Tag: masks

Since I went to look at the mummies this week, it seems a good time to post the mummy mask of Satdjehuty:

It’s from the Eighteenth Dynasty, which is apparently ‘about 1550-1295 BC’. I’m not sure how to post permalinks to the BM collections, but if you go to their Compass site and search for Satdjehuty, you can see details and other views.

It probably originally consisted of at least a coffin, the mummy, a heart scarab, this mummy mask and a quantity of linen. Only the mask and linen are in the British Museum.

We learn from the mass of linen that it was given to Satdjehuty ‘in the favour of the god’s wife, king’s wife, and king’s mother Ahmose-Nefertari’. Ahmose-Nefertari was the wife of Ahmose I (1550-1525 BC), the first king of the Dynasty, and the mother of Amenhotep I (1525-1504 BC), with whom she subsequently became associated as local deities. That Satdjehuty should have received such an honour shows she was a lady of the highest rank.

The winged head-dress on this mask is a feature found on funerary headpieces and coffins in the Second Intermediate Period (about 1750-1650 BC), and perhaps denotes protection of the deceased by a deity.

The mask of ‘Lady Clapham’, from the V&A:

To quote the museum’s own blurb:

This mask was made for a doll, known as Lady Clapham, that is thought to have belonged to the Cockerell family, descendants of the diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). The daughter of Pepys’s nephew John Jackson (the son of his sister Pauline) married a Cockerell, who had a family home in Clapham, south London.

Lady Clapham offers a fine example of both formal and informal dress for a wealthy woman in the 1690s. Her formal outfit includes a mantua (gown) and petticoat, while her informal dress is represented by the nightgown (a dressing gown rather than a garment worn to bed) and petticoat. Accessories such as the stockings, cap and chemise (a body garment) are very valuable since very few items from such an early period survive in museum collections. Equally important is the demonstration of how these clothes were worn together.

Here’s the reverse:

J-F, a Canadian cosplayer, in a Skull Kid costume at Balticon 2004:

Skull Kid is a character in The Legend of Zelda – Majora’s Mask. I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks that Majora’s Mask was a better game than Ocarina of Time.

More from the BM, because they’ve got so much good stuff. This time a mask of Dzoonokwa:

Kwakwaka’wakw, 19th century AD, from British Columbia

Dzoonokwa is a giant of the forest, or Wild Woman of the Woods. She eats children, stops people from fishing, and encourages war. In one story a young woman comes across a Dzoonokwa catching salmon; she kills her and her family and uses the mother’s skull as a bath for her own daughter’s ritual empowerment. They were not all evil though; when a Dzoonokwa came across young men she may give them supernatural gifts – a self-paddling canoe, or the water of life.

Kwakwaka’wakw masks represent her with pursed lips so that the dancer wearing the mask could frighten the crowd with cries of ‘Ho, ho’.

Another one from the BM, this from the Chewa people:

What they have to say:

This mask depicts a royal escort who accompanied Queen Elizabeth on an official visit to Malawi in 1979. He was described as ‘tall, heavy, a big man with a moustache and quite handsome’. His image was recreated two weeks later by a mask-maker who had watched the Queen’s arrival at the airport. The mask is made of wood painted pale pink. It has striking eyebrows and a moustache of synthetic fur. It would have been worn with a full length costume made of composite materials.

Simoni masks represent the youngest son of the chief and are often associated with foreigners, especially from the colonial period. They have either red or flesh-coloured painted faces and their dances suggest power and authority. Simoni is seen as intelligent and successful, but also shrewd and dangerous.

From the British Museum site, which is a goldmine of fabulous images, the death mask of Oliver Cromwell:

The BM’s blurb seems worth quoting in full.

When a famous person died, a death mask was often taken as a permanent and precise record of the way they looked. An initial cast provided a mould from which subsequent plaster or wax death masks could be taken. Death masks were widely distributed through private and public collections and were also used as models for posthumous portraits, whether painted or sculpted. This example was originally owned by Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) whose collection contributed to the founding of the British Museum in 1753.

It was important that a death mask was made as soon as possible after death so that the character of the deceased was captured before the features started to fall. The death mask of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) was taken after the embalmment of his body and it shows the cloth bound around his head to cover the cincture. The face has a beardlet and moustache, but Cromwell’s famous wart has either been pared off or has disappeared due to the action of the embalming fluid. Several casts of Cromwell’s death masks exist. Although the identification of this example has been questioned, it certainly entered the Museum as a representation of Cromwell. Cromwell was initially buried in Westminster Abbey but his body was exhumed after the Restoration and hung on Tyburn gallows and his head was displayed on a pole. Apparently, his head was later sold many times until it came into the possession of the Wilkinson family in the nineteenth century. It was finally buried in a Cambridge college in the 1960s.