as Dante Alighieri, Ludwig van Beethoven, Napoleon Bonaparte (whose death mask was taken on the island of Saint Helena), Filippo Brunelleschi, Frédéric Chopin, Oliver Cromwell (whose death mask is preserved at Warwick Castle), Joseph Haydn, John Keats, Franz Liszt, Blaise Pascal, Nikola Tesla (commissioned by his friend Hugo Gernsback and now displayed in the Nikola Tesla Museum), Torquato Tasso, and Voltaire. As in ancient Rome, death masks were often subsequently used in making marble sculpture portraits, busts, or engravings of the deceased. In Russia, the death mask tradition dates back to the times of Peter the Great, whose death mask was taken by Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli. Also well known are the death masks of Nicholas I, and Alexander I. Stalin's death mask is on display at the Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia. One of the first real Ukrainian death masks was that of the poet Taras Shevchenko, taken by Peter Clodt von Jürgensburg in St. Petersburg, Russia. In early spring of 1860 and shortly before his death in April 1865, two life masks were created of President Abraham Lincoln. Science Death masks were increasingly used by scientists from the late 18th century onwards to record variations in human physiognomy. The life mask was also increasingly common at this time, taken from living people. Anthropologists used such masks to study physiognomic features in famous people and notorious criminals. Forensic science Before the widespread availability of photography, the facial features of unidentified bodies were sometimes preserved by creating death masks so that relatives of the deceased could recognize them if they were seeking a missing person. One mask, known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, recorded the face of an unidentified young girl who, around the age of 16, according to one man's story, had been found drowned in the Seine River at Paris, France around the late 1880s. A morgue worker made a cast of her face, saying "Her beauty was breathtaking, and showed few signs of distress at the time of passing. So bewitching that I knew beauty as such must be preserved." The cast was also compared to Mona Lisa, and other famous paintings and sculptures. Copies of the mask were fashionable in Parisian Bohemian society, and the face of Resusci Anne, the world's first CPR training mannequin, introduced in 1960, was modeled after the mask. See also Plastered human skulls Portrait Sculpture References External links The International Life Cast