The massive marble mask weighs about 1,300 kg (2,900 lb) and probably depicts the face of the sea titan god Oceanus.

It was possibly used as a drain cover in the nearby Temple of Hercules Victor, which had an oculus (a round open space in the middle of the roof) similar to that of the Pantheon.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, a German painter during the Renaissance period, created two paintings depicting a woman placing her hand in the mouth of a statue of a lion while onlookers watched, a subject which was drawn by Albrecht Altdorfer and made into a woodcut by the Dutch printmaker Lucas van Leyden.

In Het geheim van de afgebeten vingers by Dutch writer Rindert Kromhout,[4] the fingers of lying children are cut off with a scythe by a skeleton who lives in the Capuchin Crypt in the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini.

Coin-operated fortune teller machines have been developed and installed in different parts of the world, including one on display in the Musée Mécanique in San Francisco.