The Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l'art is a treatise on physiognomy, albeit an unusual one. Hence I have still to outline the evolution of expressive theory and its shifting perspectives during Humbert's time.
Since antiquity, such physiognomists as the pseudo Aristotle, Polemon, Adamantius, and the pseudo-Apuleius consecrated entire chapters of their works to zoological physiognomy, according to which each part of the human body was identified with that of an animal. This correspondence was thought to reveal hidden qualities lurking within man. [43] On the other hand, Aristotle and Quintilian avoided such specious relationships and argued that one should be able to reproduce any of the major human passions simply by copying man's outward physical signs. In addition, according to them the artist's function was to represent permanent character traits, not the variable quirks of nature. [44]
Giambattista della Porta's De humana physiognomonia (Naples, 1586) supplies a rapid historical review of such previous theories. He gives primacy of place to Aristotle because Plato was imprecise and Chrysippus the Stoic hurt the propagation of physiog nomical investigation by claiming that the souls of the dead reappear in other bodies, a belief adumbrated by Pythagoras with his doctrine of metempsychosis. For della Porta, the justification for the quasi-divine science of physiognomics was that it functioned much like oracles or augury, revealing that which man strives to hide. [45]
Ancient physiognomics, in contrast to later systems, were rapid, terse, and presented without much explanation. Complexity set in when astrology and physiognomics became linked. In the astrological systems of the Renaissance men were born under the stars that determined their character.[46] In addition, della Porta's De humana physiognomonia introduced a new specificity into physiognomics by establishing models for every case and once again but more preciselyjuxtaposing the principal human and animal types, since he believed that all qualities possessed by animals are to be found in man, the microcosm. According to the Italian, each species of animal has a face that corresponds to its inclinations and passions. By analogy, a man who has the traits of a specific animal is inhabited by a similar character. [47]
Leonardo, who considered astrology to be fallacious and without scientific basis, also avoids zoological physiognomics in order to emphasize two aspects of expressive studies: the descriptive part dealing with proportion and anatomic structure, and the mimetic section, which scrutinizes temporary emotions that are mirrored in the human face.[48] Pathognomy is the method by which variable muscle movement is interpreted. This is in contradistinction to physiognomics, which elucidates a series of permanent models or human types that have been abstracted from individuals and stylized into their most essential traits, in the manner of Theophrastus's Characters. For Leonardo, expression is one of the principal parts of painting "and consists in giving each figure the necessary attention to what it is doing, and in making it show a briskness and vivacity suitable to its character, and agreeable to the action it is about...." [49] Furthermore, Leonardo distinctly links to the mind not only the movement of the face but the action of the body's members; it is to the mind alone that our limbs bear allegiance.
In the seventeenth century, Charles LeBrun develops this thesis with the help of Cartesian philosophy, devising an anatomy of emotion and elaborating forty one models illustrating simple and complex passions commanded by the movement of the eyebrows. These drawings, presented at the 1678 session of the French Academy of Painting, and also the accompanying Conférence, had an extraordinary and tenacious history, masterfully traced by Jennifer Montagu. [50] LeBrun, perhaps through the influence of the doctor, Cureau de La Chambre (1640-1662) attempted to go beyond Cartesian rationalism and to raise the expressions of the soul to the level of a science.
Our more immediate concern, however, is what happens to expressive theory in the eighteenth century. It can be said of the ancient writers on physiognomy, and also to a great extent of those who followed in their footsteps, that the hidden premise on which their doctrines rested, which assumed an absolute bond existing between external expression and inner movement of the soul, was never proved. Outward symptoms of character were isolated, scrutinised like any other given object of the exterior world, but never satisfactorily integrated into the totality of an individual's psychic functions. [51]
Eighteenth-century thinkers perceived at least two ways of solving this dilemma. Such pathognomists of the Enlightenment as Lessing, Sulzer, Lichtenberg, and Engel attempted to give to the study of mimesis a systematic, scientific form. On the other hand, such exponents of Sturm und Drang physiognomics as Herder and Lavater tended to move away from rational observation and schematization, and to revel in the multiplicity of phenomena and the diverse emotional responses that such variety aroused in the beholder. The latter group, much influenced by the Leibniz of the Theodicy, saw the totality of man as being a microcosm that makes visible the image of God hovering behind the appearances of nature. The richness of this earth is so great, the unity of living form so unending, that one can speak only stammeringly of this manifold through fragments and aphorisms. [52] This is very different from the former view, which respects the limits of our world and neatly circumscribes that which is to be examined. Lessing's incomplete Dramatic Notes of 1769 has as its leitmotiv the lament the we have actors but no art of acting. Lessing hoped determine the external signs that should accompany the theatrical utterance of various moral reflection and he also believed that, in a certain sense, a grammtical collection of expressive forms was possible. This rationally established fund of expressions was be a technical prerequisite for actors. [53] Engel, in his Ideen zu einer Mimik, continues the exploration Lessing's thesis. He reverses the traditional claim that external bodily manifestations follow naturally from the psychic state, stating that the opposite is true outward actions can work upon, or influence, the soul. [54] Engel draws a very interesting distinction action the representation or "painting" of an action and an expression. By painting gestures he mean their imitation. Expression, by far the more complex phenomenon, is the grasping of the meaning, the, significance of the action itself, which has been brought into the open. The outstretched arms of love or laughing face do not transmit an external fact but emerge from the inner being of the subject, and truly mirror a "soul made visible." [55] His contemporary Sulzer can even conclude that that which is pleasing in the outer form can never indicate anything in the inner man that displeases.[56] Over a period of time transitory expressions may tell us something permanent about the individual, gradually revealing hi lasting disposition.
What links the expressive theories of the Enlightment with those of the Sturm und Drang is that in both, underlying the aesthetic problem of the representation of man's actions, we find the concern for revelation of moral character. [57] Lavater, whose four volumes of the Physiognomische Fragmente appear between 1775 and 1778, hoped to learn from the wealth of physical types that he gathered how to recognize a good or evil character, whether the relation between an individual's corporeal and spiritual parts was absolute, and, finally, the very nature of man himself. For Lavater, man's physiognomy is the image of God and physiognomic recognition is the product not of scientific scrutiny, but of a metaphysical a religious epiphany. In his eulogy to portrait painting which he raises far above its usual place in the hierarchy of the genres, Lavater claims that the face would become a sacred object to the painter if th latter could only recognize it as the greatest work of the divine master, God.
Of course the opposite conclusion could also be reached. Lichtenberg, the great opponent of Lavater, an avowed pathognomist and admirer of Hogarth, in his Über Physiognomik und wider die Physiognomen, believed that the knowledge of man produced hatred, not love.[58] Besides, he asked, how does one distinguish in the human face morally revealing lines from those etched by climate, age, or illness? Lavater's importance, however, consists in that, although like the Enlightenment philosophers he grasped the instructive relation between essential signs forming a correspondence that joined soul and body, he transcended th is two-dimensional or approximate mirroring of the soul in the body's form and penetrated to the image of a unified nature concealed behind it. This pantheistic unity of nature is seen to give meaning to individual manifestations of expression. Nonetheless, his theory is as unscientific as that of preceding physiognomists, but it is more metaphysical in that he attempts to account for the entire realm of expressive possibilities. Significantly for present purposes, with Lavater the sphere of what is expressive becomes extended to include abstract symbols. It is no longer merely anthropocentric: circular or square foreheads, strongly curved eyebrows, and long faces take on significance because the lines or shapes themselves are perceived as being carriers of inherent meaning.[59] Hence every phenomenon, whether animate or inanimate, is potentially expressive.[60] Here lies the root of Humbert's semiotic aesthetics.
Lavater's ideas were developed in several directions. Goethe, who collaborated on parts of the Physiognomische Fragmente, writing the famous section on Homer, was interested in evolving a morphology to determine, more precisely and universally, the nature of physiognomic expression. Rather ungenerously, and forgetting his youthful foibles, Goethe accuses Lavater of writing in a "cultic jargon" now diflficult to understand. He berates him for grasping only individual phenomena, for piling experience upon experience, accumulating warts and birthmarks, to which he often linked moral and immoral characteristics. The poet dourly concludes that Lavater created a heterogenous chaos rather than a system.[61]
Conversely, Dr. Gall ( 1758 1828 ), in formulating his new "science" of phrenology, looks ahead to the more factual nineteenth century. He chose to enclose man's expressive functions within the compact area of the skull divided into twenty-seven "organs." Man was separated from animals only by the complexity and number of these organs, not by any intrinsic difference. The mental faculties are physically locatedeach in its own area and, depending on the relative size or importance of the area, the brain can determine the moral or intellectual gifts of an individual.[62] The phrenologist discovers, by dint of rigorous observation, that in this life the soul is shackled to the body. This constitutes a materialistic shrinking of all humanity into a common genus, since the individual becomes a mere particularized expression of the species; thus Gall is led to postulate that all people have the same organs following the same regulative principle. Interestingly, this conclusion is the reverse side of the eighteenth-century coin of sensibilité, predicated on the belief that all people feel alike.
Not only was Gall's materialistic system in conflict with what Lavater had meant when he stipulated that physiognomics would soon approach the dignity of a science, but it also jarred with the rising contemporary Romantic physiognomics of a Novalis or Schelling. Some years in advance of these Romantics, Lavater identified physiognomical recognition with a kind of religious epiphany. In the Hegelian sense, in which Romantic art is defined as being all postclassical art. expression is concomitantly, sought within; in contrast, Gall completely externalized it. A Schelling or a Friedrich Schlegel found it in inwardness, in a speculative, although not necessarily religious, meditation. Further, it is no longer external beauty that has physiognomic importance, but one's spiritual configuration. Man is no longer contemplated as a temporal and singular occurrence but rather is examined with regard to his eternal and unending meaning. When Friedrich Schlegel complained of the confusion and lack of unity of the moderns and that his generation lived only for the beautiful unheeding of the good and the true, he was not speaking of the Neoclassic nirvana of moral perfection, but calling for a new conception of form that would once again bind art and emotion together.[63]
The intellectual revolution that saw the origin of expression relocated from the mechanics of the external human body to the inner realm of imagination required a new notion of artistic form or modus.[64] One possibility for comprehending expression absolutely was to develop a symbolic color symphony based on nature, as did Runge. Another was to discover the objective correlative-the firm connection between inner sentiment and external world-by creating a philosophical art in which line was both syntactical mode or style and the hieroglyphic alphabet of a universal grammar containing metaphysical meaning. Line as direction, honed to the limits of insubstantiality and replacing the grosser features of muscular analysis, became the new descriptive tool of physiognomy by the late eighteenth century.[65]
In the course of this study we shall see Humbert de Superville develop a system of physiognomics based on a universal graphic language and a color mythology, which broaches the difficult problem of meaning when expression is not placed within a particular context. The linear or colored sign, rather than the all-too-palpable physical object, becomes the carrier of expression. Moreover, in order to create such an absolute system of signs he must examine the reason behind man's affective responses to certain primal phenomena. We must infer from his theory that the origin of our interpretation of certain expressions is linked to a primordial encounter with the universe sustained by primitive man, which has stamped all subsequent myths, cosmologies, and religions. This essential verity, buried in a collective unconscious, is brought to light in Humbert's Essai, and thus integrates expressive theory with all other historically relevant human disciplines. [next chapter: Introduction, Myth as basis for absolute signs]