Man Ray. Death Mask of Amedeo Modigliani , 1929.

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PATRICK R. CROWLEY

The first stage of the photograph is the “negative”; every photographic picture has to pass through the “negative process,” and some of those neg - atives which have held in good examination are admitted to the positive process ending in the picture. —Sigmund Freud, “Notes on the Concept of the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis” (1912) 1

Modest proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. . . . The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is therefore of decisive importance that a partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a new displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges in it too— something different from that previously signified. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927–40) 2

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the postmortem portrait was a common genre of Euroamerican photography. Death-stilled bodies were ideal subjects for photographic technologies still sensitive to movement. Thousands of these images survive—as daguerreotypes, tintypes, and negative- printed paper photographs. 3 But if the photography of the dead took advantage of one of the liabilities of a then-new medium, it also extended, in a transformed fashion, an older commemorative technology: the making of plaster death masks. This ancient Mediterranean practice was still very much alive in the nineteenth century, and casts were lifted from the faces of cultural and politi - cal luminaries such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Benjamin Disraeli, Gustave Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. Sometimes the two media came together in the subgenre of death mask photography. Laurence Hutton’s 1894 Portraits in Plaster includes dozens of examples, some taken from masks in his own collec - tion and others taken by colleagues in the context of the museum. 4 These newly

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 parallel media histories continued into the twentieth century. When Amedeo Modigliani died in 1920, Jacques Lipchitz hastily took a death mask of his face. Nine years later, it was photographed numerous times by Man Ray, both with and without his signature solarization. In 1926, Ernst Benkard published over a hundred photographs of death masks in his Das ewige Antlitz (translated into English as Undying Faces in 1929)—asserting in the preface that “Death masks are works of art from Nature’s workshop [ der Werkstätte der Natur ]; yet they are at the same time transcendental objects [ transzendentale Objekte ]”—a senti - ment that, in turn, prompted the philosophical meditation on death mask photography in Martin Heidegger’s 1929 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik .5 It was no accident, then, that André Bazin drew an analogy between the molding of death masks and the “molding” of photography in an influential footnote to his 1945 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”—an analogy that has since been extended and debated by Susan Sontag and, more recently, Peter Geimer. 6 This broad media-archaeological landscape of death masks and photography provides the context for two puzzling dirt-archaeological discoveries in 1870s France. First in Lyon in 1874 and then in Paris in 1878, construction workers came across an ancient Roman tomb. In each, they found a piece of plaster pre - serving the impression of a long-dead face, its eyes closed. But because these plaster relics were concave hollows (and not the then-familiar convex forms of commemorative death masks), they were initially difficult to understand. Excavators and scholars were at first unwilling to accept that these hollow forms were intentionally made by human hands, reasoning instead that they were “natural” accidents of the burial process. This question was debated in illustrated publications in the 1870s and 1880s, leading to a second curious response to the artifacts: none of the early representations of these objects pre - sented the hollow object itself. Instead, plaster casts were taken from each mold, and these modern casts—not the original ancient artifacts—were used as the basis for illustrations. Two refusals, then, accompanied the nearly simultane - ous discovery of these ancient, deathly faces: the refusal to accept these artifacts as human-made and the refusal to reproduce their images directly. We now know that these artifacts were intentionally created and that they constituted the first step in the chaîne opératoire of commemorative images that were produced in a variety of media. At least five additional examples of con - cave postmortem facial impressions have since come to light from sites in Italy, Tunisia, and Egypt. 7 But in many ways these artifacts remain elusive and are surprisingly understudied. In the archaeological literature, the molds them - selves are usually presented as epiphenomena of the casting process rather than

Two views of a death mask mold from the tomb of Claudia Victoria in Lyon, second century CE. Musée gallo-romain de Lyon.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 constitutive of it. Above all, scholars have been interested in what the molds can tell us about the problem of style as it appears in other objects , such as fin - ished portraits in plaster, wax, or marble, with the plaster mold itself having a dubious artistic, ontological, and even historical status that lies on the knife’s edge between artifact and natural object. 8 As a result, masks qua impressions or hollow molds rarely feature in discussions of Roman portraiture as primary data or evidence. 9 The language with which these objects are now discussed is also striking. Both concave impressions and the convex casts created from them are referred to as “death masks,” confusing the distinction between direct impression and subsequent image. 10 Attempts to distinguish concave from convex “death masks” have resorted to tellingly imprecise metaphors: the hollow concave forms are said to be “negatives,” and the lifelike faces they produced are their “positive” casts. 11 This technical language is borrowed from photography. Also borrowed are assumptions about relative value. This article makes a case for the crucial if tacit role that photography—and, more specifically, the positive- negative process that made possible the creation of a series of identical positive prints—has played in shaping the archaeological understanding of these molds and the motivations for their deposition in tombs by the bereaved. The potency of the negative as a metaphor for the procedures of molding and casting seems to have had its genesis in the nineteenth century, derived from an implicit but distinctly photographic way of reconceptualizing the “negative” matrix or mold as, on the one hand, a site of latency and indefinite reproducibility and, on the other hand, as a perceptual problem. Indefinite reproducibility because, despite the fact that a photographic neg - ative produces only a tonal reversal in the structure of the image and not a three-dimensional matrix—there being no actual impression on the sensitized plate, not even on the level of photons—the metaphor of the negative has offered a seductive means to explain the attributes of seriality and indexicality that both casts and photographic prints have seemed to share in common. 12

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 Perceptual problem because, like the photographic negative, the concave death mask is a visually challenging artifact—and so (like photographic nega - tives) is easily overlooked. Due to an effect known as the “hollow face illusion,” viewers of concave death masks will initially perceive their surfaces as convex sculptural forms. This visual instability—a constant shifting from concavity to convexity, depending on how the object is held and seen—makes these long- dead faces uncanny objects indeed, and means that their evasive surfaces are all but impossible to capture with still photography. The archaeological understanding and historical reception of these masks— from the 1870s up to the present—might have been very different had they been discovered thirty years earlier. Although largely superseded by the 1850s, daguerreotypes provided a distinct model of photographic imaging. 13 Rather than creating directly from the subject a negative image that then becomes an easily forgotten foundation for producing a positive print, the daguerreotype captured its subjects directly on the surface of a silvered sheet of copper. No positive printing of a negative image was needed: instead, the daguerreotype could appear either positive or negative depending on how it was held by the viewer. This overlapping of absence and presence, a simultaneous yet always shifting effect of positivity and negativity, offers an alternative model for under - standing the relations of absence and presence in another media technology, one that came to light two decades after daguerreotypes had fallen from favor.

Two Excavations in 1870s France In 1874 a team of workmen in Lyon (ancient Lugdunum) made a startling discovery during the construction of a funicular railway station on the Rue de Trion. Near the south wall of the station at a depth of about five meters, they unearthed a Roman funerary stele that had toppled over in front of the grave it had once marked. The stele was furnished with the following inscription ( CIL 13.2108): D[is] M[anibus] | et memoriae | Cl[audiae] Victoriae | quae vixit ann[os] X | mens[es] I dies XI | Claudia Severi | na mater filiae | dulcissimae | et sibi viva fecit | sub ascia dedi | cavit

Two views of a postmortem portrait of a baby showing the direct-positive and “negative” aspects of the daguerreotype, 1856–60. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 [To the departed spirit and memory of Claudia Victoria, who lived 10 years, 1 month, and 11 days. Her mother Claudia Severina made (this monument) for her sweetest daughter and for herself in her lifetime and dedicated (it) sub ascia .] Fortunately, the grave itself was preserved mostly intact. According to Arnould Locard, who was among the first to publish about it, a stone casket was found immediately adjacent to the stele. 14 Although the casket—as the inscrip - tion would seem to indicate—was large enough to accommodate two bodies quite comfortably (a common practice in Roman burial custom), archaeologists were surprised to discover only a single skeleton. At the foot of this skeleton was an unusual, oblong disk that was convex on one side, hollow on the other. So seemingly banal and dirty was this object that the untrained workman who came upon it failed to notice that it even was an object, striking the bottom of it with his pickax and shattering it into several smaller pieces. Subsequent reports credited the chief engineer of the project, Ferdinand Drugeat, for having had “the laudable and intelligent insight to preserve this object that many others would have thrown away.” 15 Upon closer inspection, Locard recognized with excitement what they had found: a plaster death mask, the first of its kind to have survived from classical antiquity. 16 But the unusual concave form of the mask gave rise to further ques - tions. What, exactly, was this lump of plaster? Archaeologists became obsessed with the circumstances of its facture. Locard framed the stakes of the matter suc - cinctly: “Is it a natural impression [ une empreinte naturelle ] made fortuitously in the manner of the moldings that the ashes of Pompeii and Herculaneum took care [ ont pris soin ] to preserve for us? Or are we, on the contrary, in the pres - ence of a true mold [ un véritable moulage ], made intentionally, post mortem , by this grieving mother, eager to preserve the features of her child?” 17 In hindsight, for the existence of the cast to have ever been thought accidental, natural, seems incredible. Yet nothing then known from the ancient world quite resembled what the archaeologists had found. The long-standing and total lack of archae - ological evidence for such artifacts had even encouraged scholars to explain away Pliny the Elder’s testimony that the credit for this technical discovery belonged to a fourth-century Greek sculptor named Lysistratus (a claim that sparked intense philologi - cal scrutiny and debate in the nineteenth century) and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 subscribe instead to Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that the practice originated with Andrea del Verrocchio in the fifteenth century. 18 In 1882 a chemical test was finally undertaken to determine whether the plaster derived from a natural deposit of gypsum (as in the mines of Montmartre in Paris) or was instead (as the tests proved) produced from an artificial recipe concocted by skilled molders. 19 A special session of the Académie des Sciences, Belles-lettres, et Arts de Lyon on June 6, 1882, hailed the discovery of the mask as an important event in the history of archaeology precisely because it gave incontrovertible proof of deliberately produced death masks in antiquity. Locard declared, “We are therefore in the presence of a voluntary act, and this impression was made intentionally, post mortem, as the eyes bear the stamp [portant le cachet ] of death.” 20 At the same time that archaeologists debated the evidentiary status of the mask, they also struggled to depict it. Efforts were made to produce a concave cast from the ancient mold. The first attempt involved a mixture of gelatin as the casting medium and nearly destroyed the ancient artifact. On account of its extreme humidity, the gelatin expanded and contracted on the surface of the fragile plaster until the mold reached its breaking point, requiring the painstaking touch of a conservator to put it back together. 21 Numerous plaster imprints were eventually produced, however, and at least one still survives. These newly created objects were in turn used to create mass-circulated illustrations. 22 The earliest appeared in an epi - graphic notice in 1878 by Auguste Allmer, who originally identified his image as a photograph but corrected himself a few months later by clarifying that it was a photogravure produced using a proprietary typographic process developed in the local foundry of the Foucher brothers. 23 Four years later, as part of the 1882 publication announcing the mask as an intentionally made artifact, Locard included a collotype ( phototypie ) illustrating two versions of the cast: the first was a modern cast whose missing forehead and nose reflected the original state of preservation; the second was a modern

Top: Nineteenth-century plaster cast of the ancient mold discov - ered in the tomb of Claudia Victoria, Lyon. Musée gallo-romain de Lyon. Bottom: Photogravure of nine - teenth-century plaster cast of the death mask mold from the tomb of Claudia Victoria, Lyon. Produced by the Foucher brothers. From Auguste Allmer, “ Epitaphe d’une petite fille dans la tombe de laquelle était déposé un moule de son visage,” Revue épi - graphique du midi de la France 1, no. 18 (July 1878).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 cast with the missing parts restored by the local sculptor and portraitist Étienne Pagny. But for the archaeologist Florian Valentin, the restoration of the nose in the second cast constituted an irresponsible and misleading intervention. In contrast to the epigraphic evidence of the stele found above the tomb, which memorialized the death of a ten-year-old girl, Locard’s restored version of the cast gave the impression of a young woman of “at least twenty years of age.” 24 In his own 1882 publication on the discoveries at Lyon, Valentin therefore decided to reproduce not Locard’s more recent collotype but Allmer’s original photogravure from 1878. This debate about the age of the mask’s subject and its visual representation became a transatlantic affair when a reporter at the Nation , looking at the 1878 image produced by the Foucher brothers, echoed the objections of an anonymous editor of the Bulletin critique that the features, if accurately reproduced, seemed too advanced in age to belong to such a young girl. 25 Perhaps, the editor suggested, the incongruity was due not to the interpretation of the tomb but to distortions introduced by the photo - mechanical process. This visual and interpretive debate was extended four years later in an 1886 publication by Henri Thédenat, an abbot who also distinguished himself as an archaeologist, poet, and amateur photographer. In his essay, Thédenat aban - doned photographic imaging techniques as a means of reproducing the Lyon mask, opting instead for a pair of drawings he had commissioned of Alexis Housselin, an archaeological illustrator. One drawing depicted the modern cast, its damaged areas filled in with dark hatch marks; the other, a reconstruction of the deceased’s face in profile , rendered the nose with a dotted line, thus combin - ing the concrete facts of preservation with the power of imagination. Thédenat, who subscribed in his essay to the archaeological consensus that the mask belonged to the young Claudia Victoria, was one of the primary bibliographic edi - tors of the Bulletin critique and very probably was the anonymous editor who had previously expressed concerns about the photomechanical reproduction of the Lyon mask. 26 This would explain why he declined to picture the Lyon mask photo -

Collotype ( phototypie ) of the plaster cast of the Lyon mask alongside a reconstructed ver - sion in plaster by Étienne Pagny. From Arnould Locard, “ Note sur une tombe romaine trouvée à Lyon et renfermant le masque d’un enfant,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences et belles-lettres et arts de Lyon: Classe des lettres 22 (1884) .

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 graphically, despite the fact that he was not averse to the technology, having included in the same study a photographic image of another ancient death mask that had recently been found in his home diocese of Paris. Thus, as the title of his essay, Sur deux masques de l’époque romaine trouvés à Lyon et à Paris (On two masks of the Roman period discovered at Lyon and Paris), suggests, Thédenat framed his account as a comparative study of the two discoveries—one that may be read in a double sense as both a comparison of their archaeological contexts and the representational techniques that register their evidentiary value. In 1878, during the construction of a new tram station in Paris, workmen turned up a sarcophagus of small dimensions with a roughly hewn exterior that contained the skeleton of an infant, a plaster mold of the infant’s face found in place on top of the skull, and a small number of grave goods, including studded booties, dice, and a glass nursing bottle. 27 As with the Lyon discovery, the find was met with interpretive uncertainty. In his report of the discovery for the Revue archéologique later that year, Robert de Lasteyrie offered an ingenious if somewhat implausible theory to explain why the mask survived as a hollow mold rather than a convex cast. Perhaps, he suggested, the mold was not really a mold at all (at least not one that was intentionally made by human hands) but the formation of a stray mass of excess mortar that had fallen onto the face “ par un hasard singulier ” (by a strange chance) when the lid was squished onto the body of the sarcophagus, thus preserving for all time the delicate features of the infant that Thédenat would later call the “ petit Parisien. ”28 This proved to be a compelling explanation. The most eloquent case for the accidental fabrication of the Paris mold would appear in Thédenat’s Sur deux masques de l’époque romaine trouvés à Lyon et à Paris . For Thédenat, the rough grain of the Parisian plaster, along with the fact that its back was irregularly shaped and oblong on one side, provided evidence enough that a practiced hand was not responsible for its creation. Instead, he declared, “chance [ hasard ] which is the author of this work, shows itself to be an able and experienced artist.” 29 As with the Lyon artifact, archaeologists immediately produced numerous casts of this hollow mold, and these modern casts served as the basis for all subsequent illustra - tions, the first of which was a lush, velvety heliograph published by Thédenat. 30 But if Thédenat insisted, in his comparative 1886 monograph, on the acci - dental status of the Parisian cast, the 1882 materials analysis of the Lyon cast

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 forced him to accept that artifact as intentionally made. But whose face did it represent, and why was it left in the tomb? Thédenat’s response is remarkable for the way it anticipates the distinction Walter Benjamin would draw fifty years later between the exhibition value and cult value of photographic images, and the crucial role that reproducibility plays in the determination of their ontolog - ical status. 31 For Thédenat, the contingency and absence generated by the hol - low impression of the little girl’s features was the key to understanding the profound nature of the mother’s grief. He writes, Claudia Severina, in depositing the mold in the tomb, obeyed a sentiment easy to understand. She did not want to break and throw away in ordinary trash this plaque, sacred to her, since it had touched the face of her child and preserved its features. Nor did she want that the cherished image, infi - nitely reproduced, should fall into the hands of strangers and be profaned by their indifferent gazes. 32 That an abbot would bring the decidedly religious language of the sacred and the profane to bear on the status of the mold is perhaps not surprising. For Thédenat, the “profanation” of the mask results not so much from the repro - duction of its indexical, material residue—even and precisely if this is what endows it with a “cult value” for Claudia Severina—as it does from its perni - cious exposure to a stranger’s gaze. In an important sense, Thédenat’s imagina - tive scenario reflects a decidedly photographic presumption about the nature of exhibition value. Much as negatives had become the oft-forgotten foundation of photographic prints, Thédenat neglected to consider what it would mean to examine and contemplate the hollow mold itself rather than its (nonexistent) “positive” cast. Over a century later, we are better positioned than Thédenat to explore such questions.

The Imagines Maiorum and Other Antique Media In the century-plus that has passed since the discoveries at Lyon and Paris, archaeologists have uncovered a modest yet surprisingly understudied corpus of plaster death masks from various sites throughout the Roman Mediterranean. 33 With one important excep - tion from a sculptor’s workshop in Tunisia, all of these plaster molds (bearing the features of

Opposite: Drawing of the plaster cast of the Lyon mask with frontal and profile views. From Henri Thédenat, Sur deux masques de l’époque romaine trouvés à Lyon et à Paris (1886). Right: Heliograph of a modern cast taken from the ancient plas - ter mold of an infant discovered in Paris in 1878. From Henri Thédenat, Sur deux masques de l’époque romaine trouvés à Lyon et à Paris (1886).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 men, women, and especially children) have been discovered in nonelite funer - ary contexts dating to the second and third centuries CE. 34 It is possible that the modified castings from such molds could have been produced for display at home in a more or less intimate setting. 35 The prevailing assumption that such castings would have been set up for domestic display is derived not only from Pliny the Elder’s testimony but from Vasari’s adaptation of Pliny in his discus - sion of Verrocchio, as Aby Warburg observes: The workshop of Verrocchio, which seems to have pioneered a more artistic treatment of votive figures, specialized in the art of making plaster and stucco death masks, which Vasari tells us were displayed in Florentine houses as true ancestral likenesses, and which so often enabled Florentine painters to supply accurate portraits of the dead. Verrocchio’s shop was like a surviving limb of pagan Roman religious art: its fallimagini and ceraiuoli were the makers of what the Romans called imagines and cerae .36 All of these masks survive in the form of “negative” molds rather than “posi - tive” casts. The hollow forms of these postmortem impressions would almost certainly never have been used to produce objects resembling the closed-eye death masks of the modern age. 37 Rather, they would have been used to produce lifelike images of the deceased—in wax as well as painted plaster and marble— whose eyes were then “opened” to enliven them. 38 That the very materiality of a portrait could suggest the stillness of death as well as the spark of life is striking. In one of his Epigrams , the poet Martial describes a face rendered in “living wax” ( vivida cera ), thereby emphasizing the supple (and, one imagines, colorful) qualities of this organic substance, while in another he draws atten - tion to the mortifying muteness of a painted picture: “The painting [ pictura ] preserves Camonius’s likeness [ effigies ] only as a child; the baby’s little form [figura ] survives. His loving father did not record his [adolescent] face with a portrait [ imagine ], fearing to see lips that did not speak.” 39 Likewise for the prose writer Apuleius, good Platonist that he was, “all handmade portraits” ( in omnibus manu faciundis imaginibus ) were lacking in vigor, color, depth, and motion—the very qualities that endowed a resemblance with lifelikeness. Furthermore, he asserts, “what is formed in clay, molded in bronze, hewn in stone, expressed in wax, smeared in paint, or made to look similar by any other human craft [ alio quopiam humano artificio adsimilatum est ], becomes dissim - ilar after just a short interval. Like a corpse it keeps a single, immutable appear - ance.” 40 That Apuleius would liken the appearance of a corpse to that of a portrait made by human hands is remarkable, since for modern scholars the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 comparison between a corpse (in the form of a death mask) and a portrait would accomplish precisely the opposite. Indeed, scholars have supposed that such a juxtaposition would register the differences between the two media and illus - trate the “transformation from real likeness into the artistic expression of like - ness,” as one specialist writes. 41 Such a missing link seemed to present itself in the exceptional case of the Tomb of the Valerii, located in the ancient necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where plaster molds and sculpted portraits in marble and plaster were found together in the same assemblage of artifacts. 42 Unfortunately, the archae - ological context of the tomb as it appeared in the second and third centuries suf - fered considerable damage in antiquity when demolition work was undertaken for the construction of Constantine’s original basilica in the fourth century. Thus, little evidence survives that would tell us anything about how the masks were originally interred. What we do know, however, is that this remarkable mausoleum—the largest and most lavish in the entire necropolis—eventually grew to accommodate more than 250 bodies, expanding from the original patron and his immediate family and dependents to include a larger network of hered - itary relations who came to visit on special feast days or anniversaries of remembrance. 43 As a result, and contrary to scholarly opinion, whether any of the molds and portraits in other media refer to the same individual remains impossible to determine, no matter how much they might seem to resemble one another in a casual comparison. Some have suggested that these postmortem images may represent nonelite appropriations of, and developments from, earlier and better-documented prac - tices of elite commemorative image-making. 44 The Roman custom of making and displaying the wax images of one’s noble ancestors—the imagines maio - rum —offers an intriguing parallel in this regard, but with significant differ - ences. 45 The most important, as Harriet Flower argues, is that the imagines were cast from living subjects. Class- and gender-based privileges also separate these pre- and post - mortem traditions. While the imagines consti - tuted the exclusive prerogative of male citizens who had achieved a curule magistracy, the surviving postmortem casts were molded from the faces of individuals who were dis - qualified de jure (whether on the basis of sex or age) from holding political office. 46 Moreover, whereas we can only speculate

Modern cast taken from ancient plaster mold from the Tomb of the Valerii in the Vatican Necropolis, mid-second century CE.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 whether and how the postmortem images might have been displayed at home, the imagines had pride of place in the aristocratic household, where they were stored in wooden cupboards (supplemented by painted labels) located in the semipublic space of the atrium where the paterfamilias would receive his clients each morning. Occasionally, they were even deployed in spectacular public funerals in the Forum at the heart of the metropolitan center. 47 Finally, the imagines maiorum seem to have belonged to an earlier tradition during the republic and the transition to empire, in contrast to the surviving death masks, which all date from the second and third centuries. Despite these important differences, both forms of commemorative images were created by the same basic casting technology. Pliny the Elder, describing the revered imagines maiorum as “faces expressed in wax” ( expressi cera vultus ), offers our best documentation of this artistic practice: The first person who modeled a likeness in plaster [ imaginem gypso ] of a human being from the face itself [ e facie ipsa ], and established the method of expressing wax [ expressit ceraque ] into this plaster mold [ in eam formam gypsi ] and then making final corrections on the wax cast, was Lysistratus of Sicyon, the brother of Lysippus of whom we have spoken. Indeed he introduced the practice of giving likenesses [ similitudines ], the object aimed at previously having been to make as handsome a face as possible. 48 How did the ancient Romans conceptualize the relation between plaster mold and the wax likeness “expressed” from its matrix? And how do these ancient ideas illuminate the archaeological discoveries at Lyon and Paris? Both Florence Dupont and Georges Didi-Huberman have taken up this question, and the answers given by both rely on an implicit and subterranean metaphor of the photographic negative that shapes their different understandings of the impor - tance of the plaster molds taken directly from a family member’s face. Dupont’s influential discussion of the imagines maiorum , situated within her larger argument about the wax effigy of the emperor in the imperial funeral, takes its point of departure from Pliny. Dupont stresses that anyone who wished to create a mask of an ancestor had first to create a plaster

Marble bust of a man from the Tomb of the Valerii in the Vatican Necropolis, mid-second century CE. Courtesy the Fabbrica di San Pietro, Vatican City.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 matrix from which the resulting image in wax could be withdrawn. 49 For Dupont, this meant that the wax image, although regarded in practice as a kind of trace bearing a direct link to its own referent—like a vestigium or a footprint, she suggests—was in fact one step removed from a strictly contiguous form of physical contact. Accordingly, she posits a casual disregard for this intermedi - ary stage in the process, arguing that it was tantamount to a kind of cultural “forgetting,” a conceptual elision that lays the groundwork for her bolder claim that “the Romans did not distinguish, did not need to distinguish, between the hollow form [ la forme en creux ] and the form in relief [ la forme en relief ] when it was a question of wax impressions. This was true not only for death masks, but for all similar techniques.” 50 The evidence backing her claim turns out to be linguistic in nature: Dupont points out that the word imago in Latin can denote both the convex and concave forms of the wax impression and the seal itself. Consequently, she explains, they are equivalent . . . the practice of taking impressions allows an infinite series of equivalences to be created with no loss whatsoever. Returning to funeral images, nothing distinguishes the form of the dead man’s face from its “nth” [ énième ] wax reproduction; it is always the same form that is transmitted from mask to mask. 51 Her claim seems to turn on an unspoken photographic analogy, for it tacitly assumes a structural dependency on a singular matrix from which all positive casts must necessarily be drawn. Such an apparatus resembles the photographic plate, from which n number of ostensibly identical prints might theoretically be made—thus giving rise to a condition that, as Benjamin observes, makes point - less any attempt to locate the “authentic” print in a photographic series. 52 That the Romans made copies of their ancestral images is beyond doubt. The ancient sources are clear on this point. From Cicero, we learn that duplicate sets of masks were made on the occasion of marriage when even daughters, who were not allowed to have masks bearing their own likenesses, were nevertheless per - mitted to commission new sets that they could add to the illustrious ranks of their new families like so much wedding china. 53 In the case of the ancestral image or the death mask, however, practical concerns (e.g., the fragility of the plaster itself, the shrinkage that occurs during surmoulage , or the sculptural process of making copies from copies) effectively ruled out the use of a single mold for the large-scale reproduction of images of the kind that Benjamin (for example) had in mind—despite the fact that he introduces the ancient tech - niques of molding and casting into his account of the modern age. 54 Dupont’s reliance on linguistic forms of evidence to bolster her broader

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 claims about infinite reproducibility appears to raise more questions than it ultimately answers. For even if the word imago can apply equally to the wax impression and the engraved matrix of the seal stone, making the leap to the conceptual equivalence of the concave and convex forms is difficult, especially since both the physical and visual relationship between the two is correlative but not coextensive. Moreover, imago is one of the most semantically flexible words in the Latin language: it expands to include such manifold things as statues, likenesses, copies, reflections, and even ghosts. 55 Although a certain family resemblance may connect all of these terms, this alone does not compel us to say they were necessarily fungible, either in theory or in practice, to the ancient mind. The relationship was important, but the terms themselves did not delimit any fixed conceptual categories. Building on Dupont’s work, Didi-Huberman makes the provocative claim that the plaster molds of the imagines (which he conflates with the death mask molds considered in this article) may even have been deemed more precious than the wax effigies themselves thanks to the originary trace they preserve of the ancestor—a trace he attributes to Pliny’s moral commitment to a genealogi - cal “transmission,” rather than permutation, of resemblance. 56 But as Myles McDonnell argues, given the complexity of the practical logistics involved, and the fact that the Romans had no rule of primogeniture in their inheritance law, the “first edition” of the mold of every ancestor who had ever lived is unlikely to have been prioritized, retained, and passed along not only from generation to generation but also from extended family to extended family. 57 Although Didi-Huberman explicitly links his discussion of the “negative” molds of the Roman imagines and death masks (the latter of which are photo - graphically reproduced in the text) only to Hegel’s dialectical negative, photographic analogies seem to undergird his core argument (as with Dupont). The question of reproducibility is metaphorically linked to the concept of the negative; namely, in the “ work of the negative [travail du négatif ], of the counter- form, and of the matrix.” 58 Yet, as Friedrich Kittler argues, these two kinds of negatives—the dialectical and the photographic—do not rest so easily together: The consequences of unlimited copying are clear: in a series first of origi - nals, second of negatives, and third of negatives of a negative, photography became a mass medium. For Hegel, the negation of a negation was sup - posed to be anything but a return to the first position, but mass media are based on precisely this oscillation. 59 Both Dupont and Didi-Huberman, then, focus their discussion of plaster molds and cast images in terms of a triadic relation between (bodily) source,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 (negative) mold, and (positive) cast—triadic concerns that are shaped by deeply photographic assumptions about the relations of source, negative, and positive print. But what happens if we suspend, for a moment, these questions of source and reproducibility, negatives and positives, a larger ch aîne opératoire , and instead pay attention to the curious visual qualities of the concave casts as arti - facts in and of themselves? 60 What exactly does a (photographic) system that produces—choose your word—transfers, reversals, inversions, or “negatives” have to do with the relationship between a mold and its resultant cast that together suffer no such transposition or lateral reversal and can thus be perfectly aligned like a hand that fits snugly inside a glove? By offering these objects as grave goods, leaving them with the deceased, the ancients clearly recognized them as valuable artifacts and not simply forgettable detritus that linked the face of the deceased to a lifelike ancestral image. The most recent photographs of the Lyon mold demonstrate the ineluctably ambivalent nature of its physical appearance—an ambivalence that extends to the physical appearance of all such objects. Whether one glances at the first photograph of the mask in a fraction of a second or examines it for several min - utes with scrupulous care, the viewer will almost certainly see a normal face whose features protrude from a recessed surface. In reality, however, the per - ception of convexity is an illusion. A second photograph of the same side of the mask introduces subtle yet crucial differences in light and shadow (in particu - lar, around the sunken eyes) whose discernment may detract from but not quite nullify the overall effect—one that might have been significantly intensified when viewed in the darkened space of the tomb, lit only by the flickering light of sputtering oil lamps. In a classic study on nature and illusion coedited with Ernst Gombrich, the neuropsychologist Richard Gregory coined this phenome - non the “Hollow Face Illusion.” The brain, even if it knows intellectually that the mask is hollow, is unable to overcome completely the countermanding sense data until the mold is subjected to the test of touch or turned at a considerably oblique angle. 61 Even then, the face continues to befuddle the person who views and handles the mask, for the reversal of its depth creates a motion parallax so that the features appear to rotate in the opposite direction from which it is turned, causing the face to seem as though it were turning to watch the observer. So powerful is the illusion, Gregory observes, that it “is best demonstrated not with a photograph of, say, a hollow face, but with the hollow mold itself.” 62 Our present-day experience with these uncanny artifacts may help explain how they were viewed in antiquity and why most of the surviving molds have been found in tombs. Did the apparent shifting of the face in the mold—the way in which it wavers between convexity and concavity—dramatize the relation to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 the deceased as a kind of ghostly presence whose susceptibility to the empiri - cal evidence of vision and touch hangs in a state of permanent and disquieting suspense? 63 Unlike the wax, plaster, and marble images produced from them, many of which seem to have been freestanding busts, these loosely shaped casts had to be held to be seen, and so their uncanny effects depended on an intimate interaction with the faces of the dead. 64 We can even return to Dupont and sug - gest that the concave plaster molds were the ultimate example of the imago : they were seals, impressions, statues, likenesses, copies, reflections, and ghosts all at once. These possibilities are reinforced by ancient texts and practices. Contra Dupont, the distinction between concave and convex forms constituted a topic of signal importance in ancient epistemology, logic, and optics. In his critique of the schools of dogmatic philosophy (the Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epicureans), the Pyrrhonist skeptic Sextus Empiricus (writing at the end of the second century CE) ridiculed the “simple-minded” and “empty” metaphors his rivals used to explain the relationship between thought and sense perception as being two sides of the same proverbial coin or—rather—drinking cup: Yes, they say, but the same thing is thought and sense-perception, but not in the same respect; rather, in one respect it is thought while in another respect it is sense-perception . . . in the way that the same drinking-cup is said to be both concave and convex, but not in the same respect—rather, in one respect it is concave (namely, the inside part), but in another respect convex (i.e., the outside). 65 For Sextus, the problem with the analogy of the drinking cup is that it cheats and wants to have it both ways—the chief complaint being that in its aspect of thought the analogy cannot apprehend its aspect as sense. And yet the ancients were well aware that concavity and convexity could, even in the realm of sense perception, be difficult to distinguish. Ptolemy, for instance, offers the follow - ing example in his second-century CE treatise on visual perception:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 This is why we judge a concave veil to be convex when we view it from afar. The reason is not that the wind disposes it in such a way that sunlight and the visual flux reach the area of concavity [blown inward by the wind]. Rather, the reason is that the [relatively] orthogonal rays strike the middle of the veil so that it shows forth vividly, whereas at the outer edges either no ray at all or a somewhat oblique one strikes it, which is why it appears dark [toward the edge]. Accordingly, then, the edges of the veil appear depressed while the middle appears elevated, and this is how something that is actually convex appears [to the viewer]. 66 For Ptolemy, the perception of convexity or concavity has nothing to do with a sort of “top-down,” cognitive model for vision in quite the way that Gregory describes—a model in which the brain is biased to perceive a convex face so that it perceives a concave face as the former in spite of itself. Rather, Ptolemy is at pains to show how optical illusions such as this result not from tricks of light (as we understand such tricks today) so much as the vector of the visual “flux” that (according to the extramissionist theory of vision in antiquity) radi - ates from the eyes until it reaches its target or gets deflected along the way. 67 The person who gazed at and placed these molds in the tomb was never thinking about ancient optics and the veridicality of sight, at least not in this special, philosophical sense. But implicitly at least, Ptolemy raises a more interesting and fundamental problem about the relationship between illusion and self- knowledge that has broader implications that go beyond the specific example he adduces (and on this point he is closer to the neuropsychological point of view): namely, that the awesome power of the illusion derives from the knowl - edge that one is being deceived by what he or she senses and yet, like Narcissus, one remains captivated by the illusion all the same. In a similar fashion, the plaster molds may have dramatized the relation to the deceased as a kind of ghostly presence whose susceptibility to the empirical evidence of vision and touch hangs in a state of permanent and disquieting suspense. If optical and philosophical ambiguities provide one set of explanations for why plaster impressions lifted from the faces of the dead may have been valued objects in and of themselves, and thus fitting offerings for interment, the details of Roman funerary law provide another. As Yan Thomas observes, under Roman law a corpus , a “body,” had to be present for a tomb to be designated as a reli - gious place. The body literally generated the tomb and all of the legal protec - tions to which tombs were entitled. This contrasts with the earlier Greek category of the cenotaph or “empty tomb” ( tumulus inanis ). Furthermore, a per - son’s corporeal remains could reside in only one tomb—although different cor - pora could rest together in the same funerary space. However, the “body” that

Hall of Following Faces (including those of Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, and Ludwig van Beethoven, shown here) in Stuart Landsborough’s Puzzling World, Wanaka, New Zealand, 2014.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 constituted the nucleus of the Roman tomb could take one of several forms; it could be the whole fleshy person, the ashes and bones produced by cremation, or even take synecdochic and symbolic forms. If the whole physical body were no longer available, then the head alone—as the ultimate locus of Roman per - sonhood—could be used to generate a tomb. Late in the second century, for example (i.e., at the start of the period from which our surviving molds were created), the jurist Paul wrote, When a burial has been performed in more than one place, the places are not both made religious, because one burial cannot produce more than one tomb. In my opinion, the place which is religious is the one where the most important part of us is buried, that is, the head from which likenesses are made, by which we are recognized [ id est caput, cuius imago fit inde cognoscimur ]. But when a request for the transfer of the remains is granted, the place ceases to be religious. 68 Accounts from the same period describe the burials of decapitated persons being delayed until heads could be reunited with bodies. Paul’s closing reference to the making of images is also significant, because in the absence of a fleshy body, or even its head, an image ( imago ) could serve as the corpus for generating a legally binding tomb. Such interment by proxy was called a funus imaginarium : the burial of an image. The first description of an archaeologically recovered Roman face cast in the postantique Mediterranean involved a complicated mixture of body, head, and effigy. In 1541, Pope Paul III set about excavating the foundations of a section of the Vatican walls that revealed a number of funerary buildings belonging to an ancient Roman ceme - tery. 69 Of all the accidental discoveries made during this construction project, the contents of one tomb, described in painstaking detail by the architect and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio, stand out: There was also a skeleton which had the skull not in its proper place, but between the legs; and where the skull should have been, there was a form or hollow mold of plaster [ forma o cavo di gesso ] in which his image [ effigie ] was made, the kind that is used in the wardrobe [ guardarobba ] of the Pope. 70 This brings us back to the (ongoing) debate about how to interpret the rela - tions of the inscription, body, and cast discovered in Lyon in 1874. The inscrip - tion described how a bereaved mother, Claudia Severina, set up the tomb during her own lifetime (viva fecit ) for her ten-year-old daughter, Claudia Victoria, and for herself. The presence of only a single skeleton (“ de petite taille ”) in the grave suggested to nineteenth-century scholars that the mother had failed to make

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 good on her promise. Nevertheless, the first publication of the tomb’s contents in 1878 tried to recuperate ancient motherly love: since the plaster mold’s fea - tures were from the start identified with those of ten-year-old Claudia Victoria, perhaps the mold’s presence in the tomb revealed that her mother was not so unsentimental after all. The mold, if placed in the tomb by the mourning Claudia Severina, offered proof of her “ amour maternal ”—an archaeology of sentimentality that would be repeated by Thédenat in his comments on the Lyon artifacts in 1886. 71 Ultimately, the stakes of the matter have tended to come down to a funda - mental confrontation between epigraphic and visual forms of evidence, with the former almost always prevailing over the latter. Perhaps the best example of this is the acrimonious 1880s debates about visual restorations of the ancient plaster cast, since those restorations presented the face of a woman, not a child, in seeming contradiction of the funerary inscription that named the child as the tomb’s primary occupant. Unfortunately, however, the casket and the skeleton described in the excavation reports are missing today, perhaps because, as often happened, they were reburied in the ancient cemetery soon after their discov - ery. Even so, rethinking the relations between inscription and still-surviving cast in light of Roman burial customs suggests a new interpretation. 72 There is clearly a major discrepancy between what the epitaph indicates and what the tomb actually contains, at least insofar as the number of skeletons is concerned. Nevertheless, the overall interpretation of the tomb, and the question of whether Claudia Severina fulfilled her promise, hinges not only on the identity of the skeleton—something we shall never know unless it is rediscovered—but also on the hitherto undisputed identification of the mask. While the ultimate ques - tion of who is buried in the tomb must remain undecided, the visual evidence of the mold deserves another look. I find it difficult to believe that the physiog - nomy could indicate a girl who had just barely lived past her tenth birthday (an issue that was raised by visual reconstructions in the 1880s). Instead, I submit that the mold must correspond to her mother, Claudia Severina, who could eas - ily have been in her mid-twenties or later. The somewhat lumpy, subcutaneous musculature of the face, particularly along the jaw line, seems too mature for a ten-year-old girl, and the length of the face, which measures nineteen centime - ters, too large. 73 From a strictly archaeological point of view, one might object that the re- identification of the Lyon mask as Claudia Severina, and by extension the com - memorative circumstances for which the tomb was erected, introduces an unacceptably subjective element into the equation. Admittedly, whether the skeleton found in the tomb was that of Claudia Severina or Claudia Victoria is

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 by no means clear. The excavators remarked only that the skeleton was “ de petite taille ,” a description that remains at once impossibly vague and impossi - ble to corroborate so long as the skeleton remains missing. 74 It is tempting, therefore, to take the inscription at its word, leave the ostensibly subjective interpretation of the mask to one side, and allow the stele itself to instantiate the mother’s presence, the question of her physical remains notwithstanding. The workaday practices of archaeology are themselves embedded in a set of intensely forensic, aesthetic, and ultimately connoisseurial modes of judg - ment. 75 Thus, the identity of the Lyon mask does not complicate the problem of the tomb assemblage but constitutes it. Could the skeleton in the tomb have belonged to Claudia Victoria? Could Claudia Severina, unable to be buried with her daughter as she had planned, have fulfilled her promise by other culturally and legally well-established means; namely, by having a likeness of her face placed at the little girl’s feet?

Physionotypes and Other Nineteenth-Century Media Much of the textual evidence we now use to understand the postmortem face casts of antiquity was available in the nineteenth century. Why, then, was accep - tance of the artifacts from Lyon and Paris as products of human intention ini - tially so difficult? And why was their direct visual reproduction—as opposed to images of their positive casts—initially avoided? These are vexing questions, because much about the media culture of the nineteenth century should have made these ancient artifacts easily recognizable and reproducible. The creation of postmortem images was an established practice in nine - teenth-century life, whether in plaster casts or photographic plates. As one pho - tographer described the mortuary carte de visite in 1855, All likenesses taken after death will of course only resemble the inanimate body, nor will there appear in the portrait anything like life itself, except indeed the sleeping infant, on whose face the playful smile of innocence sometimes steals even after death. This may be and is oft-times transferred to the silver plate. 76 An enterprising inventor even attempted (probably unknowingly) to revive the ancient practice of the imagines maiorum by creating a device that could pro - duce life casts with far greater ease than traditional methods and with a level of accuracy that easily lent itself to the “scientific” study of phrenol -

Left: Diagram of the physiono - type. From “Spirit of Discovery: The Physiognotype,” The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (October 1836). Opposite: Giorgio Sommer. Plaster casts of bodies from Pompeii, 1874. Albumen print from glass negative. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 ogy. 77 The “physionotype” was a precursor to modern pinscreen toys; its prickly surface could register the impression of a likeness in mere seconds, and this ephemeral topography could then be frozen by filling it with plaster. Unfortunately, the physionotype proved to be a failure since infants and adults alike—who compared the experience to sticking one’s face in a mound of freez - ing snow—tended to leave a horrible grimace in the pin matrix. 78 Ultimately, another nineteenth-century technology was responsible for mak - ing the artificiality of the Lyon and Paris molds so difficult for their excavators to recognize. Thédenat and his contemporaries repeatedly turned to the nascent corpus of plaster-encased skeletons of victims from Pompeii (recently produced by Giuseppe Fiorelli’s innovative technique developed in the 1860s and repro - duced photographically in great quantities in the form of cartes de visite and stereo cards) to bolster the claim that the Paris mold was a “natural” cast that had come about by chance. 79 Lasteyrie’s explanation of the chance formation of the Paris mold explicitly invoked the comparison: By a strange coincidence [ par un hasard singulier ], which deserves to be mentioned here, the heavy lid, in falling on the liquid mortar at the moment when the tomb was seated, caused a certain amount of mortar to spill forth onto the figure of the deceased infant; as it dried, this liquid molded the features of the poor child, and has preserved them for us until today, just as the mud that buried Pompeii has preserved the bodies of some of the victims of Vesuvius. 80 Fiorelli’s casts, which by their very status as casts were never truly satisfac - tory in their analogical appeal to the archaeologists who found the Paris mold, have an important prehistory. In December 1772, a curious object was discov - ered in the basement wine cellar of the Villa of Diomedes in Pompeii. 81 Archaeologists quickly identified it as the distinct impression of a woman’s breast, preserved in an otherwise formless chunk of hardened ash that had

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 flooded the room where eighteen people had taken shelter and perished by suf - focation. After being moved several times as the collection found its way from the royal collection to the so-called Palazzo degli Studi (the precursor of the present- day Naples National Archaeological Museum) at the turn of the nineteenth century, the impression quickly began to draw the attention of the general public, even serving as the centerpiece of a romantic fantasy, Arria Marcella , published in 1852 by Théophile Gautier. From the beginning of this short story, Gautier establishes the impression of the breast as the titillating object of a young man’s desire—one he tellingly compares to a “fragment of a statue mold, broken in the casting.” More significant for present purposes is the way in which he describes, more than two decades before the Lyon and Paris discoveries, the cause of its creation: “This mark [ cachet ] of beauty, stamped by chance [ hasard ] upon the scoriae of a volcano, has not been effaced.” 82 Thédenat describes the circumstances of the Paris mold’s production in pre - cisely the same terms as Gautier; namely, by focusing on the element of chance (hasard ) that the plaster/ash registers both automatically and (this being what made the mold of particular interest) accidentally . Part of what made the discovery of the impression of the breast so arresting in its nineteenth-century context was its constitutive historicity in relation to a major event in the geo - logical and archaeological record of Pompeii. With the Paris mold, by contrast, the ostensibly aleatory nature of its formation was predicated not only on the basis of its nonrepeatability in the material record but on a kind of historicity that could not be attached to anything of any particular consequence. The mun - dane quality of the circumstances in which this object was found—its senti - mental yet simultaneously objective testimony to the everyday—paradoxically set it apart as something special. In this sense, the play of chance may have resembled that which was perceived to play a crucial role in the formation and look of photographic pictures, as Robin Kelsey has recently explored in relation to some of photography’s earliest practitioners, such as Henry Fox Talbot. 83 By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the conceptual yoking of chance and historicity had emerged against the background of an epochal shift in the evidentiary status of the fragment and its materiality in the field of historiography. For Johann Gustav Droysen, the Prussian historian who pio - neered the concept of “understanding” (Verstehen ) in historical research as a critical means of interpreting human action (rather than explaining it accord - ing to the model of the natural sciences), the fragment assumed a new value as the literal and material means by which the past could be accessed empiri - cally. 84 Fundamental to Droysen’s revolutionary project was his categorical dis - tinction between what he called “sources” (Quellen ) and “remains” (Überreste ,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 literally “leftovers”), the key attribute of sources being that they are intention - ally left behind for posterity, whereas remains are preserved only by chance and thus fall accidentally under the historian’s gaze. 85 Examples of remains included such unexpected realia as “blobs of color on a painter’s palette” or, more pro - saic, “papers from public and private affairs, as they present themselves in files, reports, bills, correspondence, etc.” 86 “Characteristic of such records,” Droysen maintained, “is that they were moments in the affairs as they were taking place, that they are moments accidentally preserved out of the continuity of affairs.” 87 One of the biggest potential flaws of this paradigm, as Cornelia Vismann shows and as Droysen himself recognized, was that the ostensibly accidental nature of remains could simultaneously have been compromised by the desire to uncover them in the first place. 88 Hence, as Vismann observes, “It is no accident that Droysen formulated his important theory of historical refuse at a time when the inventorying of the past was confronting the self-archiving of one’s own present.” 89 Of critical importance in this regard is that Droysen highlighted the “rich and direct juxtapositions of direct remains of antiquity” in these historical collections that included, among other things, the media of “plaster [ Gips ] (casts) and photography.” 90 Discourses and practices of chance , then, may reveal how an accident, and not intentionality, was originally thought to explain the existence of the casts from Lyon and Paris. But this still does not explain the second refusal that accompanied the discovery of these two artifacts: the refusal to photograph either one directly, instead relying on modern casts taken from the ancient molds as a basis for subsequent illustrations. That the archaeologists declined to reproduce the ancient molds was not by chance. Although they never explained why they chose to work with modern casts, one possibility is that the concavity of the masks makes them difficult to photograph, at least in any way that guarantees a legible and unequivocal registering of contour and depth. While the documentary photography of Roman portraits has long concerned both archaeologists and art historians (because the largely aesthetic problems of focal length, point of view, lighting, and so on can introduce an unacceptably subjective basis of interpretation), the more specific challenges that photographic mediation poses to these death masks have largely escaped the notice of specialists. 91 At a practical level these molds exceed their photo - graphic legibility. And yet the visual paradoxes the molds embody were of great interest throughout the nineteenth century. In 1826, Sir David Brewster published his essay “On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios, and of Intaglios into Cameos, with an Account of Other Analogous Phenomena,” in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 which he describes both his own experiences and those of his other learned col - leagues in examining a variety of objects such as gems and coins through a com - pound microscope. 92 What they discovered, much to their astonishment, was that the perception of convexity and concavity could be manipulated by adjust - ing either the lighting effects, the instrument itself, or both. Amusingly, but without comment, Brewster runs through a series of tropes from the Western tradition of trompe l’oeil painting that he scrutinizes in order to judge the verac - ity of his own visual experience: a nail, for example, casts a shadow whose com - parison with that of the portrait in the intaglio provides the only reliable evidence with which one can discern the true contours of the latter’s surface; in another example, while looking through the “eye-tube,” he watches some flies running about on a wall, seemingly pressed into it. 93 For Brewster, who believed, for example, that ancient priests and ruling classes had monopolized their knowledge of optical media to pull off “impostures using concave mir - rors,” interest in the “conversion of cameos into intaglios” and vice versa amounted to much more than a simple diversion. At the same time, as Jonathan Crary observes, Brewster’s “implied program, the democratization and mass dis - semination of techniques of illusion, simply collapsed that older model of power onto a single human subject, transforming each observer into simultane - ously the magician and the deceived.” 94 The ramifications of Brewster’s experiments in subjective vision, and the reversal of depth perception in particular, reached a turning point in 1852 when Charles Wheatstone, a rival of Brewster and renowned for his many inventions, including the stereoscope, unveiled a curious analogue to that device, which he called a pseudoscope. 95 This apparatus consists of two rectangular prisms adjusted in such a way as to force each eye to see singly the opposite view. As a result, users looking at their world through the pseudoscope see concave sur - faces as convex and convex surfaces as concave—a world turned inside out. Or, as Wheatstone describes it, the pseudoscope reveals “another visible world, in which external objects and our internal perceptions have no longer their habitual rela - tion with each other.” 96 Among the more captivat - ing illusions Wheatstone observed with his device, he singles out “A bust [that when] regarded in front becomes a deep hollow mask; the appear -

Left: Figures illustrating Sir David Brewster’s study of the optical illusion of “conversions of relief.” From David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (1834). Opposite: Diagrams of Charles Wheatstone’s pseudoscope. From Charles Wheatsone, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 142 (1852).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 ance when regarded in profile is equally striking.” To ensure the success of this illusion, he warns, “it is necessary to illuminate the object equally, so as to allow no lights or shades to appear upon them” since these shadows, as Brewster had already demonstrated, are precisely what gives the observer the necessary infor - mation to help overcome the illusion. For Wheatstone, the most wonderful aspect of this illusion—one that, in a nod to Brewster, he called “conversions of relief”—is that one experiences it by “ regarding the objects themselves , by means of an instrument adapted for this purpose.” Unlike the stereoscope, which produces the illusion of (normal) depth with the use of photographic stereo cards, the pseudoscope ostensibly requires no such mediation save the prisms that reorganize the optic axes. Wheatstone describes the apparent con - tingency of the “conversion of relief” as having “the same relation to that of the real object as a cast to a mould, or a mould to a cast.” 97 Wheatstone’s experiments with the pseudoscope are a world away from Ptolemy’s veil or even Gregory’s observation that the hollow face illusion is best demonstrated “with the hollow mold itself.” For despite Wheatstone’s claim that the relation between the pseudoscope and its object of study is analogous to a mold and its cast, what is evident is that everything hangs in the balance of “the instrument adapted to this purpose”—namely, the prisms that manipulate the normal functioning of binocular parallax. In an important epistemological sense, Wheatstone’s pseudoscope—no less than his claims about the subjective discernment of the world it presented—is constitutive of the metaphoric potency that would eventually become attributed to the photographic negative as a kind of inversion or reversal. Crucially, however, this inversion or reversal becomes itself transposed from one of depth to one of light —the very thing that the pseudoscope necessarily excluded from consideration by paradoxically pushing it to the point of excess. Now, rather than discerning the data of shad - ows that serve to indicate the reality of the figures, the figures themselves become the shadows whose discernment requires a rarified gift of visual dis -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 cernment, as one photographer notes in a 1912 essay titled “The Interpretation of the Negative”: It is a marvelous power, the power to read correctly and translate in the form of a mental positive the potential possibilities of the negative. Looking at the negative, we see not the negative but the positive. When showing a negative to a customer our attention is often called to the fact that the face is dark and the hair is light, which startles us, and we have to look to see if this is really so. The photographer has gradually become gifted with a sort of second sight, and is thus able, when looking at the negative, to see the finished print before him. The negative, however beau - tiful to the eye of the photographer, must nevertheless be interpreted in positive terms to become intelligible to the laity. The negative may be com - pared to the engraved plate. It is the mold from which a casting may at any time be made and multiplied. 98 And so perhaps here, too, we have another explanation for the nonpho - tographability of the masks from Lyon and Paris. By the 1870s, negative-based photography—in contrast to daguerreotype and tintypes—had become the dom - inant form of light-based imaging. But although central to the photographic process, negatives were easily marginalized as artifacts in a process focused on the relations that negatives bridged: between the appearance of the pho - tographed three-dimensional subject and its positive-print replication on a flat photographic surface. Again we can see how subterranean photographic assumptions have shaped the interpretation of these casts: excavators were less interested in these artifacts in and of themselves and more enchanted by the images that could be “developed” from their concave surfaces: positive, convex likenesses, as if three-dimensional photographs of the dead. A telling example of how photographic assumptions of positivity shaped the reception of archaeological “negatives” in the nineteenth century is provided by the plaster casts of Pompeii. In his history-cum -memoir The Evolution of Photography (1868), John Werge describes this “most terrible process of natural mold making” as a dramatic confrontation or confounding between the present and the past: while looking at the pictures, it is very difficult to divest the mind of the idea that they are not the works of some ancient photographer who plied his lens and camera immediately after the eruption had ceased, so forcibly do they carry the mind back to the time and place of the awful immure - ment of both a town and its people. 99

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 Despite its blatant anachronism, Werge’s photographic way of looking at the casts and the geological events that produced them aptly captures the paradox - ical nature of their ontological status as something between trace and referent. (One often forgets that only the fleshy material decomposed in these cavities, so that the plaster casts also contain sometimes-visible teeth and bones that make them resemble—but at the same time quite distinct from—something like the Neolithic plastered skulls from Jericho dating to the eighth millennium BCE.) 100 Just as important—and akin to the visual difficulties presented by concave facial impressions—Werge’s ways of looking at the casts draws our attention to the impossibility of rendering the “negative” cavities photographically, as they were always already constitutively invisible .

Coda: Metaphors of Impression If photographic metaphors of (valued) positivity and (forgettable) negativity have shaped our understanding of the plaster death masks from Roman antiq - uity, then metaphors of impression drawn from the making of death masks have also shaped our understandings of photography. For Bazin, in his 1945 “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” the quality of impressionability was what constituted, above all, the essential ground of com - parison between the photograph and the death mask as images that are intrin - sically self-generated, hence authorless: It would be useful to study the psychology of minor visual genres such as the molding of death masks, in which a degree of reproductive automa - tism is manifest. In this sense, we could see photography as a kind of molding, taking an impression of an object through the use of light. 101 Despite the fact that, strictly speaking, the photographic process does not involve genuine impressions , Bazin’s emphasis on the plasticity of light and its technical manipulation has proved tremendously influential as a figurative mode of explicating the seemingly miraculous formation of photographic pic - tures. 102 To say that a photograph is like a death mask is a perfectly reasonable, if debatable, claim. But to suggest, as Sontag would later do in her reformulation of Bazin’s theory, that it is at once like a death mask, a footprint, and a nail from the True Cross within the space of a single paragraph is to invoke three very dif - ferent kinds of evidence. 103 As Geimer observes in his account of photographic indexicality and its contested status as an intellectually available and heuristic concept, Sontag’s example of the nail from the True Cross is perhaps the furthest outlier from the death mask, as it pertains to a relic that, while it might have

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 penetrated the body of Christ, was not impressed by it, like the marble foot - prints from the Church of Domine Quo Vadis on the Via Appia in Rome. (One might be tempted to invoke here the example of Veronica’s veil, as others have done, but this, too, seems imprecise, since the veil obtains the image of Christ from a stain of sweat that bleeds through the warp and weft of its fibrous sup - port rather than from a solid matrix of miraculously pliable material.) 104 For Geimer, the metaphorical paradigm of the trace is a paramount if prob - lematic concern when distinguishing among its various species or exemplifica - tions and their epistemological value. With regard to the differences between the death mask and the footprint adduced by Sontag, for example, he explains how the physical circumstances of their facture mark them apart from photo - graphic images and even from one another: Both result from a bodily impression in a material that can be formed, both resemble their model, and both are remnants or remainders. The face of the dead is left behind in the clay or plaster, just like the footprint in the sand. For a phenomenology of the trace, however, it is important to know whether it was the body “itself” that left its imprint or whether the imprint was “lifted” from it, as in the case of the death mask. . . . Unlike the foot - print, which generally comes about unintentionally, the death mask is cre - ated as a deliberate work. 105 Geimer’s observation that these objects come about intentionally—that they are carefully orchestrated artifacts of highly skilled labor depending on some kind of external agency for their existence, and that they do not simply occur ran - domly in nature (even if they are formed sur nature )—would appear so obvious as to seem otherwise inconceivable. And yet this is precisely the scenario archaeologists envisioned when these objects first started coming out of the ground in the 1870s. Or consider Camera Lucida , in which Roland Barthes appears to expound upon Bazin’s analogy between photography and the plastic arts, postulating, “It seems that in Latin ‘photograph’ would be said ‘imago lucis opera expressa’; which is to say: image revealed, ‘extracted,’ ‘mounted,’ ‘expressed’ (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light.” 106 Barthes’s “translation” of photogra - phy from Greek into Latin (which he describes only a few pages earlier as “a pedantry necessary because it illuminates certain nuances”) is itself reveal - ing. 107 First, the verbose translation into a phrase rather than a single term helps to clarify the stakes of what exactly is happening in photography. With respect to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s early, Grecophilic attempts to identify the photo - graphic image and the process responsible for its creation, Joel Snyder draws

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 attention to the deeply ambiguous syntax of words such as physautotype , which could be understood variously “as ‘nature impressing itself,’ or as ‘a self impres - sion of nature,’ or perhaps as ‘self impression by nature.’” 108 In Barthes’s formulation, however, the grammatical use of the Latin “ablative of agent” clarifies that the resemblance is being achieved by the action of light. In addi - tion to removing such ambiguities (which could have been accomplished just as well in transliterated Greek), Barthes’s preference for Latin appears to go a step further by glossing Pliny the Elder’s Natural History , in which the verb exprimere (“to express”) repeatedly draws attention (in such phrases as expressi cera vultus ) to the physical contingency that ostensibly guarantees a resemblance. But if the metaphorical language of pressing has retained a certain degree of explanatory power with regard to both the ontology of the photographic image and the death mask, the question of agency that subtends the comparison has been understood differently in each case. The crux of the matter, as John Dewey observes using the example of grapes whose juice can be expressed either in a wine press or underfoot, is that expression does not happen naturally (i.e., on its own) but always requires some kind of external agent: there can be no ex pression without a corresponding com pression. 109 In photography, as Barthes stresses, the external agent is light. But who or what is the external agent in the making of the death mask? Pliny recognizes Lysistratus as “the first person” (hominis . . . primus omnium ) to have made a casting from the face itself and who also “established the method” ( instituere ) of making corrections to the image expressed in wax. 110 Although Pliny’s testimony might at first glance appear to be attributing the agency to Lysistratus, another possibility is that, as with photography, Pliny means to suggest that the sculptor only discovers and refines—rather than invents—a method of obtaining a resemblance. In this case, the difference from photography would be that, for Pliny, what achieves the resemblance is neither the artist nor the automatic “system” constituted by the mold and malleable substrate (as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon suggests in his critique of Aristotelian hylomorphism). 111 Pliny’s formulation would con - stitute instead a return to discourses of chance, although not a random, aleatory species of chance. Rather, it is one that is governed by Pliny’s Stoic cosmology and his belief in, and commitment to, the “Providence” of a divine Nature. 112 Rehearsing these old chestnuts in various theories of the ontology of the pho - tographic image with a view to the ways they touch upon or deploy ancient techniques and conceptualizations of molding and casting has little to do with mere captiousness. Rather, a deeper consideration of the ancient metaphors and analogies that are so often adduced to compare or even assimilate photographs

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 to death masks reveals a discursive circularity or recursiveness. What the nine - teenth-century discoveries of the Lyon and Paris masks disclose are the power - ful yet tremendously subtle ways in which both the historical understanding and analogical potential of death masks has always already been photographic.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Greek and Latin texts are from the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). I am deeply grateful to Jordan Bear, Sarah Miller, Joel Snyder, and the editors at Grey Room for their generous and insightful comments and criticisms. All errors are of course my own.

1. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1956–74), 12:264. 2. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 459. 3. The literature on postmortem photography is considerable, but see especially Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and Audrey Linkman, “Taken from Life: Post-mortem Portraiture in Britain (1860–1910),” History of Photography 30, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 309–347. On the “deathliness” of photography in the nine - teenth century, see Rosalind Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” October 5 (Summer 1978): 29–47. 4. Laurence Hutton, Portraits in Plaster (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894). Hutton’s own collection was based on a collection of six masks found in the trash (thrown away by their deceased owner’s “unappreciative heirs”) in the East Village in the early 1860s. His masks are now at Princeton University. See http://library.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/ C0770/. 5. Ernst Benkard, Das ewige Antlitz (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1926); and Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics , trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Cf. Louis Kaplan, “Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Recasting of the Photographic Image,” Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 1 (2010): 45–62. 6. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 3–12. Bazin’s analogy would later be taken up and expanded by Susan Sontag in her collection of essays On Photography (1977; New York: Picador, 1990), 154. Sontag’s multiple photographic metaphors are, in turn, discussed by Peter Geimer, “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” trans. Kata Gellen, Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 7–28. See also the recent discussion of photography in relation to death masks in Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 7. For a comprehensive catalogue of these masks, see Heinrich Drerup, “ Totenmaske und Ahnenbild bei den Römern,” Römische Mitteilungen 87 (1980): 81–129. Missing from this cata - logue is a specimen of an infant in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. 8. Kendall L. Walton, “Style and the Products and Processes of Art,” in The Concept of Style , ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 72–103. 9. For a glimpse into the historiography of this long debate, see especially Jan Bazant, “Roman Deathmasks Once Again,” Annali: Sezione di archeologia e storia antica 13 (1991): 209–18. 10. Marcia Pointon encapsulates the problem in her essay “Casts, Imprints, and the Deathliness of Things: Artifacts at the Edge,” Art Bulletin 96, no. 2 (2014): 173: “Terminology sows confusion: the mold and the imprint, or cast, is each referred to as a death mask, an elision indicative of the desire to maintain the connection between face and mask.” 11. The use of this terminology of “negatives” and “positives” with specific reference to the molding of death masks had emerged by at least the 1890s. See, for example, the discussion of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 casting of Lincoln’s and Grant’s death masks in Cleveland Moffett, “Grant and Lincoln in Bronze,” McClure’s Magazine 5, no. 5 (October 1895): 425ff. How or why people began to characterize molds in more general terms as “negatives” and casts as “positives,” by which they seem to mean concave and convex forms, respectively, remains unclear, but a preliminary examination of results from an Internet search engine indicates that the characterization gradually appears some - time in the 1880s in relation to patents for metal forging and gynecological models—a genealogy that seems ripe for further study. The familiar language of photographic “positives” and “nega - tives” (along with the name of “photography” itself) had already been introduced by Sir John Herschel as early as 1840, on which see especially Geoffrey Batchen, “The Naming of Photography: A Mass of Metaphor,” History of Photography 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 28–29, 31n59. For a brief account of the early history of the negative, see D.B. Thomas, The First Negatives: An Account of the Discovery and Early Use of the Negative-Positive Photographic Process (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1964). 12. The literature on photographic indexicality is vast. See Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce , ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1940), 119. A retrospective reading of Bazin through the lens of Peircean semiotics can be located in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 120–55. Perhaps the most well-known art-historical account of indexi - cality remains Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” in The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 196–209. For a reevaluation and critique of this reading, see especially Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” Nordicom Review 25, nos. 1–2 (2004), 39–49; and Geimer, “Image as Trace.” See also Jordan Bear, “Index Marks the Spot? The Photo-Diagram’s Referential System,” Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (2012): 315–34; and Joel Snyder, “Pointless,” in James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), 369–85. Most significant for my present purposes of bringing together these archaeological and photographic discourses is Georges Didi- Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008). 13. On the relationship between archaeology and daguerreotypy, see especially Lindsey S. Stewart, “In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the Daguerreotypes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey,” in Claire L. Lyons et al., eds., Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 66 –91. 14. The earliest and most important publications about the mask are Auguste Allmer, “Epitaphe d’une petite fille dans la tombe de laquelle était déposé un moule de son visage,” Revue épigraphique du midi de la France 1, no. 18 (July 1878): 298–300; Arnould Locard, “ Note sur une tombe romaine trouvée à Lyon et renfermant le masque d’un enfant,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences et belles-lettres et arts de Lyon: Classe des lettres 22 (1884): 21–36; Hénri Thédenat, Sur deux masques de l’époque romaine trouvés à Lyon et à Paris (Paris: H. Champion, 1886); and Auguste Allmer and Paul Dissard, “ Trion: Antiquités découvertes en 1885, 1886, et antérieure - ment,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences et belles-lettres et arts de Lyon: Classe des lettres 25 (1887): 32–37. 15. André Steyert, Nouvelle histoire de Lyon (Lyon: Bernoux et Cumin, 1895), 1:335. 16. Although an image of the mask was first published in 1878, the mask itself went missing for several years after it came to light. This may explain why the mask belonging to the infant in Paris, although found four years later in 1878, was independently regarded as the first of its kind

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 in recorded archaeological history. Locard, “ Note sur une tombe,” 24. 17. Locard, “ Note sur une tombe,” 34. 18. Thédenat, 12. On the philological controversy, see Charles C. Perkins, “The Art of Casting Plaster among the Greeks and Romans (Second and Concluding Notice),” American Art Review 1, no. 6 (1880): 256–57. 19. Locard, “ Note sur une tombe,” 28. 20. Locard, “ Note sur une tombe,” 34. 21. Locard, “ Note sur une tombe,” 25. 22. Today the Lyon mold remains understudied even among specialists. In part, this has to do with the fact that the ancient mold had long been kept at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon rather than the Musée gallo-romain de Lyon , where the stele and a modern (nineteenth-century) cast of the mask had been put on display and were generally known to archaeologists since the 1880s. (Thanks to M. Hugues Savay-Guerraz, conservator at the Musée gallo-romain de Lyon , for bring - ing this to my attention.) This helps to explain why, as recently as 1980, Heinrich Drerup identi - fied the Lyon mold as missing in his modest catalogue of such objects (notably excluding the Paris mold), which by then included a handful of additional specimens that had come to light over the previous century. Drerup, “ Totenmaske und Ahnenbild bei den Römern,” 3. As a result, Drerup and others were forced to rely on the modern cast of the mold for their analysis, rather than on the excavated mask itself. Consequently, the ancient mold itself has largely been written out of the picture, its many imperfections smoothed over in a series of modern proxies made from var - ious and variously resembling media. The first publication of the ancient mold (as opposed to the modern cast) appears in Véronique Dasen, “Wax and Plaster Memories: Children in Elite and Non-Elite Strategies,” in Children, Memory, and Family Identity in Roman Culture , ed. Véronique Dasen and Thomas Späth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 109–46. 23. Auguste Allmer, “ Corrections et additions,” Revue épigraphique du midi de la France 1, no. 20 (September–October 1878): 320. 24. Florian Valentin, “Miscellanea,” Bulletin épigraphique de la Gaule 2 (1882): 249. 25. “ Chronique,” Bulletin critique de la littérature, d’histoire , et de théologie , no. 2 (15 October 1882): 217–18; and “Notes,” The Nation , 30 November 1882, 464. 26. Thédenat signed nearly all of the other reviews in the “ Chronique ” during this period, but a scant few appear to have been left anonymous rather haphazardly. 27. Léon Landau, Un coin de Paris, le cimetière gallo-romain de la rue Nicole (Paris: Didier, 1878). 28. See Robert de Lasteyrie, “ Sur un cimetière romain découvert à Paris, rue Nicole Henri,” Revue archéologique , June 1878, 378; and Thédenat, 27. The ancient mold and its modern cast remain on display at the Musée Carnavalet , the city museum of Paris. 29. Thédenat, 27. On the art-historical phenomenon of “chance images,” see especially Horst W. Janson, “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought,” in Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky , ed. Millard Meiss (Zurich: Buehler Buchdruck, 1960), 254–66. 30. The Science Museum, London, owns a copy of the mask (accession no. A656209) with a handwritten inscription on the reverse that recounts the story of its making as given in Landau. 31. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media , ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 27.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 32. “ Il est donc probable que le moule du musée de Lyon dut servir à tirer un masque en cire. . . . Claudia Severina, en déposant le moule dans la tombe, obéit à un sentiment facile à com - prendre. Elle ne voulut pas briser et jeter avec les débris vulgaires ce plâtre, sacré pour elle, car il avait touché le visage de son enfant et conservait ses traits. Elle ne voulut pas non plus que la chère image pût, indéfiniment reproduit, tomber en des mains inconnues et être profanée par des regards indifférents .” Thédenat, 15–16. 33. Drerup, “ Totenmaske und Ahnenbild bei den Römern,” 1980. 34. On the Tunisian workshop that produced unfinished plaster portraits found alongside a plaster mold, see Hédi Slim, “ Masques mortuaires d’El Jem (Thysdrus),” Antiquités africaines 10 (1976): 79–92. 35. In a letter to his friend Macrinus, Pliny the Younger contrasts the emotional response to “images of the dead displayed at home” ( defunctorum imagines domi positae ) to those set up in a very public space ( in celeberrimo loco ), although whether he is referring to more conventional likenesses in marble or bronze, or to the mold-made images his famous uncle of the same name had discussed, remains ambiguous in each case. 36. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity , trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 207. See also Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman across the Tides of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 64ff. 37. Institutional spaces of justice constituted a unique example of such a context for display beyond the tomb. In his treatise on rhetorical training, Quintilian recalls an episode in which a death mask had been used as a visual aid to solicit a sympathetic response—to catastrophic effect, in this case—during a courtroom drama. That Quintilian was talking about a “true” death mask is strongly suggested by his remark that the grisly, disfigured image was fashioned in wax after being taken (through the interceding plaster mold, we must imagine) cadaveri , from the corpse itself. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria , 6.1. 38. Slim, “ Masques mortuaires d’El Jem (Thysdrus),” 87 –89. 39. Martial, Epigrams , 9.74. 40. Apuleius, Apology , trans. Vincent Hunink, in Rhetorical Works , ed. S.J. Harrison (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), bk. 14, 38. See also Yun Lee Too, “Statues, Mirrors, Gods: Controlling Images in Apuleius,” in Art and Text in Roman Culture , ed. Jas Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133–52. 41. Jane Fejfer, Roman Portraits in Context (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 121. 42. The major publication is Henner von Hesberg and Harald Mielsch, Die heidnische Nekropole unter St. Peter in Rom: Die Mausoleen E –I und Z –Psi , Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, ser. 3, Memorie , vol. 16, no. 2 (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1986), 143–208. See also Dasen, “Wax and Plaster Memories”; Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Housing the Dead: The Tomb as House in Roman Italy,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context , ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 66–76; and Luigi Maria Caliò, “ La morte del sapiente: La tomba di Valerius Herma nella necropoli vaticana ,” in Arte e memoria culturale nell’età della Seconda Sofistica , ed. Orietta D. Cordovana and Marco Galli (Catania: Edizioni del Prisma, 2007), 289–318. 43. Barbara E. Borg, Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs in Third-Century C.E. Rome (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 135–39. On the conceptualization of familial and hereditary tombs in Roman funerary law, see Max Käser, “ Zum römischen Grabrecht,” in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Romanistische Abteilung 95 (1978): 15–92. 44. Dasen, “Wax and Plaster Memories.” 45. The bibliography on the imagines maiorum is vast. See especially Harriet Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996); Peter Blöme, “ Die imagines maiorum : Ein Problemfall römischer und neuzeitlicher Ästhetik ,” in Homo Pictor , ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: K.G. Sauer, 2001), 305–22; and John Pollini, From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 46. Flower, Ancestor Masks . See also Wallace-Hadrill, “Housing the Dead”; and Dasen, “Wax and Plaster Memories.” 47. “In the halls of our ancestors it was otherwise; portraits were the objects displayed to be looked at, not statues by foreign artists, nor bronzes nor marbles, but wax models of faces were set out each on a separate side-board, to furnish likenesses to be carried in procession at a funeral in the clan, and always when some member of it passed away the entire company of his house that had ever existed was present.” Pliny the Elder, Natural History , 35.4ff. See also Georges Didi- Huberman, “The Molding Image: Genealogy and the Truth of Resemblance in Pliny’s Natural History , Book 35, 1–7,” in Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of the Law , ed. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 71–88. 48. Pliny the Elder, Natural History , 35.44. 49. Florence Dupont, “The Emperor-God’s Other Body,” trans. Brian Massumi, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three , ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 396–419. 50. Dupont, “The Emperor-God’s Other Body,” 407; translation modified (the English transla - tion qualifies the hollow form as a “negative” and the form in relief as a “positive,” but Dupont does not use these terms in French). 51. Dupont, “The Emperor-God’s Other Body,” 408; translation modified (the English transla - tion arbitrarily gives “hundredth”). 52. See Silverman, Miracle of Analogy , 12. 53. Cicero, Against Vatinius , 28. 54. Dupont does not cite Benjamin in her essay, but Didi-Huberman (who cites Dupont) makes the theoretical connection to Benjamin explicit. On both the technical issues and art-historical consequences of producing copies of death masks, see especially Joost Keizer, “Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Art History 38, no. 1 (February 2015): 11–37. 55. Flower, 32–59. 56. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact , 60–70 (esp. 69). See also Didi-Huberman, “The Molding Image.” 57. Myles McDonnell, “ Un Ballo in Maschera : Processions, Portraits, and Emotions,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999): 541–52. 58. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact , 69. 59. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media , trans. Anthony Enns (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 134. Cf. David S. Ferris, “The Shortness of History, or Photography In Nuce : Benjamin’s Attenuation of the Negative,” in Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and History (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 19–37. 60. On the chaîne opératoire , see Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact , 35ff. 61. Richard L. Gregory and Ernst Gombrich, eds., Illusion in Nature and Art (New York:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 Scribner, 1973). 62. Gregory and Gombrich, 84. 63. Regarding a similar effect in the optical “reversibility” of Marcel Duchamp’s Feuille de vigne femelle in André Breton’s surrealist photography, see Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact , 257–65. Although I would agree that Breton’s photograph of the mold constitutes a form of “reversibility” similar to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s example of the glove turned inside out, I am not sure that I would agree with a characterization of Duchamp’s sculpture as a “negative” form in the first place. 64. In the ancient sepulchral context, the very fact that these “negative” molds were deposited in the proximity of more-traditional portraits, yet under very different conditions of visibility (e.g., sealed up within a sarcophagus), would seem to suggest that the Romans did indeed draw a distinction between the two in the first place and were perhaps even acutely aware of their sig - nifying power. Of course, questions of preservation may also be at issue: objects included in buri - als have a far greater chance of surviving in the archaeological record than do objects kept circulating as part of daily life. 65. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians , trans. and ed. Richard Bett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.307 (61). For related problems of metaphor, analogy, and exemplarity in Roman philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence, see the excellent collection of essays in Michèle Lowrie and Susanne Lüdermann, eds., Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law (London: Routledge, 2015). 66. Ptolemy, Optics , 2.128, quoted in and trans. A. Mark Smith, “Ptolemy’s Theory of Visual Perception: An English Translation of the Optics with Introduction and Commentary,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 86, no. 2 (1996): 44. 67. On this ancient theory of vision, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 1–17. On Ptolemy’s optical account, see Gérard Simon, Le regard, l’être, et l’apparence dans l’optique de l’antiquité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil , 1988), 19; and A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 68. Paul 3 quaestionum , D. 11, 7, 44, trans. Alan Watson, in The Digest of Justinian , vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). See also Yan Thomas, “ Res religiosae : On the Categories of Religion and Commerce in Roman Law,” in Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy, eds., Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50. 69. Gianfranco Spagnesi, Roma: La Basilica di San Pietro, borgo e la città (Milan: Jaca Book, 2002), 126. 70. Paolo Liverani et al. eds., The Vatican Necropoles (Milan: Editoriale Jaca Book, 2010), 103. 71. Allmer, “ Epitaphe d’une petite fille,” 299. 72. From the inscription we learn that young Claudia Victoria took her nomen gentile from her mother (Claudia Severina) rather than her father, suggesting she was an illegitimate child of less- than-noble birth. As Véronique Dasen suggests, the cognomen “Victoria” may help to explain why the girl’s parents had never been married, for the masculine version of this name was extremely common among soldiers, who at the time were not allowed to marry until they had completed their term of service. See Dasen, “Wax and Plaster Memories,” 125. 73. Unfortunately, the length of the mask is difficult to compare with good statistical infor - mation from modern medical studies, whose metrics are produced by taking the precise circum -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 ference of the head (something that is impossible to do with a death mask) and orofacial points that use the nose (unfortunately missing in the Lyon mold) as a crucial point of reference. However, I wish to thank my colleague María Cecilia (Nené) Lozada, a bioarchaeologist and anthropologist, who conducted a visual analysis of Locard’s photograph along with her class and concluded (without any knowledge of the specifics of the inscription) that the mask likely belonged to a female young adult, age twenty to thirty-five. 74. Locard, “ Note sur une tombe,” 23. 75. Richard Neer, “Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (2005): 1–26. 76. Nathan Burgess, “Taking Portraits after Death,” Photographic and Fine Art Journal , 1855, 80, quoted in Ruby, 44–45. 77. See especially Édouard Papet, “ Le moulage sur nature au service de la science ,” in À fleur de peau: Le moulage sur nature au XIXe siècle , ed. Édouard Papet (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 88–95. 78. On these questions of facture in the nineteenth century, see especially Édouard Papet, “Technique: ‘Saisir la nature sur le fait, ’” in À fleur de peau , 74–77; and Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen, Masterpieces of the Gipsformerei: Art Manufactuary of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin since 1819 (Munich: Hirmer, 2012). For contemporary accounts of the physionotype, see Musée des familles 2 (1835): 144; and [François-Ferdinand-Philippe-Louis-Marie d’Orléans, prince de Joinville], Memoirs (Vieux Souvenirs) of the Prince of Joinville , trans. Lady Mary Loyd (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 298. 79. Lasteyrie, “ Sur un cimetière,” 378; and Thédenat, 11–12. On the plaster victims from Pompeii, see especially Brigitte Desrochers, “Giorgio Sommer’s Photographs of Pompeii,” History of Photography 28, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 111 –129; and Eugene Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues: Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 80. “ Par un hasard singulier et qui mérite d’être signalé, le lourd couvercle, en tombant sur le mortier liquide au moment de la tombe, a fait jaillir une certaine quantité de mortier jusque sur la figure du petit défunt; ce liquide en séchant a moulé les traits du pauvre enfant et nous les a conservé jusqu’à aujourd’hui, comme la boue qui a enseveli Pompéi a conservé les corps de quelques-unes des victimes du Vésuve. ” Lasteyrie, “ Sur un cimetière,” 378. 81. For the history of this object, see especially Amedeo Maiuri, Pompei ed Ercolano: Fra case e abitanti (Padua: Le Tre Venezie , 1950), 55–60. 82. Théophile Gautier, Arria Marcella (1852), trans. F.C. de Sumichrast (Boston: Brainard, 1901), 315–16. See also Georges Didi-Huberman, “ L’air et l’empreinte ,” in À fleur de peau , 43–59. 83. Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015). 84. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik (1875) , ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977). 85. See especially Cornelia Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” trans. Dominic Bonfiglio, Perspectives on Science 9, no. 2 (2001): 196–209. See also Gavin Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological Record (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20ff. 86. Droysen, 11; and Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” 202. 87. Droysen, 76 (emphasis added); and Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” 202. 88. Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” 205ff. On the relation between chance and the manipula - tion of discourse, see John Tagg, “Neither Fish nor Flesh,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (December 2009): 78–79.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 89. Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” 204. 90. Quoted in Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” 204; translation slightly modified (in her text, which is translated from German, Droysen’s spare mention of Gips is translated as “mold,” but the context suggests he means a cast, which would more normally be designated as Gipsabguss ). 91. See especially Klaus Fittschen, “ Über das photographieren römischer Porträts,” Arch äologischer Anzeiger 1 (1974): 484–94; and Annetta Alexandridis and Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer, Arch äologie der Photographie: Bilder aus der Photothek der Antikensammlung Berlin (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2004). More generally, see Mary Bergstein, “Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (1992): 475–98 and Claire L. Lyons, “The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth Century Photography,” in Antiquity and Photography , 22 –65. 92. Sir David Brewster, “On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios, and of Intaglios into Cameos, with an Account of Other Analogous Phenomena,” Edinburgh Journal of Science 4 (1826): 99–108; reprinted in Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (London, 1834). 93. Cf. Michael Baxandall, “Fixation and Distraction: The Nail in Braque’s Violin and Pitcher (1910),” in John Onians, ed., Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E.H. Gombrich (London: Phaidon, 1994), 399–415. 94. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 133. 95. Charles Wheatstone, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision—Part the Second: On Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 142 (1852): 1–17. See also Crary, 118ff; and Robert J. Silverman, “The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (October 1993): 729–56. 96. Wheatstone, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision,” 12. While the pseudoscope proved to be a commercial failure—no one was particularly interested in seeing the very fabric of his or her world turned inside out—it nevertheless played a crucial role in the physiological understanding of binocular vision in the nineteenth century. 97. Wheatstone, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision,” 13 (emphasis in original). 98. Charles Truscott, “The Interpretation of the Negative,” Wilson’s Photographic Magazine 49 (1912): 153 (emphasis in original). 99. John Werge, The Evolution of Photography (London: Piper and Carter, 1890), 304. 100. That being said, collections do exist of casts of the casts from Pompeii. As a gift for Kaiser Wilhelm II, Giuseppe Fiorelli asked the sculptor Achille d’Orsi to make a set of reduced-scale plaster copies of the victims in Naples. See Dwyer, 105ff. On the Jericho skulls, which were not discovered until 1953, see especially the discussion in Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact , 55ff. 101. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 11n3. 102. Geimer, “Image as Trace.” See also the remarks of Michel Frizot, “Who’s Afraid of Photons?” trans. Kim Timby, in Photography Theory , 272ff; and Snyder, “Section 3: The Art Seminar,” 150 (where he retorts, “photons don’t impress ”). On the wave/particle theories of light that have been variously mobilized in photographic discourse, see the classic discussion in Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (1938; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 262–63.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00197 by guest on 27 September 2021 103. Bazin produced a similarly heterogeneous list, including “mummy, mold, death mask, mirror, equivalent, substitute, and asymptote.” See Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 451. 104. On the related matter of photographic reproductions of Christian relics and their pecu - liar indexicality, see Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” October 29 (1984): 63–81; and Peter Geimer, “A Self-Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography? Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin,” trans. Gerrit Jackson, Grey Room , no. 59 (2015): 6–43. 105. Geimer, “Image as Trace,” 10. 106. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 81. 107. Barthes, 77. 108. Joel Snyder, “What Happens by Itself in Photography?” in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 1993), 361 (emphasis in original). See also Peter Geimer, “Self-Generated Images,” trans. Michael Powers, in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media , ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 27–43. 109. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigee, 1980), 66–67. 110. Pliny, Natural History , 35.153ff. 111. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958; Paris: Aubier, 1989), 243. See also Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact , 34ff. 112. See especially Ernesto Paparazzo, “Philosophy and Science in the Elder Pliny’s Naturalis Historia ,” in Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts , ed. Roy Gibson and Ruth Morello (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 89–111. Thanks to Verity Platt for sharing with me an unpublished paper in which she touches on aspects of Pliny’s Stoic cosmology and the problem of chance, forthcoming in her book “Beyond Ekphrasis: Making Objects Matter in Classical Antiquity.”

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