The: Foolish HumanWhat skyclad devilry is this?

The death mask of Oliver Cromwell from the Lawrence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks at Princeton University Library

I’m constantly enchanted by little echoes we get from the past: fossils, old photographs and recordings, handwritten letters, etc.  There is an almost eerie feeling of being transported back in time when one takes the effort to scrutinize things like these, and it isn’t rare for me wwhile watching a movie or reading some other account to wonder just how minutely accurate a portrayal is.  My desire to see what it was actually like in the Middle Ages or during the Revolutionary War is sometimes palpable, my descent into despair expedient.  The past is, in many ways, utterly unreachable.

Maybe that’s why The Lawrence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks intrigued me so much when I happened upon it yesterday.  Paintings of famous people are all well and good, but here we have the most accurate physical representations, actual plaster casts of the faces of some titanic historical figures, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Cromwell, George Washington, and Leo Tolstoy among them along with many others.  I find myself obsessed with the changing human form, and it seems oddly inconceivable to me that a person living hundreds of years ago was physically much like any one of us.  Granted, that’s a cognitive disconnect brought about by unbridgeable distance, but I find it no less interesting to consider.

I wish we had a much larger repository of these to peruse, though I do find this collection pretty astounding.

(Side note:  some of the plasters included in this collection are actually life masks, but most are not.)