Spinoza's Death Mask Found

In Columbia University Library

I’m still re-reading Jane Jacobs’ SYSTEMS OF SURVIVAL for my upcoming article, and just added Garry Apgar’s new dictionary of Voltaire quotations to my to-do list, but simply had to share this very exciting recent news about Spinoza’s death mask, discovered in a box by a young researcher named Marianna Najman-Franks, Barnard ’22. (HT: LeiterReports)

I was a philosophy major, and Spinoza was my favorite philosopher. I had no idea this mask even existed.

To me it is incredible that it was just locked away…although had it been displayed it might have been taken down as a symbol of white supremacy, given the criminally anti-intellectual climate in today’s totalitarian “universities” (more like Communist monoversities, in my opinion).

Najman-Franks writes:

A box much lighter than the others, nearly falling to pieces with a red cloth hanging out on all sides, caught my attention. Opening it gently, I was met with a face. At the time, admittedly a bit grossed out, I packaged the face back up without much of a second thought. As I would later find out, the discovery of Spinoza’s death mask is not only an unprecedented discovery, but is also the first time that anybody since his death saw his likeness.

Columbia also has a bust of Spinoza, also donated by Oko to the University Library, but it is slightly abstract and doesn’t exactly capture his likeness. The death mask is a momentous finding, and one that I hope scholars interested in Spinoza can come and examine as soon as we can all safely gather inside the RBML.