MM's quiz made me think that masks could be an interesting topic. It was odd, but just after MM posted his pictures, I read something about the origin of the word "person": I had no idea it was linked to "mask".
I was reading about being a slave years ago when I stumbled upon this: "We, after all, apply this word "person" with a splendidly indiscriminate generosity, applying it without hesitation to everyone, regardless of social station, race, or sex; but originally, at least in some of the most crucial contexts, it had a much more limited application.
Specifically, in Roman legal usage, one's person was one's status before the law, which was certainly not something invariable from one individual to the next. The original and primary meaning of the Latin word persona was mask, and as a legal term its use may well have harked back to the wax funerary effigies by which persons of social consequence were represented after their deaths, and which families of rank were allowed to display as icons of their ancestral pedigrees In a sense, the only face proper for a slave, at least as far as the cultural imagination of the ancient world went, was the brutish and grotesquely leering "slave mask" worn by actors on the comic stage OED offers the general 19c.
So masks - there are many quotes about them and pictures of them. Masks in drama, in carnivals, in masquerades, in funeral effigies. We humans love masks and have been designing them for over years, I believe. My favourite quote about masks is from Oscar Wilde: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. Discussion of masks in an historical context will almost certainly expose much about the human psyche en route - and the example from etymology you cite displays this perfectly.
