Vatican Museums

White Mask belongs to a small body of heads sculpted by Manzù between 1936 and 1937, evidence of the powerful impact of the work of Medardo Rosso, which he had seen in Paris in 1933. It is a series of female heads in wax, small in size, and characterised by various coloured accents, in which the sculptor sought to depict the expressions of their faces through differences in the modulation of the material, capturing light with an increasingly agile touch. During the same years Manzù produced similar items in bronze and marble; the similarities in outcomes show that these experiments constituted technical and expressive challenges. The valuable group of wax “masks”, as they were defined by the artist, was presented by Carlo Carrà in the personal exhibition dedicated to the artist in 1937 at the Galleria La Cometa in Rome.