Looking at a face is a complex experience that offers a viewer insight into emotions, reactions, and perhaps even behavioural intentions through means of the information transfer embedded in facial expressions. It is often said that the eyes are the windows of the soul, but it is the face, with its innumerable quirks, muscle twitches, and movements, which provides an unspoken glimpse into the inner space of the person behind it. Before turning to examine the static faces and mask-like forms captured in Anglo-Saxon metalwork it is useful to consider the possible faces and facial expressions that inform and underpin these decorative motifs.

Facial expressions are produced by the movements of muscles, voluntary or involuntary, under the skin, which act as a form of non-verbal communication and may, in turn, convey the emotional state of an individual to observers. These silent communications can confirm or contradict a verbal utterance – or even ‘speak’ in the absence of any such utterance. Some facial expressions (and their attendant meanings) are socially and culturally conditioned, as evidenced by the disconnect in the interpretation of a smile between eastern and western cultures, but it has been argued, primarily in psychological discourse, that a number of these visual cues, such as fear, are universal, thus providing a means by which a form of non-verbal communication might bypass linguistic limitations.

If facial expressions provide a means of communicating emotions and intentions, albeit modified by social and cultural conditioning, then it is possible that historical faces can convey similar non-verbal cues despite their temporal distance from their viewer. Contemporary studies making a case for the universality of facial expression as an index of emotion often draw on images of faces from the past, and use these captured images to support the idea that muscular movements forming facial expressions are inherent to humans, and therefore universal. A modern viewer can readily find historical faces – in old movies, antique photographs, or in artistic representations – which can have varying degrees of veracity, ranging from the life-cast techniques used to create Roman or Etruscan death masks, to the controversial and often disorienting portraits of the twentieth-century artist Lucien Freud. The human figure, and more specifically the face, has appeared in artistic representation from its earliest days, and remains effective because of its visible humanity.