ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the practice of producing death masks as a unique form of copying practice. It introduces the cultural history of death masks, the history of death masks in museums and the history of the masks’ production. The centuries-old tradition of preserving faces of death through casting has served a number of functions, as have the actual objects – the death masks – themselves. The process of making a death mask has, however, been profoundly different in cases in which the infamous rather than the famous have been casted. The mask of Henrik Wergeland was given to the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History as a gift in 1904. Regarding the Chopin mask at Ringve Museum, both the hand and the mask were exhibited between 1964 and 2015, when there was a fire in the museum. The death mask is a copy of a copy of a dead person’s face.
