There is, for me, a proper Barthesian punctum in the photograph above, which depicts the death mask cast of Walt Whitman in the Hutton Collection. No, it is not the fact that the sculptor (the young Philadelphia artist Samuel Murray, assisted by his mentor Thomas Eakins) chose to elaborate the traditional frontal “mask” into a full sculptural head — though this is uncanny. Nor is it the wonderful frankness of the beard, which has been permitted to show as limp and wet (as it would have been, soused with animal grease), rather than tooled to appear suitably leonine or Mosaical — though this too gives the work a stark immediacy. No. The punctum for me lies in the bard’s closed eyes, and the sense of what lies behind those plaster lids — for the living Walt Whitman actually saw Hutton’s collection of death masks with his own living eyes. Which is to say, the plaster cast of Whitman’s eyes can be understood as a figure for something like the consciousness of the collection itself: it is locus in the collection of a representation of the collection; it is the site where the collection maintains its self-(un?)awareness. We might go so far as to say that these cast eyelids should be understood as the death mask of Hutton’s collection as a whole, which, no longer displayed in his handsome townhouse halls, has come to be, rather, entombed in the sepulchral catacombs of an underground library.