Hommage à Ghazala Azmat

Alongside probably the hat and the greatcoat, the death mask is iconic Napoleon. Surrounding it, however, is great mystery and confusion. What we see is a historical misch-masch in which extremely diverse masks, both in terms of the material used and the face they reproduce, suddenly appear and then disappear (equally suddenly) into private collections. Furthermore, the evidence needed to establish historical truth behind these masks is often fragmentary, and even biased. Indeed, though the owners or supporters present their items as authentic, the reconstruction of the history of these masks is very frequently based on conjecture or simple personal conviction. This study here is the first modern description of the whole question of Napoleon’s death mask, and it provides a meticulous description of the process by which the original masks were made, looks in detail at the most important and best-documented masks, catalogues a huge majority of the known masks, and uses contemporary documents and accounts in order to distinguish the versions that appear to be the most faithful to the original creation.