Kirkup Mask

Behind this mask of Dante’s face, kept inside Palazzo Vecchio, are several fascinating stories. Most people are probably familiar with it from the role it played in Dan Brown’s Inferno. To refresh your memory: Langdon realizes that his high-tech cylinder was projecting onto Botticelli’s cutaway drawing of Dante’s Hell the phrase cerca trova, which you’ll find nearby on the wall of the Salone dei Cinquecento in Vasari’s Battaglia di Marciano only if you have a telescope. This leads him to connect the phrase “Paradise 25” to the Baptistry, where he finds this ‘death’ mask of Dante. On the back of it, Langdon discovers a riddle that then takes him and the plot away from Florence.

Less futuristic, but no less fascinating, is the mask’s real story. Scholars now believe, as archeologist and art historian Corrado Ricci first proposed in 1891, that what you’re looking at is a copy of the face of a statue that once decorated Dante’s tomb in Ravenna.

According to Ricci (and seconded by Alessandro D’Ancona who was not only a senator but also professor, critic, politician and director of Florence’s prestigious newspaper La nazione), that original bust was made in 1481 by Tullio Lombardo, whose father was then in charge of the tomb’s restoration.

In about 1555, the archbishop of Ravenna removed the bust from the tomb and gave it to Giambologna (sculptor of the Rape of the Sabines in the Loggia della Signoria) who in turn passed it on to his own student, Pietro Tacca (the artist who made the bronze copy of the boar affectionately called Porcellino in the Mercato Nuovo).

Tacca apparently allowed several people to make copies of the bust, but was its sole owner. One day, however, he was visited by one of the duchesses of the Sforza family who, upon seeing the Dante bust, snatched it up, wrapped it in the green scarf she was wearing and left with it. It was never seen again.

The mask in this small wooden case was most probably one of the copies that were made from the bust while Tacca still owned it. It first appears in 1830 when it is suddenly discovered in Ravenna by an artist named Lorenzo Bartolini who gives it to fellow-artist and friend Seymour Kirkup, from whom the mask gets its name.

Kirkup was a wealthy Englishman who dedicated his entire life to Dante. Born in England in 1788, Kirkup was an acquaintance of William Blake (whose own passion for Dante is well known) and, after moving to Italy, John Keats and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

Kirkup was a follower of a clairvoyant and psychic called Daniel Home who conducted seances and served as a medium for conversations with the dead. Nathaniel Hawthorne met Kirkup in Florence and remembered that Kirkup had “the reputation of being a necromancer, not undeservedly, as he is deeply interested in spirit-rappings, and holds converse [...] with dead poets and emperors.”

Above: a photo of Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced Hume)

According to Hawthorne, Kirkup firmly believed that what you see in this case was Dante’s death mask and, therefore, that it represented his actual features. It would also have served as a particularly useful tool for seances. He goes on to say that Kirkup had regular conversations with Dante through a medium and that the connection was particularly strong when Kirkup’s young daughter Imogene was in the room.

About a decade before he died, Kirkup sold all of his books to help support Imogene after his death. (She died at the age of 24 and is buried, like her father, in Leghorn, or Livorno.) Some of the most valuable of those books were purchased by Bertram, the fourth Earl of Ashburnham, from whom the Italian government bought them back. They are now held at the National Library in Florence, where there is another statue of Dante. When Kirkup died, his widow gave this mask to Alessandro D’Ancona who donated it to the Uffizi in 1911 (hence the description inscribed beneath it).