What Happened to Your Face?

One of the things Wittgenstein implies is that we don’t theorize the faces we see. I might talk of “reading” your face, but it isn’t like reading a code or a map: I don’t look at you, add together your liquid eyes and droopy mouth, and pronounce my final judgment that you’re sad. I simply look at your face, apprehend its gestalt as a unity, and go from there. Recent neuroscientific research has shown that we process whole faces more readily than mere parts; we aren’t adding the bits up. We look, and we speak, and we look again: that’s life.

One oddity, given all this, is that, although humans have made pictures of faces for as long as we’ve represented anything, realism has only recently become the norm. As the scholar Fay Bound-Alberti points out in “The Face: A Cultural History” (Grand Central), between the thirty-thousand-year-old figures on the walls of the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave and ancient Cycladic statuary, from the fourth to second millennium B.C., human figures rarely showed recognizable facial features. There were exceptions. In Egypt, certain pharaohs seemed, for reasons still debated, to tilt their own representations from the ideal to the natural. Senusret III, the most outlandish example, had temples filled with statues of himself, his gigantic faces lined and grim and aged, though set atop a young and muscular body. Centuries later came an interlude in Greece and Rome, beginning with the so-called Severe style of Greek sculpture, in which faces gained clearer features and bodies sharper definition. Socrates’ ugliness can be reliably inferred from his many unsexy sculptural representations; the statues and busts of individual Caesars, though they blend truth and propaganda, remain easy to distinguish. But this facial gallery closed with the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, which inherited a suspicion of idolatry from the Old Testament and Judaism. David Le Breton points out in “Faces” (Polity) that the Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth-century collection of Christian ecclesiastical laws, recommended that painters be exiled altogether from Christendom, just as poets would have been from Plato’s ideal state. They stayed, but, rather than memorializing individual heroes, they largely devoted themselves to religious imagery, in which realism was again forgone in favor of iconic value. The old order had resumed.

Only with the Renaissance would it break again, with the fifteenth-century blossoming of the naturalistic portrait: van Eyck, Campin, Piero della Francesca. The archetype of painted interiority may still be the good old “Mona Lisa,” known in Italian as “La Gioconda”—the face that launched a thousand conjectures. Bound-Alberti brings her in, dutifully, to say how “enigmatic” her smile is, though Wittgenstein, again, made more of the cliché: “When we speak of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, that may well mean that we ask ourselves: In what situation, in what story, might one smile like that?” To talk of stories, he means, is to talk of time; you need the before and the after, the rounded sense of a life. After all, some people laugh in anger and weep with joy. If I read your smile as happiness, I’m drawing on a fluid sense of the character I know, and on our place in an emotional culture. One reason Leonardo’s painting has endured in the popular imagination is straightforward: we want to ask questions of her—how she feels, what she’s thinking—and though we don’t believe she’s alive any more than we believe Hamlet or James Bond to be alive, we can’t help responding to her face as if she were.

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.