style20,7 cm high Provenance: Fabrizio Savi collection, acquired from a private collector in Bruxelles between 1995 and 2000.If the use of entirely covering the body of the deceased with jade plaques is a purely Chinese tradition, the Liao funerary masks have origins not related to Buddhist or Taoist practices but shamanic, and therefore proper to the peoples outside the borders of the Chinese empire, as were the Liao. It seems that each mask was adapted to the physiognomy of the face of the single deceased.