A death mask is a plaster cast made by pressing a mould onto the face of a person just after they died, usually after smearing the skin with tallow so the plaster would not stick. The practice was an old funerary custom that became fashionable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when people wanted memorial objects of famous figures in a new age of mass celebrity. It also overlapped with physiognomy, the belief that a person's character could be read in their features, so casts of great thinkers' foreheads were collected as evidence. The custom declined after the 1860s, as photography became the main way people remembered the dead. The casts still carry a strong sense of contact with the person they came from.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.