Physiognomics as Philosophy: Reconceiving an Early Modern Science

Project Information

PHYSIOGNOMONICA

Grant agreement ID: 101023861

DOI

10.3030/101023861

Project terminated on 31 August 2022

EC signature date 6 April 2021

Start date 15 May 2021

End date 14 October 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 183 473,28

EU contribution

€ 183 473,28

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PHYSIOGNOMONICA (Physiognomics as Philosophy: Reconceiving an Early Modern Science)

Reporting period: 2021-05-15 to 2023-05-14

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Physiognomics is the theory that it is possible to gain access to the interiority of a person – the character, or the soul – by studying the outside, namely the bodily features. The idea of judging people by their appearances is both common practice and a taboo, condemned as superstitious and based on prejudices. And yet, in early modernity – a key formative period for the discipline – physiognomics was not (only) a dubious diagnostic tool, but rather a central philosophical framework for addressing complex body-soul relationships, and for proposing novel theories of the soul. This project thus seeks to position our contemporary judgements within a broader historical and philosophical reconstruction. In particular, it makes extensive use of archival research to try to imagine what physiognomics meant for early modern philosophers who used it and theorised it. Regarded as a valuable tool throughout antiquity, physiognomics stimulated a wealth of debates in early modernity, combining psychology with medicine and anatomy, and with politics, ethics and aesthetics. Can physiognomic analysis help to distinguish between friends and rivals by unveiling a person’s true nature, and should rulers be acquainted with physiognomics in order to tell allies from enemies? Is a beautiful person good, and an ugly person bad? Are signs of good health also signs of moral standing? My project argues that far from simply expressing a superstitious mentality, physiognomics presented itself in early modernity as a ‘total discipline’, capable of synthetising multidisciplinary knowledge, under the guidance of key philosophical principles. The project aims to produce three outputs: a free available anthology of short physiognomic texts in English translation (https://pric.unive.it/projects/physiognomics-as-philosophy/home); a monograph on philosophical physiognomics in early modernity; and the edition of a central, and hitherto unpublished, chirophysiognomic source from the 16th century: Abramo Colorni’s Nova Chirofisionomia.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first phase of the project took place in London, where I conducted extensive archival research in the British Library and in the library of the Wellcome Trust, which hosts one of the richest collections of physiognomic prints, manuscripts and objects. At the Wellcome Library, I recorded an hour-long film interview with the Engagement Office of the Wellcome Collection, Daniel Rees. Resuming the project after my maternity leave, I developed my work along three paths. First, I selected, translated and introduced three extracts from physiognomic works of early modernity, which were uploaded on the project website. Second, I used the occasion of several paper presentations to develop the plan for my monograph:

- the Introduction and methodological framework for presenting a philosophical study of early modern physiognomics (paper “The Pea and the Wave: The Science of Physiognomics in Early Modern Europe, Hamburg, 21/7/22; and “Warum die Geschichte der Philosophie anachronistisch sein muss”, Siegen 5/7/22);
- chapter 1 on the science-magic divide (paper “Physiognomic Translations”, Padua 5-7/9/22; and “How to Renew an Old Science: The Revival of Physiognomics in Early Modernity”, paper presentation invited at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, prepared for November 2021, but postponed due to Covid);
- chapter 2 on what physiognomics meant to an early modern practitioner (paper “Cardano the Physionomist”, Venice 24/5/22);
- chapter 4 on the ethical application of physiognomics (“‘A Mirror for Good Behaviour’: Physiognomics as Ethics”, London 28/5/21, and “‘I touch the Truth With My Hands’: Physiognomic Techniques for Overcoming Insincerity”, Dublin, 2/4/22).

The third planned output of my project is the edition of Abramo Colorni’s Nova Chirofisionomia.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

My project treats physiognomics as a philosophical device, namely as an integrated system of philosophical principles and rules, with which physiognomists participated in the main debates of early modernity. Until now, physiognomics has been studied mainly by historians, with a specific focus on the Middle Ages (see the ground-breaking works by I. Agrimi, especially Ingeniosa scientia nature. Studi sulla fisiognomonica medievale (Florence 2004)). I could build on recent significant advancement in the philological study of physiognomic texts (exemplary in this respect is the new edition of the Pseudoaristotle’s Physiognomonica, ed. L, Devriese: Aristoteles latinus XIX (Turnhout 2019)), and proceeded to a systematic study of the contribution of physiognomics to three main philosophical debates of early modernity.
1. The intersection of science and magic, which physiognomists discussed in order to justify recourse to their discipline. I studied in particular how the term “conjecture” (congettura/coniettura) was used by main authors of physiognomic literature, like Cocles and Della Porta. I was also able to show that physiognomists employed a refined approach to temporal directionality in order to provide new foundations to physiognomics as a science. For instance, Girolamo Cardano argued that the body has a multiform system of signs through which it expresses both what it experienced in the past, and what it will likely experience in the future. The border between magic and science appears in early modern physiognomic literature as a line that is continuously negotiated between the temporal development of signs and their physical localisation.
2. The human-animal border. For this, I went beyond the state of the art studying chiromantic literature in order to show that hand reading offers a philosophically significant context to reframe one of the key debates of early modernity. Traditionally, handreading has been understudied by historians of philosophy, under the assumption that its philosophical contribution was negligible (but O. Trabucco’s edition of Della Porta’s Chirofisionomia (Naples 2003) paved the way for a change). I demonstrated that chiromants operated within what they understood as a legitimate Aristotelian framework. The main goal of my work on chiromancy was to prepare an edition of Colorni’s Nova Chirofisionomia.
3. The body-soul difference. This section of the project goes beyond currently available literature on the subject by demonstrating that physiognomic literature offered to practitioners a set of options for understanding the relationship between body and soul in terms of dynamism. I claim that physiognomics thus became a major path for psychological investigation in early modernity, and mapped three possible patterns of interaction between body and soul in physiognomic literature: the soul and body could be in harmony, with the body reflecting the nature of the soul (the standard situation); or the body could be ‘behind’ the soul, when the soul has already changed, but this change has not been carried onto the surface of the body yet; or the body could foretell characteristics of the soul that have not come to light yet.

Wellcome MS 273