Salzburg, Austria | Memento Mori
The thing about skulls is that, it can be remarkably hard prove whos they were.
Of course, one can tell things like gender, age, sometimes history of disease or injury from a skull, therefore making a mismatch easy to identify. But if all those match up, it gets a bit more difficult to make a definite positive match. With the advent of DNA, in theory one should be able to scrap a little bone, run some tests, and viola: definitive proof of skull ownership… Alas, it is not so simple in the real world.
In 1902 the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria came into the possession of what was said to be Mozarts skull. Missing its lower jaw, this skull matched a historical record indicating that Joseph Rothmayer a gravedigger had taken the skull from the group grave in which Mozart was buried ten years after Mozart’s death in 1791.
Though often said to be buried in a mass or paupers grave, Mozart was actually buried in a grave with only four or five other bodies in it, a standard middle class burial procedure in those times. According to the story the grave digger attached a wire to the skull so he knew which one it would be when he went to retrieve it. (That he would have waited ten years to do so, though casts some doubt on this claim.) From there the passed through various hands, a sexton, a Dr. Hyrtl’s phrenologist collection — which excluding Mozart’s skull would go on to become the Mutter Museum’s skull collection — before ending up in the hands of the Mozarteum in 1902.
So it was with great excitement that in 2006, 104 years after acquiring it, the Mozarteum was going to prove once and for all that it was Mozart’s skull. The plan was to test the skulls DNA against the DNA of Mozart’s relatives, taken from his maternal grandmother and niece’s thigh bones. The results were dismaying.
Using Mitochondrial DNA, the results came back suggesting that not only was the skull unrelated to the family remains, but that the family remains were unrelated to each other, casting doubt on the authenticity of the remains of the maternal grandmother and niece as well. The result was neither fully negative, nor positive, but once more: inconclusive.
Perhaps the best case for the skull being that of Mozart’s is the evidence that it took a hard hit about a year before Mozart’s death. This would be consistent with the headaches that Mozart described in his last year of life and provide some additional explanation of his early death.
However, this too is ultimately speculative, and the mystery of Mozart’s skull will, for the time being, simply have to remain unsolved.
Still at the Mozarteum, the skull is no longer on display, as it unnerved a number of the docents. However with an advance request, a showing of the skull may be given.
