Dead Mona Lisa Smile (L’inconnue de la Seine)
Warning: if you cannot stomach morbid subjects, stop reading now.
I came across her picture while doing research on masks, specifically death masks. I figured death masks were made of famous people only but found out they were also used as tools for identifying victims of crime or suicide before the dawn of photography. Frankly they creep me out but it is interesting to see at the same time accurate depictions (I don’t want to say portraits) of people such as Voltaire, Beethoven, Goethe, Napoleon etc. I want to think the closed eyes are sleeping eyes but it doesn’t work, though some of them look quite peaceful. Still, their features are frozen in time as if botched by a bad sculptor. I try to imagine how must they have looked when they were alive, when their faces had real expressions…It helps a little but I still find the idea of a death mask really strange. And if you think in Victorian times dead children were ceremoniously propped up and photographed as if living, it gets even stranger.
Back to the real subject: while browsing through the pictures, I discovered the death mask of a young woman with a Mona Lisa smile. A suicide victim from the 19th century, she was found drowned in the Seine river. When taken to the morgue, the attendant was so impressed with her beauty that he took a plaster cast of her face. Apparently identifying victims of crime or suicide was a fashionable pastime in the social circles of 19th century Paris, however nobody was able to identify the young woman. So she became known as the Unknown Girl from the Seine. Many casts of her death mask were made as the Parisian society became quite obsessed with her for a while. Some experts say her features are too clear for a dead person pulled from the river, and claim that the cast was made of a living person.
Finally, here is the picture:
Doesn’t her smile look exactly like Mona Lisa’s?
