Essays on Physiognomy; Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind

by Johann Kaspar Lavater

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Genres: Science

790 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2016

About the author

Johann Kaspar (or Casper) Lavater was a Swiss poet, writer, philosopher, physiognomist and theologian.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Physiognomy is something nowadays we happily regard as a load of old tosh. Unlike astrology, it doesn't even have dreamy-eyed modern believers – it's just something vaguely associated with old belief systems and imperfect understandings. But if you read old novels, it's everywhere. Emily, examining Valancourt's portrait in Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, notes that ‘the soft cloud of the brow spoke of the fine sensibility of the temper’; Jane Eyre sees through Blanche Ingram's pretty hair to the ‘habitual expression of her arched and haughty lip’; in Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams remarks that ‘nature imprints such a portraiture of the mind on the countenance, that a skilful physiognomist will rarely be deceived’.

Of course, in many of these novels, appearances are deceptive: this is one of the truths that we expect from decent fiction. But the principles of physiognomy were widely accepted, and when things did not turn out as expected, it's often attributed not to pseudoscience, but to a failure properly to ‘decode’ the hidden lessons of people's faces.



The leading authority on all this was a guy called Johann Kasper Lavater, who is mostly forgotten now but was literally a household name in late-eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. A Pietist minister from Zurich, he was Henry Fuseli's childhood best friend and already had an international reputation for his religious enthusiasm, publishing several collections of sermons which fused personal experiences of Christ with experiments into the supernatural. (Young Werther refers to them at some point during his descent into depression.) For Lavater, physiognomy was an extension of his spiritual convictions (‘And God said: Let us make Man in our own Image’ are the opening words of his Introduction), and he believed that the faces of geniuses like Fuseli or Goethe could tell us something about the divine.


[Click to enlarge] JK Lavater: ‘Good nature is depicted in every part of the face,’ according to the author and subject


[Click to enlarge] Henry Fuseli: ‘The curve which describes the profile…indicates an energetic character, which spurns at the idea of trammels.’

Tracing the bibliography of Lavater's writings is a bit of a mission, but interesting. His original Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe were published in the late 1770s. After that, however, Lavater worked closely on a French translation, which ended up being hugely expanded from the original German and was considered the new ‘authoritative’ text: this was gradually published in The Hague as Essai sur la physiognomie during the 1780s and 90s.

In England, however, things were messier. There were two rival teams of translators, both working on different editions, both first getting into print in 1789. The first was a three-volume octavo edition translated by the indefatigable writer-about-town Thomas Holcroft, working from a German abridgement of the original: it was called Essays on Physiognomy; for the promotion of the knowledge and love of mankind.

But there was concurrently a second team who were trying to do things with more authority. This translation was made by Henry Hunter from the French edition, and the illustrations were orchestrated by Thomas Holloway. It was published in five huge quarto volumes from 1789–1798 as Essays on Physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and love of mankind. In fact, the guiding light behind this edition was Lavater's friend Fuseli, who lived in London and had contributed many of the illustrations to Lavater's work; he now organised a huge effort to expand the scope to more than 800 illustrations from more than thirty engravers. Leading portrait painters such as James Northcote, Benjamin West and Thomas Lawrence contributed pictures, and Blake and Gillray were among the engravers. This edition, which was priced as a luxury item, was bought by many as a kind of contemporary art portfolio, and was said by more than one reviewer to be the finest printed book of the century.


[Click to enlarge] After Henry Fuseli, ‘The Daughter of Herodias’


[Click to enlarge] After Benjamin West, “Of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven…”

The use of art is central to the book, because much of Lavater's argument looks to artworks for its authority. This seems a bit strange, perhaps, but I suppose in the days before photography, it was the nearest thing you could get to concrete examples. Lavater and Fuseli had had a rather fractious relationship when working together on this project, and Lavater took exception to many of Fuseli's illustrations in the text of the French version; hilariously, in the English translation, Fuseli takes the opportunity to rebut the accusations even as he's translating them. This image, for example:


[Click to enlarge] Thomas Holloway after Fuseli, ‘Mary, Sister of Martha’

…bears the inscription: ‘This Print is engraved after an entirely new Drawing by Mr Fuseli, he being unwilling that the preceding Outline should pass as his Idea of Mary. But Mr Lavater's remarks rendered it necessary to the English Editor to give a facsimile of the French Engraving.’ Sure enough, Lavater comments that the arm ‘is badly designed: too weak and too delicate for the hand of a man, it has neither the grace nor pliancy of the beautiful hand of a woman.’ Here a footnote inserts itself: ‘The Painter has consulted, with respect to this subject, and has endeavoured to regain what was lost or disfigured by the Engraver of the head in the French edition. It is left to the Reader to determine, whether the criticisms of the Author, on spurious deformities, were worth retaining at the expence of propriety and beauty?’


[Click to enlarge] Thomas Holloway after Thomas Lawrence, ‘Henry Fuseli Esq. R.A.’

Similar intertextual arguments recur throughout the five volumes, to amusing and bizarre effect. Apart from these entertaining hints of editorial argument, the art remains the best thing in this strange book (I've managed to acquire a copy; it's still very beautiful, and the pictures in it still comparatively little known). The arguments themselves seem completely ludicrous today. Many of them are reasoned from portraits of famous figures, so that you have the astonishing sight of Lavater looking at an etching of Julius Caesar and concluding – supposedly from physiognomic principles – that he may be destined for great things, or examining an engraving of Shakespeare and inferring an artistic temperament.

The conclusions based on abstract features, meanwhile, now seem so plainly unbelievable that you wonder how anyone could have taken them seriously. Noses, for instance:


‘A small nostril is the certain sign of a timid spirit…’

From this plate, we learn that the owner of the nose top-right ‘merits consideration only for his love of order and propriety’, while bottom-left belongs to someone who ‘abandons himself to gross brutality’. The consequences of all this in subsequent European thought would be profound, not only in fiction but in more pernicious ways, too – many of these interpretations would be taken up by commentators in explicitly racist ways, for example, and the same can be said for physiognomy's Victorian lovechild, phrenology.

There's every reason to be thankful, then, that physiognomy is now quite reasonably forgotten; but as an insight into Georgian ways of thinking, and a record of how contemporary art was used in society, Lavater's work is still an absolutely fascinating and intricate document.