How far back we may place the earliest of these royal
masks I am unable to say. St. Louis (1226-70), who was
buried at the Abbey of St. Denis, caused effigies to be
erected of all the kings that preceded him and had been
buried there. But it is not supposed that any of these
were portraits. The tomb of Philippe le Hardi (ob. 1285)
bears an effigy which is supposed to be the earliest authentic royal portrait statue at St. Denis.[1] So we are entitled
to believe that at least from the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, sepulchral
masks have been used in some part of Europe. With
regard to America, as we cannot credit the pious Pilgrim
Fathers with having brought with them from England the
custom of rougeing the faces of the dead, it is probably a
very modern nineteenth-century recrudescence of a very
ancient idea, and is perhaps totally disconnected historically
with any practice of the kind in Europe. Though the
possibility is not excluded that the practice might have been
introduced by Italians from Sicily.
For the next eight or nine centuries, till the fifth or fourth century, there is a break in the record, though it is possible that in Italy and Gaul the tradition was never entirely lost. It might be objected that the word "mask," Italian maschero, French masque, is of Arabic origin, and that the Latin persona has entirely lost its original meaning in the Romance languages. But persona was only applied to the masks used in the theatre and at some processions of a semi-religious nature. The Latin word for the wax mask of an ancestor was imago ; and in this form it was probably transmitted till supplanted by the newer and more fashionable word "mask." The next set of masks, nearly all of them of metal, of which mention will be made, belong to the Imperial period of Roman history. Some of them can be approximately dated, and I shall enumerate them as nearly
- ↑ A. Hare, Days near Paris. pp. 166, 181.
