (rather than explaining it accord-
ing to the model of the natural sciences), the fragment assumed a new value as
the literal and material means by which the past could be accessed empiri-
cally.84 Fundamental to Droysens revolutionary project was his categorical dis-
tinction between what he called sources (Quellen) and remains (berreste,
86 Grey Room 64
literally leftovers), the key attribute of sources being that they are intention-
ally left behind for posterity, whereas remains are preserved only by chance and
thus fall accidentally under the historians gaze.85 Examples of remains included
such unexpected realia as blobs of color on a painters palette or, more pro-
saic, papers from public and private affairs, as they present themselves in files,
reports, bills, correspondence, etc.86 Characteristic of such records, Droysen
maintained, is that they were moments in the affairs as they were taking place,
that they are moments accidentally preserved out of the continuity of affairs.87
One of the biggest potential flaws of this paradigm, as Cornelia Vismann shows
and as Droysen himself recognized, was that the ostensibly accidental nature of
remains could simultaneously have been compromised by the desire to uncover
them in the first place.88 Hence, as Vismann observes, It is no accident that
Droysen formulated his important theory of historical refuse at a time when
the inventorying of the past was confronting the self-archiving of ones own
present.89 Of critical importance in this regard is that Droysen highlighted the
rich and direct juxtapositions of direct remains of antiquity in these historical
collections that included, among other things, the media of plaster [Gips]
(casts) and photography.90
Discourses and practices of chance, then, may reveal how an accident, and
not intentionality, was originally thought to explain the existence of the casts
from Lyon and Paris. But this still does not explain the second refusal that
accompanied the discovery of these two artifacts: the refusal to photograph
either one directly, instead relying on modern casts taken from the ancient
molds as a basis for subsequent illustrations. That the archaeologists declined
to reproduce the ancient molds was not by chance. Although they never
explained why they chose to work with modern casts, one possibility is that
the concavity of the masks makes them difficult to photograph, at least in any
way that guarantees a legible and unequivocal registering of contour and depth.
While the documentary photography of Roman portraits has long concerned
both archaeologists and art historians (because the largely aesthetic problems
of focal length, point of view, lighting, and so on can introduce an unacceptably
subjective basis of interpretation), the more specific challenges that
photographic mediation poses to these death masks have largely escaped the
notice of specialists.91 At a practical level these molds exceed their photo-
graphic legibility.
And yet the visual paradoxes the molds embody were of great interest
throughout the nineteenth century. In 1826, Sir David Brewster published his
essay On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios, and
of Intaglios into Cameos, with an Account of Other Analogous Phenomena, in

which he describes both his own experiences and those of his other learned col-
leagues in examining a variety of objects such as gems and coins through a com-
pound microscope.92 What they discovered, much to their astonishment, was
that the perception of convexity and concavity could be manipulated by adjust-
ing either the lighting effects, the instrument itself, or both. Amusingly, but
without comment, Brewster runs through a series of tropes from the Western
tradition of trompe loeil painting that he scrutinizes in order to judge the verac-
ity of his own visual experience: a nail, for example, casts a shadow whose com-
parison with that of the portrait in the intaglio provides the only reliable
evidence with which one can discern the true contours of the latters surface; in
another example, while looking through the eye-tube, he watches some flies
running about on a wall, seemingly pressed into it.93 For Brewster, who
believed, for example, that ancient priests and ruling classes had monopolized
their knowledge of optical media to pull off impostures using concave mir-
rors, interest in the conversion of cameos into intaglios and vice versa
amounted to much more than a simple diversion. At the same time, as Jonathan
Crary observes, Brewsters implied program, the democratization and mass dis-
semination of techniques of illusion, simply collapsed that older model of
power onto a single human subject, transforming each observer into simultane-
ously the magician and the deceived.94
The ramifications of Brewsters experiments in subjective vision, and the
reversal of depth perception in particular, reached a turning point in 1852 when
Charles Wheatstone, a rival of Brewster and renowned for his many inventions,
including the stereoscope, unveiled a curious analogue to that device, which he
called a pseudoscope.95 This apparatus consists of two rectangular prisms
adjusted in such a way as to force each eye to see singly the opposite view. As a
result, users looking at their world through the pseudoscope see concave sur-
faces as convex and convex surfaces as concavea world turned inside out. Or,
as Wheatstone describes it, the pseudoscope reveals another visible world, in
which external objects and
our internal perceptions have
no longer their habitual rela-
tion with each other.96
Among the more captivat-
ing illusions Wheatstone
observed with his device, he
singles out A bust [that when]
regarded in front becomes a
deep hollow mask; the appear-
Left: Figures illustrating Sir David

Brewsters study of the optical
illusion of conversions of relief.
From David Brewster, Letters on
Natural Magic (1834).
Opposite: Diagrams of Charles
Wheatstones pseudoscope.
From Charles Wheatsone,
Contributions to the Physiology
of Vision, Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society
of London 142 (1852).
88 Grey Room 64
ance when regarded in profile is equally striking. To ensure the success of this
illusion, he warns, it is necessary to illuminate the object equally, so as to allow
no lights or shades to appear upon them since these shadows, as Brewster had
already demonstrated, are precisely what gives the observer the necessary infor-
mation to help overcome the illusion. For Wheatstone, the most wonderful
aspect of this illusionone that, in a nod to Brewster, he called conversions of
reliefis that one experiences it by regarding the objects themselves, by
means of an instrument adapted for this purpose. Unlike the stereoscope,
which produces the illusion of (normal) depth with the use of photographic
stereo cards, the pseudoscope ostensibly requires no such mediation save the
prisms that reorganize the optic axes. Wheatstone describes the apparent con-
tingency of the conversion of relief as having the same relation to that of the
real object as a cast to a mould, or a mould to a cast.97
Wheatstones experiments with the pseudoscope are a world away from
Ptolemys veil or even Gregorys observation that the hollow face illusion is best
demonstrated with the hollow mold itself. For despite Wheatstones claim that
the relation between the pseudoscope and its object of study is analogous to a
mold and its cast, what is evident is that everything hangs in the balance of the
instrument adapted to this purposenamely, the prisms that manipulate the
normal functioning of binocular parallax. In an important epistemological
sense, Wheatstones pseudoscopeno less than his claims about the subjective
discernment of the world it presentedis constitutive of the metaphoric
potency that would eventually become attributed to the photographic negative
as a kind of inversion or reversal. Crucially, however, this inversion or reversal
becomes itself transposed from one of depth to one of lightthe very thing that
the pseudoscope necessarily excluded from consideration by paradoxically
pushing it to the point of excess. Now, rather than discerning the data of shad-
ows that serve to indicate the reality of the figures, the figures themselves
become the shadows whose discernment requires a rarified gift of visual dis-

cernment, as one photographer notes in a 1912 essay titled The Interpretation
of the Negative:
It is a marvelous power, the power to read correctly and translate in the
form of a mental positive the potential possibilities of the negative.
Looking at the negative, we see not the negative but the positive. When
showing a negative to a customer our attention is often called to the fact
that the face is dark and the hair is light, which startles us, and we have to
look to see if this is really so. The photographer has gradually become
gifted with a sort of second sight, and is thus able, when looking at the
negative, to see the finished print before him. The negative, however beau-
tiful to the eye of the photographer, must nevertheless be interpreted in
positive terms to become intelligible to the laity. The negative may be com-
pared to the engraved plate. It is the mold from which a casting may at any
time be made and multiplied.98
And so perhaps here, too, we have another explanation for the nonpho-
tographability of the masks from Lyon and Paris. By the 1870s, negative-based
photographyin contrast to daguerreotype and tintypeshad become the dom-
inant form of light-based imaging. But although central to the photographic
process, negatives were easily marginalized as artifacts in a process focused on
the relations that negatives bridged: between the appearance of the pho-
tographed three-dimensional subject and its positive-print replication on a flat
photographic surface. Again we can see how subterranean photographic
assumptions have shaped the interpretation of these casts: excavators were less
interested in these artifacts in and of themselves and more enchanted by the
images that could be developed from their concave surfaces: positive, convex
likenesses, as if three-dimensional photographs of the dead.
A telling example of how photographic assumptions of positivity shaped the
reception of archaeological negatives in the nineteenth century is provided
by the plaster casts of Pompeii. In his history-cum-memoir The Evolution of
Photography (1868), John Werge describes this most terrible process of natural
mold making as a dramatic confrontation or confounding between the present
and the past:
while looking at the pictures, it is very difficult to divest the mind of the
idea that they are not the works of some ancient photographer who plied
his lens and camera immediately after the eruption had ceased, so forcibly
do they carry the mind back to the time and place of the awful immure-
ment of both a town and its people.99
90 Grey Room 64
Despite its blatant anachronism, Werges photographic way of looking at the
casts and the geological events that produced them aptly captures the paradox-
ical nature of their ontological status as something between trace and referent.
(One often forgets that only the fleshy material decomposed in these cavities, so
that the plaster casts also contain sometimes-visible teeth and bones that make
them resemblebut at the same time quite distinct fromsomething like the
Neolithic plastered skulls from Jericho dating to the eighth millennium BCE.)100
Just as importantand akin to the visual difficulties presented by concave
facial impressionsWerges ways of looking at the casts draws our attention to
the impossibility of rendering the negative cavities photographically, as they
were always already constitutively invisible.
Coda: Metaphors of Impression

If photographic metaphors of (valued) positivity and (forgettable) negativity
have shaped our understanding of the plaster death masks from Roman antiq-
uity, then metaphors of impression drawn from the making of death masks have
also shaped our understandings of photography.
For Bazin, in his 1945 Ontology of the Photographic Image, the quality of
impressionability was what constituted, above all, the essential ground of com-
parison between the photograph and the death mask as images that are intrin-
sically self-generated, hence authorless:
It would be useful to study the psychology of minor visual genres such as
the molding of death masks, in which a degree of reproductive automa-
tism is manifest. In this sense, we could see photography as a kind of
molding, taking an impression of an object through the use of light.101
Despite the fact that, strictly speaking, the photographic process does not
involve genuine impressions, Bazins emphasis on the plasticity of light and its
technical manipulation has proved tremendously influential as a figurative
mode of explicating the seemingly miraculous formation of photographic pic-
tures.102
To say that a photograph is like a death mask is a perfectly reasonable, if
debatable, claim. But to suggest, as Sontag would later do in her reformulation
of Bazins theory, that it is at once like a death mask, a footprint, and a nail from
the True Cross within the space of a single paragraph is to invoke three very dif-
ferent kinds of evidence.103 As Geimer observes in his account of photographic
indexicality and its contested status as an intellectually available and heuristic
concept, Sontags example of the nail from the True Cross is perhaps the furthest
outlier from the death mask, as it pertains to a relic that, while it might have

penetrated the body of Christ, was not impressed by it, like the marble foot-
prints from the Church of Domine Quo Vadis on the Via Appia in Rome. (One
might be tempted to invoke here the example of Veronicas veil, as others have
done, but this, too, seems imprecise, since the veil obtains the image of Christ
from a stain of sweat that bleeds through the warp and weft of its fibrous sup-
port rather than from a solid matrix of miraculously pliable material.)104
For Geimer, the metaphorical paradigm of the trace is a paramount if prob-
lematic concern when distinguishing among its various species or exemplifica-
tions and their epistemological value. With regard to the differences between
the death mask and the footprint adduced by Sontag, for example, he explains
how the physical circumstances of their facture mark them apart from photo-
graphic images and even from one another:
Both result from a bodily impression in a material that can be formed, both
resemble their model, and both are remnants or remainders. The face of
the dead is left behind in the clay or plaster, just like the footprint in the
sand. For a phenomenology of the trace, however, it is important to know
whether it was the body itself that left its imprint or whether the imprint
was lifted from it, as in the case of the death mask. . . . Unlike the foot-
print, which generally comes about unintentionally, the death mask is cre-
ated as a deliberate work.105
Geimers observation that these objects come about intentionallythat they are
carefully orchestrated artifacts of highly skilled labor depending on some kind
of external agency for their existence, and that they do not simply occur ran-
domly in nature (even if they are formed sur nature)would appear so obvious
as to seem otherwise inconceivable. And yet this is precisely the scenario
archaeologists envisioned when these objects first started coming out of the
ground in the 1870s.
Or consider Camera Lucida , in which Roland Barthes appears to expound
upon Bazins analogy between photography and the plastic arts, postulating, It
seems that in Latin photograph would be said imago lucis opera expressa;
which is to say: image revealed, extracted, mounted, expressed (like the
juice of a lemon) by the action of light.106 Barthess translation of photogra-
phy from Greek into Latin (which he describes only a few pages earlier as a
pedantry necessary because it illuminates certain nuances) is itself reveal-
ing.107 First, the verbose translation into a phrase rather than a single term helps
to clarify the stakes of what exactly is happening in photography. With respect
to Joseph Nicphore Nipces early, Grecophilic attempts to identify the photo-
graphic image and the process responsible for its creation, Joel Snyder draws
92 Grey Room 64
attention to the deeply ambiguous syntax of words such as physautotype, which
could be understood variously as nature impressing itself, or as a self impres-
sion of nature, or perhaps as self impression by nature.108 In Barthess
formulation, however, the grammatical use of the Latin ablative of agent
clarifies that the resemblance is being achieved by the action of light. In addi-
tion to removing such ambiguities (which could have been accomplished just
as well in transliterated Greek), Barthess preference for Latin appears to go
a step further by glossing Pliny the Elders Natural History, in which the
verb exprimere (to express) repeatedly draws attention (in such phrases as
expressi cera vultus) to the physical contingency that ostensibly guarantees
a resemblance.
But if the metaphorical language of pressing has retained a certain degree of
explanatory power with regard to both the ontology of the photographic image
and the death mask, the question of agency that subtends the comparison has
been understood differently in each case. The crux of the matter, as John Dewey
observes using the example of grapes whose juice can be expressed either in a
wine press or underfoot, is that expression does not happen naturally (i.e., on
its own) but always requires some kind of external agent: there can be no
expression without a corresponding compression.109 In photography, as Barthes
stresses, the external agent is light. But who or what is the external agent in the
making of the death mask? Pliny recognizes Lysistratus as the first person
(hominis . . . primus omnium) to have made a casting from the face itself and
who also established the method (instituere) of making corrections to the
image expressed in wax.110 Although Plinys testimony might at first glance
appear to be attributing the agency to Lysistratus, another possibility is that, as
with photography, Pliny means to suggest that the sculptor only discovers and
refinesrather than inventsa method of obtaining a resemblance. In this case,
the difference from photography would be that, for Pliny, what achieves the
resemblance is neither the artist nor the automatic system constituted by the
mold and malleable substrate (as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon suggests in
his critique of Aristotelian hylomorphism).111 Plinys formulation would con-
stitute instead a return to discourses of chance, although not a random, aleatory
species of chance. Rather, it is one that is governed by Plinys Stoic cosmology
and his belief in, and commitment to, the Providence of a divine Nature.112
Rehearsing these old chestnuts in various theories of the ontology of the pho-
tographic image with a view to the ways they touch upon or deploy ancient
techniques and conceptualizations of molding and casting has little to do with
mere captiousness. Rather, a deeper consideration of the ancient metaphors and
analogies that are so often adduced to compare or even assimilate photographs

to death masks reveals a discursive circularity or recursiveness. What the nine-
teenth-century discoveries of the Lyon and Paris masks disclose are the power-
ful yet tremendously subtle ways in which both the historical understanding
and analogical potential of death masks has always already been photographic.
94 Grey Room 64
Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Greek and Latin texts are from the Loeb Classical
Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). I am deeply grateful to Jordan Bear, Sarah
Miller, Joel Snyder, and the editors at Grey Room for their generous and insightful comments and
criticisms. All errors are of course my own.
1. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 195674), 12:264.
2. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 459.
3. The literature on postmortem photography is considerable, but see especially Jay Ruby,
Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and
Audrey Linkman, Taken from Life: Post-mortem Portraiture in Britain (18601910), History of
Photography 30, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 309347. On the deathliness of photography in the nine-
teenth century, see Rosalind Krauss, Tracing Nadar, October 5 (Summer 1978): 2947.
4. Laurence Hutton, Portraits in Plaster (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894). Huttons own
collection was based on a collection of six masks found in the trash (thrown away by their
deceased owners unappreciative heirs) in the East Village in the early 1860s. His masks are
now at Princeton University. See http://library.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/
C0770/.
5. Ernst Benkard, Das ewige Antlitz (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1926); and Martin
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997). Cf. Louis Kaplan, Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancys Recasting
of the Photographic Image, Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 1 (2010): 4562.
6. Andr Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, in What Is Cinema? trans. Timothy
Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 312. Bazins analogy would later be taken up and expanded
by Susan Sontag in her collection of essays On Photography (1977; New York: Picador, 1990), 154.
Sontags multiple photographic metaphors are, in turn, discussed by Peter Geimer, Image as
Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm, trans. Kata Gellen, Differences 18, no. 1 (2007):
728. See also the recent discussion of photography in relation to death masks in Kaja Silverman,
The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2015).
7. For a comprehensive catalogue of these masks, see Heinrich Drerup, Totenmaske und
Ahnenbild bei den Rmern, Rmische Mitteilungen 87 (1980): 81129. Missing from this cata-
logue is a specimen of an infant in the Muse Carnavalet in Paris.
8. Kendall L. Walton, Style and the Products and Processes of Art, in The Concept of Style,
ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 72103.
9. For a glimpse into the historiography of this long debate, see especially Jan Bazant, Roman
Deathmasks Once Again, Annali: Sezione di archeologia e storia antica 13 (1991): 20918.
10. Marcia Pointon encapsulates the problem in her essay Casts, Imprints, and the
Deathliness of Things: Artifacts at the Edge, Art Bulletin 96, no. 2 (2014): 173: Terminology
sows confusion: the mold and the imprint, or cast, is each referred to as a death mask, an elision
indicative of the desire to maintain the connection between face and mask.
11. The use of this terminology of negatives and positives with specific reference to the
molding of death masks had emerged by at least the 1890s. See, for example, the discussion of the

casting of Lincolns and Grants death masks in Cleveland Moffett, Grant and Lincoln in Bronze,
McClures Magazine 5, no. 5 (October 1895): 425ff. How or why people began to characterize
molds in more general terms as negatives and casts as positives, by which they seem to mean
concave and convex forms, respectively, remains unclear, but a preliminary examination of
results from an Internet search engine indicates that the characterization gradually appears some-
time in the 1880s in relation to patents for metal forging and gynecological modelsa genealogy
that seems ripe for further study. The familiar language of photographic positives and nega-
tives (along with the name of photography itself) had already been introduced by Sir John
Herschel as early as 1840, on which see especially Geoffrey Batchen, The Naming of
Photography: A Mass of Metaphor, History of Photography 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 2829, 31n59.
For a brief account of the early history of the negative, see D.B. Thomas, The First Negatives: An
Account of the Discovery and Early Use of the Negative-Positive Photographic Process (London:
H.M. Stationery Office, 1964).
12. The literature on photographic indexicality is vast. See Charles Sanders Peirce, Logic as
Semiotic: The Theory of Signs, in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New
York: Dover, 1940), 119. A retrospective reading of Bazin through the lens of Peircean semiotics
can be located in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1969), 12055. Perhaps the most well-known art-historical account of indexi-
cality remains Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Part 1, in The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 196209. For a
reevaluation and critique of this reading, see especially Tom Gunning, Whats the Point of an
Index? or, Faking Photographs, Nordicom Review 25, nos. 12 (2004), 3949; and Geimer, Image
as Trace. See also Jordan Bear, Index Marks the Spot? The Photo-Diagrams Referential System,
Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (2012): 31534; and Joel Snyder, Pointless, in James Elkins,
ed., Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), 36985. Most significant for my present
purposes of bringing together these archaeological and photographic discourses is Georges Didi-
Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: archologie, anachronisme et modernit de lempreinte
(Paris: ditions de Minuit, 2008).
13. On the relationship between archaeology and daguerreotypy, see especially Lindsey S.
Stewart, In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the Daguerreotypes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de
Prangey, in Claire L. Lyons et al., eds., Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient
Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 6691.
14. The earliest and most important publications about the mask are Auguste Allmer,
Epitaphe dune petite fille dans la tombe de laquelle tait dpos un moule de son visage, Revue
pigraphique du midi de la France 1, no. 18 (July 1878): 298300; Arnould Locard, Note sur une
tombe romaine trouve Lyon et renfermant le masque dun enfant, Mmoires de lAcadmie
des sciences et belles-lettres et arts de Lyon: Classe des lettres 22 (1884): 2136; Hnri Thdenat,
Sur deux masques de lpoque romaine trouvs Lyon et Paris (Paris: H. Champion, 1886); and
Auguste Allmer and Paul Dissard, Trion: Antiquits dcouvertes en 1885, 1886, et antrieure-
ment, Mmoires de lAcadmie des sciences et belles-lettres et arts de Lyon: Classe des lettres 25
(1887): 3237.
15. Andr Steyert, Nouvelle histoire de Lyon (Lyon: Bernoux et Cumin, 1895), 1:335.
16. Although an image of the mask was first published in 1878, the mask itself went missing
for several years after it came to light. This may explain why the mask belonging to the infant in
Paris, although found four years later in 1878, was independently regarded as the first of its kind
96 Grey Room 64
in recorded archaeological history. Locard, Note sur une tombe, 24.
17. Locard, Note sur une tombe, 34.
18. Thdenat, 12. On the philological controversy, see Charles C. Perkins, The Art of Casting
Plaster among the Greeks and Romans (Second and Concluding Notice), American Art Review
1, no. 6 (1880): 25657.
22. Today the Lyon mold remains understudied even among specialists. In part, this has to do
with the fact that the ancient mold had long been kept at the Muse des beaux-arts de Lyon rather
than the Muse gallo-romain de Lyon, where the stele and a modern (nineteenth-century) cast of
the mask had been put on display and were generally known to archaeologists since the 1880s.
(Thanks to M. Hugues Savay-Guerraz, conservator at the Muse gallo-romain de Lyon, for bring-
ing this to my attention.) This helps to explain why, as recently as 1980, Heinrich Drerup identi-
fied the Lyon mold as missing in his modest catalogue of such objects (notably excluding the Paris
mold), which by then included a handful of additional specimens that had come to light over the
previous century. Drerup, Totenmaske und Ahnenbild bei den Rmern, 3. As a result, Drerup
and others were forced to rely on the modern cast of the mold for their analysis, rather than on
the excavated mask itself. Consequently, the ancient mold itself has largely been written out of
the picture, its many imperfections smoothed over in a series of modern proxies made from var-
ious and variously resembling media. The first publication of the ancient mold (as opposed to the
modern cast) appears in Vronique Dasen, Wax and Plaster Memories: Children in Elite and
Non-Elite Strategies, in Children, Memory, and Family Identity in Roman Culture, ed. Vronique
Dasen and Thomas Spth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10946.
23. Auguste Allmer, Corrections et additions, Revue pigraphique du midi de la France 1,
no. 20 (SeptemberOctober 1878): 320.
24. Florian Valentin, Miscellanea, Bulletin pigraphique de la Gaule 2 (1882): 249.
25. Chronique, Bulletin critique de la littrature, dhistoire, et de thologie, no. 2 (15 October
1882): 21718; and Notes, The Nation, 30 November 1882, 464.
26. Thdenat signed nearly all of the other reviews in the Chronique during this period, but
a scant few appear to have been left anonymous rather haphazardly.
27. Lon Landau, Un coin de Paris, le cimetire gallo-romain de la rue Nicole (Paris: Didier,
1878).
28. See Robert de Lasteyrie, Sur un cimetire romain dcouvert Paris, rue Nicole Henri,
Revue archologique, June 1878, 378; and Thdenat, 27. The ancient mold and its modern cast
remain on display at the Muse Carnavalet, the city museum of Paris.
29. Thdenat, 27. On the art-historical phenomenon of chance images, see especially Horst
W. Janson, The Image Made by Chance in Renaissance Thought, in Essays in Honor of Erwin
Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (Zurich: Buehler Buchdruck, 1960), 25466.
30. The Science Museum, London, owns a copy of the mask (accession no. A656209) with a
handwritten inscription on the reverse that recounts the story of its making as given in Landau.
31. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second
Version), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media , ed. Michael W. Jennings et al.
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 27.

32. Il est donc probable que le moule du muse de Lyon dut servir tirer un masque en
cire. . . . Claudia Severina, en dposant le moule dans la tombe, obit un sentiment facile com-
prendre. Elle ne voulut pas briser et jeter avec les dbris vulgaires ce pltre, sacr pour elle, car
il avait touch le visage de son enfant et conservait ses traits. Elle ne voulut pas non plus que la
chre image pt, indfiniment reproduit, tomber en des mains inconnues et tre profane par des
regards indiffrents. Thdenat, 1516.
33. Drerup, Totenmaske und Ahnenbild bei den Rmern, 1980.
34. On the Tunisian workshop that produced unfinished plaster portraits found alongside a
plaster mold, see Hdi Slim, Masques mortuaires dEl Jem (Thysdrus), Antiquits africaines 10
(1976): 7992.
35. In a letter to his friend Macrinus, Pliny the Younger contrasts the emotional response to
images of the dead displayed at home (defunctorum imagines domi positae) to those set up in
a very public space (in celeberrimo loco), although whether he is referring to more conventional
likenesses in marble or bronze, or to the mold-made images his famous uncle of the same name
had discussed, remains ambiguous in each case.
36. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 207. See also Anne-Galle
Saliot, The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman across the Tides of Modernity (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 64ff.
37. Institutional spaces of justice constituted a unique example of such a context for display
beyond the tomb. In his treatise on rhetorical training, Quintilian recalls an episode in which a
death mask had been used as a visual aid to solicit a sympathetic responseto catastrophic
effect, in this caseduring a courtroom drama. That Quintilian was talking about a true death
mask is strongly suggested by his remark that the grisly, disfigured image was fashioned in wax
after being taken (through the interceding plaster mold, we must imagine) cadaveri, from the
corpse itself. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria , 6.1.
38. Slim, Masques mortuaires dEl Jem (Thysdrus), 8789.
39. Martial, Epigrams, 9.74.
40. Apuleius, Apology, trans. Vincent Hunink, in Rhetorical Works, ed. S.J. Harrison (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), bk. 14, 38. See also Yun Lee Too, Statues, Mirrors, Gods:
Controlling Images in Apuleius, in Art and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jas Elsner (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13352.
41. Jane Fejfer, Roman Portraits in Context (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 121.
42. The major publication is Henner von Hesberg and Harald Mielsch, Die heidnische
Nekropole unter St. Peter in Rom: Die Mausoleen EI und ZPsi, Atti della Pontificia Accademia
Romana di Archeologia, ser. 3, Memorie, vol. 16, no. 2 (Rome: LErma di Bretschneider, 1986),
143208. See also Dasen, Wax and Plaster Memories; Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Housing the
Dead: The Tomb as House in Roman Italy, in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in
Context, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 6676; and Luigi
Maria Cali, La morte del sapiente: La tomba di Valerius Herma nella necropoli vaticana, in
Arte e memoria culturale nellet della Seconda Sofistica , ed. Orietta D. Cordovana and Marco
Galli (Catania: Edizioni del Prisma, 2007), 289318.
43. Barbara E. Borg, Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs in Third-Century C.E.
Rome (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13539. On the conceptualization of familial
and hereditary tombs in Roman funerary law, see Max Kser, Zum rmischen Grabrecht, in
98 Grey Room 64
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fr Rechtsgeschichte: Romanistische Abteilung 95 (1978): 1592.
44. Dasen, Wax and Plaster Memories.
45. The bibliography on the imagines maiorum is vast. See especially Harriet Flower, Ancestor
Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Peter Blme, Die imagines maiorum: Ein Problemfall rmischer und neuzeitlicher sthetik, in
Homo Pictor, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: K.G. Sauer, 2001), 30522; and John Pollini, From
Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
46. Flower, Ancestor Masks. See also Wallace-Hadrill, Housing the Dead; and Dasen, Wax
and Plaster Memories.
47. In the halls of our ancestors it was otherwise; portraits were the objects displayed to be
looked at, not statues by foreign artists, nor bronzes nor marbles, but wax models of faces were
set out each on a separate side-board, to furnish likenesses to be carried in procession at a funeral
in the clan, and always when some member of it passed away the entire company of his house
that had ever existed was present. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 35.4ff. See also Georges Didi-
Huberman, The Molding Image: Genealogy and the Truth of Resemblance in Plinys Natural
History, Book 35, 17, in Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of the Law,
ed. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7188.
48. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 35.44.
49. Florence Dupont, The Emperor-Gods Other Body, trans. Brian Massumi, in Fragments
for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989),
396419.
50. Dupont, The Emperor-Gods Other Body, 407; translation modified (the English transla-
tion qualifies the hollow form as a negative and the form in relief as a positive, but Dupont
does not use these terms in French).
51. Dupont, The Emperor-Gods Other Body, 408; translation modified (the English transla-
tion arbitrarily gives hundredth).
52. See Silverman, Miracle of Analogy, 12.
53. Cicero, Against Vatinius, 28.
54. Dupont does not cite Benjamin in her essay, but Didi-Huberman (who cites Dupont) makes
the theoretical connection to Benjamin explicit. On both the technical issues and art-historical
consequences of producing copies of death masks, see especially Joost Keizer, Portrait and
Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Art History 38, no. 1 (February 2015): 1137.
55. Flower, 3259.
56. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 6070 (esp. 69). See also Didi-Huberman,
The Molding Image.
57. Myles McDonnell, Un Ballo in Maschera: Processions, Portraits, and Emotions, Journal of
Roman Archaeology 12 (1999): 54152.
58. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 69.
59. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media , trans. Anthony Enns (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 134. Cf.
David S. Ferris, The Shortness of History, or Photography In Nuce: Benjamins Attenuation of
the Negative, in Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and History (London: Bloomsbury,
2005), 1937.
60. On the chane opratoire, see Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 35ff.
61. Richard L. Gregory and Ernst Gombrich, eds., Illusion in Nature and Art (New York:

Scribner, 1973).
62. Gregory and Gombrich, 84.
63. Regarding a similar effect in the optical reversibility of Marcel Duchamps Feuille de
vigne femelle in Andr Bretons surrealist photography, see Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par
contact, 25765. Although I would agree that Bretons photograph of the mold constitutes a form
of reversibility similar to Maurice Merleau-Pontys example of the glove turned inside out, I am
not sure that I would agree with a characterization of Duchamps sculpture as a negative form
in the first place.
64. In the ancient sepulchral context, the very fact that these negative molds were deposited
in the proximity of more-traditional portraits, yet under very different conditions of visibility
(e.g., sealed up within a sarcophagus), would seem to suggest that the Romans did indeed draw a
distinction between the two in the first place and were perhaps even acutely aware of their sig-
nifying power. Of course, questions of preservation may also be at issue: objects included in buri-
als have a far greater chance of surviving in the archaeological record than do objects kept
circulating as part of daily life.
65. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, trans. and ed. Richard Bett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 1.307 (61). For related problems of metaphor, analogy, and exemplarity
in Roman philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence, see the excellent collection of essays in
Michle Lowrie and Susanne Ldermann, eds., Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through
Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law (London: Routledge, 2015).
66. Ptolemy, Optics, 2.128, quoted in and trans. A. Mark Smith, Ptolemys Theory of Visual
Perception: An English Translation of the Optics with Introduction and Commentary,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 86, no. 2 (1996): 44.
67. On this ancient theory of vision, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi
to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 117. On Ptolemys optical account, see
Grard Simon, Le regard, ltre, et lapparence dans loptique de lantiquit (Paris: ditions du
Seuil, 1988), 19; and A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern
Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
68. Paul 3 quaestionum, D. 11, 7, 44, trans. Alan Watson, in The Digest of Justinian, vol. 1
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). See also Yan Thomas, Res religiosae: On
the Categories of Religion and Commerce in Roman Law, in Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy, eds.,
Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50.
69. Gianfranco Spagnesi, Roma: La Basilica di San Pietro, borgo e la citt (Milan: Jaca Book,
2002), 126.
70. Paolo Liverani et al. eds., The Vatican Necropoles (Milan: Editoriale Jaca Book, 2010), 103.
71. Allmer, Epitaphe dune petite fille, 299.
72. From the inscription we learn that young Claudia Victoria took her nomen gentile from her
mother (Claudia Severina) rather than her father, suggesting she was an illegitimate child of less-
than-noble birth. As Vronique Dasen suggests, the cognomen Victoria may help to explain why
the girls parents had never been married, for the masculine version of this name was extremely
common among soldiers, who at the time were not allowed to marry until they had completed
their term of service. See Dasen, Wax and Plaster Memories, 125.
73. Unfortunately, the length of the mask is difficult to compare with good statistical infor-
mation from modern medical studies, whose metrics are produced by taking the precise circum-
100 Grey Room 64

ference of the head (something that is impossible to do with a death mask) and orofacial points
that use the nose (unfortunately missing in the Lyon mold) as a crucial point of reference.
However, I wish to thank my colleague Mara Cecilia (Nen) Lozada, a bioarchaeologist and
anthropologist, who conducted a visual analysis of Locards photograph along with her class and
concluded (without any knowledge of the specifics of the inscription) that the mask likely
belonged to a female young adult, age twenty to thirty-five.
75. Richard Neer, Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style, Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (2005):
126.
76. Nathan Burgess, Taking Portraits after Death, Photographic and Fine Art Journal, 1855,
80, quoted in Ruby, 4445.
77. See especially douard Papet, Le moulage sur nature au service de la science, in fleur
de peau: Le moulage sur nature au XIXe sicle, ed. douard Papet (Paris: Runion des muses
nationaux, 2001), 8895.
78. On these questions of facture in the nineteenth century, see especially douard Papet,
Technique: Saisir la nature sur le fait, in fleur de peau, 7477; and Hans Georg Hiller von
Gaertringen, Masterpieces of the Gipsformerei: Art Manufactuary of the Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin since 1819 (Munich: Hirmer, 2012). For contemporary accounts of the physionotype, see
Muse des familles 2 (1835): 144; and [Franois-Ferdinand-Philippe-Louis-Marie dOrlans,
prince de Joinville], Memoirs (Vieux Souvenirs) of the Prince of Joinville, trans. Lady Mary Loyd
(New York: Macmillan, 1895), 298.
79. Lasteyrie, Sur un cimetire, 378; and Thdenat, 1112. On the plaster victims from
Pompeii, see especially Brigitte Desrochers, Giorgio Sommers Photographs of Pompeii, History
of Photography 28, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 111129; and Eugene Dwyer, Pompeiis Living Statues:
Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
80. Par un hasard singulier et qui mrite dtre signal, le lourd couvercle, en tombant sur le
mortier liquide au moment de la tombe, a fait jaillir une certaine quantit de mortier jusque sur la
figure du petit dfunt; ce liquide en schant a moul les traits du pauvre enfant et nous les a
conserv jusqu aujourdhui, comme la boue qui a enseveli Pompi a conserv les corps de
quelques-unes des victimes du Vsuve. Lasteyrie, Sur un cimetire, 378.
81. For the history of this object, see especially Amedeo Maiuri, Pompei ed Ercolano: Fra case
e abitanti (Padua: Le Tre Venezie, 1950), 5560.
82. Thophile Gautier, Arria Marcella (1852), trans. F.C. de Sumichrast (Boston: Brainard,
1901), 31516. See also Georges Didi-Huberman, Lair et lempreinte, in fleur de peau, 4359.
83. Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015).
84. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik (1875), ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog,
1977).
85. See especially Cornelia Vismann, The Love of Ruins, trans. Dominic Bonfiglio, Perspectives
on Science 9, no. 2 (2001): 196209. See also Gavin Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological
Record (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20ff.
86. Droysen, 11; and Vismann, The Love of Ruins, 202.
87. Droysen, 76 (emphasis added); and Vismann, The Love of Ruins, 202.
88. Vismann, The Love of Ruins, 205ff. On the relation between chance and the manipula-
tion of discourse, see John Tagg, Neither Fish nor Flesh, History and Theory 48, no. 4 (December
2009): 7879.
89. Vismann, The Love of Ruins, 204.
90. Quoted in Vismann, The Love of Ruins, 204; translation slightly modified (in her text,
which is translated from German, Droysens spare mention of Gips is translated as mold, but
the context suggests he means a cast, which would more normally be designated as Gipsabguss).
91. See especially Klaus Fittschen, ber das photographieren rmischer Portrts,
Archologischer Anzeiger 1 (1974): 48494; and Annetta Alexandridis and Wolf-Dieter
Heilmeyer, Archologie der Photographie: Bilder aus der Photothek der Antikensammlung Berlin
(Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2004). More generally, see Mary Bergstein, Lonely
Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture, Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (1992): 47598
and Claire L. Lyons, The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth Century Photography, in
Antiquity and Photography, 2265.
92. Sir David Brewster, On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios,
and of Intaglios into Cameos, with an Account of Other Analogous Phenomena, Edinburgh
Journal of Science 4 (1826): 99108; reprinted in Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic
(London, 1834).
93. Cf. Michael Baxandall, Fixation and Distraction: The Nail in Braques Violin and Pitcher
(1910), in John Onians, ed., Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E.H.
Gombrich (London: Phaidon, 1994), 399415.
94. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 133.
95. Charles Wheatstone, Contributions to the Physiology of VisionPart the Second: On
Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision, Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London 142 (1852): 117. See also Crary, 118ff; and Robert J.
Silverman, The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century, Technology and
Culture 34, no. 4 (October 1993): 72956.
96. Wheatstone, Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, 12. While the pseudoscope
proved to be a commercial failureno one was particularly interested in seeing the very fabric
of his or her world turned inside outit nevertheless played a crucial role in the physiological
understanding of binocular vision in the nineteenth century.
97. Wheatstone, Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, 13 (emphasis in original).
98. Charles Truscott, The Interpretation of the Negative, Wilsons Photographic Magazine 49
(1912): 153 (emphasis in original).
99. John Werge, The Evolution of Photography (London: Piper and Carter, 1890), 304.
100. That being said, collections do exist of casts of the casts from Pompeii. As a gift for Kaiser
Wilhelm II, Giuseppe Fiorelli asked the sculptor Achille dOrsi to make a set of reduced-scale
plaster copies of the victims in Naples. See Dwyer, 105ff. On the Jericho skulls, which were not
discovered until 1953, see especially the discussion in Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par
contact, 55ff.
101. Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, 11n3.
102. Geimer, Image as Trace. See also the remarks of Michel Frizot, Whos Afraid of
Photons? trans. Kim Timby, in Photography Theory, 272ff; and Snyder, Section 3: The Art
Seminar, 150 (where he retorts, photons dont impress). On the wave/particle theories of light
that have been variously mobilized in photographic discourse, see the classic discussion in
Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity
and Quanta (1938; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 26263.
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103. Bazin produced a similarly heterogeneous list, including mummy, mold, death mask,
mirror, equivalent, substitute, and asymptote. See Daniel Morgan, Rethinking Bazin: Ontology
and Realist Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 451.
104. On the related matter of photographic reproductions of Christian relics and their pecu-
liar indexicality, see Georges Didi-Huberman, The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a
Stain), October 29 (1984): 6381; and Peter Geimer, A Self-Portrait of Christ or the White Noise
of Photography? Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin, trans. Gerrit
Jackson, Grey Room, no. 59 (2015): 643.
105. Geimer, Image as Trace, 10.
106. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 81.
107. Barthes, 77.
108. Joel Snyder, What Happens by Itself in Photography? in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and
Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (Lubbock: Texas Tech
University, 1993), 361 (emphasis in original). See also Peter Geimer, Self-Generated Images,
trans. Michael Powers, in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media , ed. Jacques Khalip
and Robert Mitchell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 2743.
109. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigee, 1980), 6667.
110. Pliny, Natural History, 35.153ff.
111. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode dexistence des objets techniques (1958; Paris: Aubier, 1989),
243. See also Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 34ff.
112. See especially Ernesto Paparazzo, Philosophy and Science in the Elder Plinys Naturalis
Historia , in Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts, ed. Roy Gibson and Ruth Morello (Leiden:
Brill, 2011), 89111. Thanks to Verity Platt for sharing with me an unpublished paper in which
she touches on aspects of Plinys Stoic cosmology and the problem of chance, forthcoming in her
book Beyond Ekphrasis: Making Objects Matter in Classical Antiquity.

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Man Ray.

The first stage of the photograph is the negative; every photographic

Modest proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. . . . The very contours

Two views of a death mask mold

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 67

Two Excavations in 1870s France

Two views of a postmortem

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 69

Collotype (phototypie) of the

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 71

The Imagines Maiorum and Other Antique Media

Opposite: Drawing of the plaster

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 73

Modern cast taken from ancient

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 75

Marble bust of a man from the

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 77

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 79

Hall of Following Faces (including

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 81

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 83

Physionotypes and Other Nineteenth-Century Media

Left: Diagram of the physiono-

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 85

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 87

Left: Figures illustrating Sir David

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 89

Coda: Metaphors of Impression

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 91

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 93

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 95

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 97

Crowley | Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative 99

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