What is this mask?

Before you upload, read this

It will save you a wasted answer.

What it does

It looks at what is visible in your photograph and proposes which carving tradition the object most resembles. It tells you which features led it there. Then it shows you records from our database of the same tradition so you can compare with your own eyes.

What it does not do

It cannot tell you whether your mask is authentic. It cannot tell you what it is worth. It cannot tell you how old it is. Anyone or anything that offers you those three from a photograph is guessing, and you should be careful with them.

Treat this as a place to start looking. Not a certificate.

And it gets things wrong

You should know this before you trust an answer. There are hundreds of thousands of unique pieces in the world already and more carved every day. No tool is going to be right every time against a field that size, and this one is not.

That is exactly why it shows you reference records instead of just handing you a name. Look at them. Hold them against what is in your hands. Compare the mouth, the brow, the crest, the way the eyes were cut. If nothing quite matches, that tells you something too.

A result appearing on the screen does not mean the result is correct. It means you have somewhere to start.

How to photograph a mask so this actually works

• Daylight, indirect. Near a window, out of direct sun. Flash flattens the surface and the surface is where the information is.
• Plain background. A white sheet or a bare wall. A patterned cloth confuses it.
• Fill the frame. Hold the camera level with the middle of the face and come close enough that the mask fills the picture. A small mask sitting in the middle of a large empty photograph gives the tool almost nothing to work with. The more clearly the features read, the better your answer, because it is trying to separate your object from hundreds of thousands of others.
• Then take three more. One from the side. One from above at an angle. And one of the inside. The inside is often where the real information hides, and almost nobody photographs it.
• Do not clean it first. Please. The dust, the staining and the residue are evidence. People scrub decades of history off an object in ten minutes because they want it to look nice for the photograph.

Reading the answer

Every record we hold carries two grades, and they are separate on purpose.

Attribution confidence says how firmly we can say what a thing is and who made it. Provenance status says how much is known about where the object has been. A museum published attribution can sit on an object with no documented history before 1970. That is not a contradiction. It is an honest description of a real situation, and it is very common.