English borrowed mask in the 1530s from French masque
Masks cover faces for protection, disguise, performance, ritual, or play, and have done so since antiquity. Art historians also call a bodiless sculpted face a mask when it is not modelled fully in the round. In ancient Rome, the word persona meant both a mask and a full citizen.
A mask is normally worn on the face for protection, disguise, performance, or entertainment, and often for rites. Masks have served ceremonial and practical purposes since antiquity, turning up in hunting, sport, feasts, and war, and some ceremonial masks were never meant to be worn at all. In art history, a sculpted face without a body, shown in low relief rather than modelled in the round as a head, is also called a mask.
English took the word in the 1530s from Middle French masque, a covering to hide or protect the face, which came through Italian maschera from Medieval Latin masca, meaning mask, spectre, or nightmare. Where masca came from is uncertain; one suggestion is the Arabic maskharah, 'buffoon', from a verb meaning to ridicule. Masks themselves are much older: the earliest human-like artworks date to about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, and masks of leather, plants, or wood that have long since rotted still appear in Paleolithic cave drawings.
Ritual masks often suspended the usual rules. The Greek bacchanalia and the cult of Dionysus used them while revellers stepped outside their normal rank; Iroquois communities used them for healing through the False Face Society; and Yup'ik masks range from 3-inch finger masks to 10-kilogram pieces hung from ceilings or carried by several people. Roman families kept wax death masks of ancestors, called imagines, in the household shrine to display their lineage.
Theatre traditions from ancient Greece to Japanese noh, Tibetan lhamo, Korean talchum, and Indonesian topeng put every performer in a mask, with different types for different characters. In West Africa, Yoruba, Igbo, and Edo masquerades communicate with spirits and ancestors; the Dogon of Mali use seventy-eight kinds of mask across three main cults; and Punu masks from Gabon, with arched brows and whitened faces, express an ideal of feminine beauty. Most African masks today are made for tourists and, however skilled, usually lack the spiritual character of traditional ones.
Source: Mask
