Illustration: 3 villains
Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801)
Essays on Physiognomy, translated by
Henry Hunter, D.D. London: John Murray, 1789-1798.
Volume I, page 163.
The CCAD Library owns a copy of the Hunter translation of Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente, a classic pseudo-scientific analysis of the human face and its relation to inner character. The work is highly valued for its engraved illustrations by Henry Fuseli, Daniel Chodowiecki, Thomas Holloway, Francesco Bartolozzi, and William Blake. There are numerous portraits of famous writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and famous contemporary personages, including Goethe, Samuel Johnson, John Locke, George Washington, Voltaire, Heidegger, Christopher Wren, Diderot, Isaac Newton, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Sebastian Bach. The five volumes are filled with hundreds of fascinating illustrations; three of these are signed by William Blake (volume I, pages 127, 206 and 225). Additionally there is a full-page portrait of Democritus engraved by Blake after Rubens (volume I, opposite page 159).
(Adapted from the sale listing of Ursus Rare Books, New York, NY)
(1741–1801), prominent Swiss pastor, theologian, author of books on metaphysics, and citizen of Zurich, remembered most for reviving physiognomy, the pseudoscience of finding people’s moral character revealed in their physical—especially facial—features. Both Johann Caspar Lavater and his lavishly illustrated Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–1778) enjoyed tremendous success and suffered terrible ridicule. Lavater regarded man as made in God’s image and “read” the human body, like Christ, as God’s Word made flesh. He distinguished physiognomy, the study of fixed facial features, from pathognomy, the study of features that change along with one’s emotions. (Physiognomy should not be confused with phrenology, the interpretation of bumps on the skull.) In theory, his own correlations of good and bad with beauty and ugliness seem well meant; in practice, however, such judging by mere appearances often betrays or reinforces prejudices based on nationality, race, class, religion, and gender. While typifying many common eighteenth-century attitudes toward virtue and vice, kalokagathia, and beautiful souls, Lavater’s intellectual legacy has thus always seemed dubious.
eNotes also offers an excellent overview.
What do the expressions “highbrow” and “lowbrow” have in common with saying a woman has “mousey” features? They are contemporary manifestations of an ancient pseudoscience that permeated visual culture in European history, notably in the 18th and 19th centuries: physiognomy.
Physiognomy has its roots in antiquity. As early as 500 B.C., Pythagoras was accepting or rejecting students based on how gifted they looked. Aristotle wrote that large-headed people were mean, those with small faces were steadfast, broad faces reflected stupidity, and round faces signaled courage.
In the early 1600s, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta, considered the father of physiognomy, was instrumental in spreading ideas about character and appearance in Europe. Della Porta came up with the idea for physiognomy through his alchemical experiments, in which he attempted to boil down and distill from substances their “tincture,” or pure essence. He made an analogy to the human essence, suggesting that one could deduce an individual’s character from empirical observation of his physical features. His widely disseminated book on the subject, De humana physiognomia, was instrumental in spreading physiognomy throughout Europe. Illustrations in the book depict human and animal heads side by side, implying that people who look like particular animals have those creatures’ traits.
In the second half of the 18th century, Johann Caspar Lavater became the new king of physiognomy. He blended an examination of silhouette, the profile, portraiture, and proportions into his best-selling book, Essays on Physiognomy, which included a detailed reading of the face broken down into its major pieces, including the eyes, brows, mouth, and nose. The expression “stuck-up” comes from this time, when a person with a nose bending slightly upwards was read as having a contemptuous, superior attitude.
Lavater often expressed an obvious cultural bias in his readings of the morality of people from other countries. “Lavater idealizes the familiar and praises what he knows,” wrote one critic, “but finds ‘deficiencies’ in the faces of Africans, Laplanders, and Calmuck Tartars.” The connections between physiognomy and aesthetics were pointed in Essays on Physiognomy, as Lavater commissioned artist Henry Fuseli and poet and engraver William Blake to provide the illustrations. This artistic interest in physical appearance and character contributed to the development of theories of the ideal geometric proportions of the face in the late 18th century by theorists such as William Hogarth and Lord Shaftesbury.
The influence of physiognomy can be seen throughout 18th- and 19th-century European art. In the 18th century in particular, natural philosophers embraced the “ideal” features found in classical sculpture, which were mistakenly thought to represent how the ancients actually looked. The assumed cultural superiority of ancient Greece became attached to these features, which were adopted by European artists and depicted again and again. “Others”—such as Asians and Africans—were considered not only less beautiful, but less moral.
See more at: https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/physiognomy-the-beautiful-pseudoscience
About Face : German physiognomic thought from Lavater to Auschwitz by 
About Faces : physiognomy in nineteenth-century Britain by 
Artist As Anthropologist : the representation of type and character in Victorian art by 
Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture by Graham, John. "Lavater's Physiognomy in England." Journal of the History of Ideas 22, no. 4 (1961): 561. (CCAD has a photocopy on file. Ask cmannix@ccad.edu).
Johnson, Mary Lynn. "Blake’s Engravings for Lavater’s Physiognomy: Overdue Credit to Chodowiecki, Schellenberg, and Lips." Blake Quarterly, Fall 2004, Volume 38,Issue 2, pages 54-74. http://bq.blakearchive.org/38.2.johnson
Percival, Melissa. "Johann Caspar Lavater: Physiognomy and Connoisseurship," Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 2003, Volume 26, Issue 1, pages 77–90. (CCAD has a photocopy on file. Ask cmannix@ccad.edu).
Stemmler, Joan K. "The physiognomical portraits of Johann Caspar Lavater." Art Bulletin, March 1993, Vol. 75, p151- 168; 18p,1993, 18p. Available through JSTOR and in BOUND PERIODICALS (Art Bulletin).
Trawick, Leonard M. "William Blake's German Connection." Colby Quarterly, December 1977, Volume 13, Issue 4, p.229-245. Available online.
