A mascaron is an ornament in the form of a face used in architecture and the decorative arts. Originally intended to frighten evil spirits from entering a building, the compositional element became purely decorative, usually human in appearance, sometimes chimeric. The most recent architectural styles to extensively employ it were Beaux Arts and Art Nouveau. In addition to architecture, mascarons are used in the other applied arts.
Types Green Man
In the 11th century, European stonemasons decorating churches began carving a stylized foliate mascaron in the form of a man's face, reminiscent of a style that had appeared in green ceramic tile as early as the Byzantine era. Known today for convenience as the "Green Man", it was believed by early 20th-century scholars the image secretly represented a surviving pre-Christian god. Today, few scholars hold this, and instead interpret the Green Man as a symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring.
Bucranium
A bucranium (plural bucrania) is an ox skull mascaron, usually used in Antiquity, for decorating funerary and commemorative monuments. The motif originated in a ceremony wherein an ox's head was hung from the wooden beams supporting the temple roof; this scene was later represented, in stone, on the frieze, or stone lintels, above the columns in Doric temples. The ox skull is usually decorated with ribbons and festoons. The motif was reused during the Renaissance, losing its ancient symbolism, being reduced only to a simple ornament. It fell out of use until 18th century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum led to Neoclassicism, a revival of the aesthetic of Classical Greece and Rome.
History In Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, mascarons were used mainly for decoration, but sometimes for threatening evil spirits. Since the Baroque, they were only used as an ornament, usually presented at the tops of various features (window or door keystones, handles, cartouches etc.).
Antiquity Ancient Near East and Egypt Mascarons were rarely present in the Ancient Near East, and usually in the form of bull or lion heads. Good examples can be seen at the Lyres of Ur.
In ancient Egypt, Hathor was the supreme goddess of love, identified by the Greeks with Aphrodite. Her face was used for decorating multiple objects. She was most often depicted as a woman wearing a headdress with horns and a sun disk. Mirrors and sistra (a musical instrument used in ancient Egypt) feature a Hathor mascaron on the handle. Some mirrors feature her because in Egypt they were often made of gold or bronze and therefore symbolized the sun disk, and because they were connected with beauty and femininity. Hathor was sometimes represented as a human face with bovine ears. This mask-like face was placed on the capitals of columns beginning in the late Old Kingdom. Columns of this style were used in many temples to Hathor and other goddesses. Mascarons were also present on Egyptian canopic jars. These were vessels used for storing the internal organs removed during mummification. The earliest jars were simple, but during the First Intermediate Period, the lids of the jars began to be modelled in the form of human heads. From the 18th Dynasty, they were designed each with a different mascaron, so they resemble the four sons of Horus (baboon, jackal, falcon and human).
Greco-Roman world In ancient Greece, Rome, and in the architecture of the Etruscan civilization, lion mascarons were often used to decorate temple cornices. The tile-ends at the edges of a roof were concealed by ornamental blocks known as antefixae, which were sometimes decorated with human mascarons.
Sometimes, mascarons were used for threatening. Medusa decorates the architrave of the temple of Didyma, and is intended to frighten the enemies of Apollo, stylized so as to be seen from a distance and allow play of light and shadow.
Besides faces, mascarons sometimes took the form of theatre masks. Theatrical manifestations are initially a sacred ceremony linked to the cult of Dionysus. These sacred ceremonies are reflected in decorative friezes with the faces of Dionysos ( Bacchus), maenads (bacchantes among the Romans), satyrs, and Silenus, all with festoons between them, decorating religious buildings.
A certain type of mascaron used in the Greco-Roman world was the bucranium, a bull head or skull, which will be later rediscovered in the Renaissance and used in styles that use the Classical vocabulary of decoration and design.
Later, the Roman Empire took all these decorative elements, as it incorporated many cultural elements of Ancient Greece.
Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica
China
In the Neolithic period in China, small jade objects were created. The hardness of jade gives it durability, which helped at its conservation over millennia. Some of these objects, like the cong, a straight tube with a circular interior and square outer section, were decorated with highly stylized mascarons.
During the Chinese Bronze Age (the Shang and Zhou dynasties), court intercessions and communication with the spirit world were conducted by a shaman (possibly the king himself). In the Shang dynasty (1600–1050 BC), the supreme deity was Shangdi, but aristocratic families preferred to contact the spirits of their ancestors. They prepared elaborate banquets of food and drink for them, heated and served in bronze ritual vessels. These vessels had shapes reflecting their purposes, differing for wine, water, cereals and meat; some were marked with readable characters, demonstrating the development of writing. One of the most commonly used motifs employed was the taotie, a stylized mascaron divided symmetrically, with nostrils, eyes, eyebrows, jaws, cheeks and horns, surrounded by incised patterns.
Middle Ages The use of mascarons continued during the Middle Ages. They are rare in Byzantine art, but are often found in Romanesque and also in the Gothic styles, especially in the 14th century.
Many corbels from medieval cathedrals and churches take the shape of mascarons, and this is where they are most often found. In Romanesque architecture, they can often be found on church exteriors, as a row mascaron-shaped modilions just below the eaves, but also on the inside, at the bases of some groin vaults.
Since the styles of the Middle Ages meant both a continuation of some ancient elements and principles and a break from them, medieval capitals tend to be more diverse and creative, some pretty unusual, compared to their Greco-Roman ancestors. Because of this, Romanesque and Gothic capitals tend to be more frequently decorated with mascarons compared to those of Ancient Greece or Rome.
A specific type of mascarons found in the English Norman style, a substyle of Romanesque architecture, are those highly stylized ones, called 'beakheads', that seem to 'bite' a roll molding. Most of them are birdlike, but they can also be inspired by other animal and humanoid forms. They are often found in 12th century architecture, and appear to have originated in Scandinavian architecture. Another specific type of medieval mascarons, this time in Gothic architecture, are those at the bottom of what is called a 'hood mould' or a 'drip mould', a feature in the upper part of some Gothic door and window frames.
Besides Western and Central Europe, they are also present in medieval Russian architecture.
Renaissance Renaissance artists reread the myths of Greco-Roman Antiquity which gave them new subjects and ornaments. Archaeological discoveries like the excavations of the Baths of Caracalla by the farneses, or Laocoön and His Sons, inspired sculptors and architects of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Villa of Emperor Hadrian and the Pantheon in Rome offer construction models radically different from the Gothic style. The forms of Antiquity are coming back into fashion: columns, pilasters, pediments, domes, and statues decorate the buildings of this era.
In the Quattrocento, the last Gothic influences tended to disappear in Italy; It was not until the beginning of the 16th century that the decorative faces of Antiquity took their place again in the form of mascarons.
The Renaissance fashion spread into the rest of Western Europe. It arrived in France with the Italian Wars. Rosso Fiorentino (born in Florence in 1494, died in Fontainebleau in 1540) and Le Primatice (born in Bologna in 1504 and died in Paris in 1570) came to work at Fontainebleau for the King of France Francis I. Rosso, who worked in Italy until the sack of the city of Rome in 1527, mastered the stucco technique. Le Primaticce had collaborated in Mantua with Giulio Romano.
Baroque and Rococo Succeeding Mannerism, and developing as a result of religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants across Europe, Baroque art emerged in the late 16th century. The name may derive from 'barocco', the Portuguese word for misshaped pearl, and it describes art that combined emotion, dynamism and drama with powerful color, realism and strong tonal contrasts. Between 1545 and 1563 at the Council of Trent, it was decided that religious art must encourage piety, realism and accuracy, and, by attracting viewers' attention and empathy, glorify the Catholic Church and strengthen the image of Catholicism. Since Baroque architecture and design extended the classical vocabulary of the Renaissance, mascarons continued to be used. During the 17th and 18th centuries, they were most often decorated keystones above arched doors or windows, inside a cartouche. They were present especially at the first floor of many palaces, which often have continuous arched windows and doors. Another frequent use was at the top of cartouches.
The Baroque was followed by the Rococo, which kept some of characteristics of the Baroque, like monumentality and curving shapes, but came with new features, like pastel colours, foliate ornamentation, asymmetry and an emphasis on secular architecture. The Rococo is also mainly associated with palace and domestic architecture, compared to how the Baroque is often seen as a mainly ecclesiastical style. One of the most noticeable characteristic is its delicacy. Besides the use of curving lines and flowers, the fanciness of the style is also visible in the many artworks that show scenes of aristocratic life. People in Rococo painting by artists like Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste van Loo, François Boucher, or Jean Siméon Chardin have cupid-like faces. Of course, this feature is present in sculpture too, including mascarons. Like in the case of Baroque architecture, most Rococo mascarons are placed on keystones of arched doors or windows. Good examples of them are present at most hôtel particuliers from the reign of Louis XV (1715-1774).