The Made-Up Face.

Cal Revely-Calder (who has an interesting Three Things substack) writes about faces in the New Yorker (archived); I was enjoying its brio and historical tidbits, but when I got to this passage I knew I had to post it:

Yet there’s another side to this coin. Our vocabulary also speaks of invention, even artifice. The English word “face” derives from the Latin facies, implying a created form; so does the French visage, from videre, suggesting something seen from without. “Mask,” “masque,” “mascara,” “maquillage,” and their European relations seem to be etymologically linked, and carry long-standing associations with concealment, distortion, pretense. For Socrates, the art worth prizing was the cultivation and preservation of natural beauty; we’ve happily overwritten it with what he treated suspiciously as kommōtikē, the art of changing how one looks. Even “person,” along with “impersonation” and “personae,” derives from persona, a theatrical mask through which classical actors spoke. The cultural historian Hans Belting suggested that faces and masks were conceptually inseparable: we shouldn’t think of one as “real” and the other as “fake”—one as the thing we have and the other as the thing we temporarily don. Life, he wrote, was fully “a perpetuum mobile,” an “expressive drama,” in which our faces resolve into one legible position, one legible role, then reassemble themselves into the next. We make them up, in every sense.

I was suspicious about “the Latin facies, implying a created form,” but it seems to be true; Wiktionary says:

The term faciēs is to faciō as speciēs is to speciō, literally meaning “a make, imposed form”.

(face): Compare typologically Czech tvář, Polish twarz [both ‘face’] (<< Proto-Slavic *tvarь, akin to *tvoriti)

All of which was new to me, and may be new to you.

Revely-Calder writes well, and his piece is full of interesting passages, such as this:

One unexpected consequence of the return of realism was a renewed attention to anatomy. Take dissection, which was mostly in abeyance through the medieval era, though by the thirteenth century in Europe it was beginning to appear in university curricula. During the Renaissance, it flourished again, and became a routine part of an artist’s studies, as Leonardo’s sketches attest. At the same time, another art returned, equally venerable and equally obsessed with the human form: physiognomy. The thinking, from the Greeks onward, was that you could, if sufficiently skilled, read people’s inward rottenness from their outward appearance. They might alter their behavior or speech, but a nose could never lie. Physiognomic treatises reappeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then took off in the eighteenth and nineteenth. The star was Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss poet and philosopher, whose “Physiognomische Fragmente,” a complete manual of flesh-reading, was published in four volumes between 1775 and 1778, featuring illustrations by Henry Fuseli and William Blake of faces and other body parts. It was successful enough to be abridged in multiple forms—“The Portable Lavater,” “Ladies’ Lavater”—and by the end of the century, Le Breton writes, “a visit to Lavater, complete with a physiognomy consultation with the master, was a must for anyone travelling to Switzerland.” The fashion spread. George Sand was a Lavater fan. So was Honoré de Balzac, who called physiognomy “prophetic.” Balzac used Lavater’s work in devising his own characters, who are practically lashed to destiny; Samuel Beckett would deride them as “clockwork cabbages.” One eighteenth-century chief justice of Naples took aside convicted prisoners who still refused to confess and personally examined their heads. If he found proof of inbuilt depravity, he would approve their execution; if he didn’t, he’d set them free.

Such thinking had serious critics. If you judged someone’s soul from his appearance, Montaigne noted, it would be curtains for Socrates. The entry for “physionomie” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie described it as “imaginary” and “ridiculous.” Hegel compared physiognomists to a merchant who complains that it rains whenever the fair comes to town. But the belief died hard, and photography spurred its adherents on. Once faces had been “captured,” as we still say, they could be put into giant comparative systems, proto-databases of facial types. Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, used superimposed portrait photos in his hunt for “deviant” traits that criminals supposedly shared. His friend Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, agreed, suggesting that the signs of a “born criminal” included a receding brow and a heavy jaw.

I thought we had discussed Lombroso somewhere, but apparently not.