BBC News
LONDON — Millions of people around the world have learned CPR on a mannequin known as Resusci Anne. The story of the 19th Century beauty behind the model — or at least, one version of it — will be told at a symposium in London to mark European Restart a Heart Day. But does anyone really know anything about her?
The Lorenzi workshop is a small haven of peace and antiquity in the busy Parisian suburb of Arcueil. And it’s the last of its kind. Downstairs themouleurs, or cast-makers, create figurines, busts and statues, pouring plaster into moulds in much the same way they have since the family business started in the 1870s.
But if you want to be face-to-face with history, pick your way up the dusty wooden stairs to a room above the workshop. It’s an unsettling experience. Hanging all around you in the narrow attic are life and death masks of poets and artists, politicians and revolutionaries: Napoleon, Robespierre, Verlaine, Victor Hugo, the robust, impatient face of the living Beethoven and the sallow, diminished features of the composer’s death mask.
Full story: Resusci Anne and L’Inconnue: The Mona Lisa of the Seine