When a Drowned Woman’s Face Became the Muse of Paris
▻http://hyperallergic.com/332941/inconnue-seine-muse-paris
Death mask of #L’Inconnue_de_la_Seine (1900 photograph)
(via Wikimedia)
One of the most popular muses of early-20th-century Paris was a drowned woman. The face of “L’Inconnue de la Seine” (“The Unknown Woman of the Seine”) was a fashionable fixture of salons and studios, her enigmatic expression of a slight smile and closed eyes haunted by stories of her suicide. It was said the death mask, replicated in these endless copies, was made at the Paris morgue between 1898 and 1900, by a pathologist struck by the beauty of this corpse pulled from the Seine river.
You may have seen her face yourself, even kissed those lips. For what makes the story of the Inconnue even stranger is her 1950s use as the model for a CPR training device. #Resusci_Anne is still produced by Laerdal Medical, which includes the tale of her Seine suicide on its website, adding she’s now “a symbol of life to the millions of people throughout the world who have learned the lifegiving technique of modern resuscitation, and to those whose lives she has helped save from unnecessary death.”
Vintage version of Resusci Anne
(photo by aorta/Flickr)