Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative

Crowley, Patrick

doi:10.1162/grey_a_00197

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…The post-mortem portrait became a popular subject of photography and ancient Roman death masks were seen anew through the camera lens. As an effect of the encounter between the two media, the linguistically difficult and blurred distinction between the hollow imprint that serves as the mould for the convex cast was now referred to in the language of photography as ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ (Crowley, 2016; on death masks and photography see also Pointon, 2014).…”

Section: Casting and Photographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Images Made by Contagion: On Dermatological Wax Moulages

Fend

2022

Body & Society

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Moulages are contact media – images made by contagion in the most literal sense: their production relies on a process in which the object to be reproduced is touched by the reproducing material. In the case of dermatological moulages, the plaster touches the infected skin of the sick and, once dried, serves as the negative form for the waxen image of a disease. Focussing on the collection of the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, the article situates the production of dermatological moulages within the visual culture of 19th-century medicine and raises the question how an ancient technique of image production could become such a prevalent tool for the documentation of skin diseases during a period usually associated with the rise of scientific medicine and a reconsideration of theories of contagion in medical aetiology.

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Section: Casting and Photographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Images Made by Contagion: On Dermatological Wax Moulages

Fend

2022

Body & Society

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Documentation and decontextualization in Nora Okka’s spolia

Driscoll¹

2022

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics

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Sophia’s double: photography, archaeology, and modern Greece

Stager¹

2022

Classical Receptions Journal

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In the context of the entangled productions of scientific archaeology, photographic technologies, and the Greek nation-state, this article analyses the ancient Greek idea of the eidōlon (image, phantom, double) as a paradigm for photography. Sophia Engastromenou Schliemann presented herself for the camera as Helen of Troy and mobilized an ancient textual debate about Helen and her double and the Trojan War. This image of Sophia adorned in Trojan gold is widely known and little studied and, as this essay will explore, it circulated far beyond Sophia’s control. Undergirding this article’s historical contingencies is an exploration of the photograph as eidōlon.

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Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative

Cited by 8 publications

References 16 publications

Images Made by Contagion: On Dermatological Wax Moulages

Images Made by Contagion: On Dermatological Wax Moulages

Documentation and decontextualization in Nora Okka’s spolia

Sophia’s double: photography, archaeology, and modern Greece

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