This is a life-size, museum-grade replica of the 1812 life mask of Ludwig van Beethoven, taken directly from the composer’s face at age 42 by the Austrian sculptor Franz Klein.
It is made of hand-shaped reconstituted limestone mixed with pulverized bronze and acrylic. It is finished in a rock-hard museum-grade preservation wax to retain the patina under harsh museum lighting.
In 1812, Beethoven’s friends and patrons, the Viennese piano makers Nannette and Johann Andreas Streicher, commissioned Klein to create a realistic bust of Beethoven for their concert hall. Klein invited Beethoven to sit for the casting, and he agreed. Klein first coated Beethoven’s face with oil and applied wet plaster. Beethoven breathed only through two small tubes in his nostrils. The first attempt failed when Beethoven panicked and tore the setting plaster away. The second attempt succeeded and resulted in the mask seen here, the only true life mask of his features.
From that mold, Klein created busts of Beethoven, adding hair, eyes, and clothing in clay over the strictly documentary facial cast, and 19th-century copies in plaster and bronze spread through Europe’s collections. Today, casts from this original life mask are preserved in institutions throughout the world, where it is treated as one of the most authentic visual records of the composer’s face in his early forties. The musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon went so far as to call the mask “without any question, the most important documentary evidence of Beethoven’s features.”
This took about a month to design and make.
This listing includes the museum display tag, which identifies Beethoven, the date and origin of the life mask (Franz Klein, Vienna, 1812, commissioned by the Streicher family), and notes its connection to examples held in major collection.
Made in the USA.
