Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/388

358 coloured green. A bronze mask, once in the possession of Sir William Hamilton, is recorded to have been found in a grave in a church at S$ta$ Agata dei Goti, in the province of Naples, but no further particulars are known. In the Waldeck Museum at Arolsen is a bronze mask that belonged formerly to a collection made principally in Naples, and may therefore be of Lower Italian origin. It differs in one respect from the other metallic masks that have been mentioned in being made of cast, not of beaten, bronze. It represents the portrait of an old man of well-determined Roman type, with a wrinkled forehead and a large wart on the left cheek below the eye. The eyes and nostrils are perforated and the mouth half open. The excellence of the workmanship and the earnestness of the treatment allow us probably to recognise a mask such as the Romans made in wax in honour of their ancestors, kept in the atrium, and carried with the funeral procession. The workmanship deserves to be placed by the side of the best performances of Roman portrait art, and will scarcely be later than the beginning of Imperial times. In the Museum at Chiusi there is a mere fragment of a bronze mask. Only the lower part of the forehead, the eyes, the upper portion of the nose, and the cheeks below the eyes are preserved. No details are known as to where it was found. If it is part of a funeral mask it differs from Roman masks in metal in that the eyes are not perforated, following in this particular some of those in terra-cotta. Perhaps it is Etruscan. In the British Museum there are two terra-cotta masks from Chiusi of Etruscan aspect. One represents a bearded man, the other a woman. The modelling is done with great care, the eyes are very oblique, the pupils and nostrils are perforated, and the mouth is slightly open. The clay is thin, very fine, of slightly reddish colour, but coated over with a bright olive tint. After the clay was burnt, the cheeks, forehead, and head-dresses were covered with human and animal figures, besides other designs, by scratching the