Plaster facial casts

In the nineteenth century, plaster was adopted for the mass production of facial casts. Using France as a case study, this chapter develops an interdisciplinary history of these bodily artifacts to reflect on the political character informing the display of the face as the symbolic locus of persons. First, the galleries of Versailles, converted into a museum by King Louis-Philippe, featured casts of illustrious men and served as a monumental demonstration of power. This period also coincided with the heyday of phrenology, whose founders, Franz Joseph Gall and Pierre Marie Alexandre Dumoutier, also assembled collections of facial casts in two Parisian museums. Unlike the galleries of Versailles, however, these exhibitions featured people considered famous, criminal, or insane/idiotic. Dumoutier was also a pioneer in using live casting to document individuals from non-Western territories, a practice which would become the standard benchmark of racial typologies. This essay evaluates the twofold political nature of these artifacts: while the facial casts of prominent men aimed to highlight unique characteristics as a celebration of individual members of a community defined by political power, the phrenological and anthropological facial casts aimed to dissolve the singularity of individuals deemed to be outside the community into human typologies and races.