Bird-beaked masks

During the Black Death of 1347 to 1352, doctors wore bird-beaked masks filled with various herbs that were designed to protect the wearer from breathing poisoned air – or so we have been led to believe. German historians, however, have now called into question whether these long-nosed masks, much favoured by today’s Venetian Carnival revellers, really date from the medieval period.

The earliest records of herb-stuffed beaks date from the mid-17th century, and most depictions occur in satirical works, such as the poem Doctor Schnabel von Rom (‘Doctor Beak of Rome’) and the engraving of a plague doctor by Gerhart Altzenbach that accompanies it. These both date from 1656, the year in which the so-called ‘Naples plague’ killed up to 1,250,000 people in southern Italy. That is also the date of the first appearance of the mask-wearing commedia dell’arte character known as Il Medico della Peste (‘The Plague Doctor’).

Only two examples of such masks have survived. The one in the Deutsches Medizinhistorische Museum (the German Museum of Medicine History) in Ingolstadt was bought from an antiques dealer in 2002, while the other, in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, was acquired ‘on the art market’ in 2006. Neither has a secure provenance and there is more than a suspicion that they might actually be theatrical masks or Carnival costumes, rather than prophylactic headgear.