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The article explores the range of empathetic relations that are experienced by viewers of the works of Caravaggio, an Italian painter active in Rome, and clarify the role that the body, physiognomy and gesture play in our experience and understanding of those works. It further explore presence and how Caravaggio makes his works alive and empathize with the emotions, feelings and thoughts of those he depict.

A damaged and badly weathered stone head, discovered prior to 1823 in York, and interpreted as an early portrait of the emperor Constantine I, is here re-examined and identified as a modified image of an earlier, deified emperor, almost certainly Hadrian. A re-analysis of the image as it survives today further suggests that the recarving, into a likeness of Constantine, occurred after a.d. 312 and not, as widely believed, at the moment of Constantine's proclamation as emperor in York in a.d. 306. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of art attribution in painting demonstrates that connoisseurs compare faces and facial features in their efforts to ascribe paintings to regions, schools, workshops and specific artists. Connoisseurs do not generally reflect on their application of face recognition or its importance. Since connoisseurs apply both specialist perception skills (recognising a brushstroke technique, for instance) and generic perception skills, an experiment was performed aiming to eliminate a connoisseur's specialist skills. The experiment was performed using laymen observing faces, derived from paintings, that were stripped from all contextual information (i.e., cut-out faces). Thus, only generic skills could be applied in order to categorise these pictures. The results show how laymen arrive at the same categorisation of paintings as connoisseurs do, without prior training in matters of artistic connoisseurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at some of the principles behind restoration and conservation applied to ancient artefacts and architecture. A number of case studies are discussed, from medieval stained glass to buildings that have been damaged by fire. The paper ends with some remarks about the conservation of ruins. Underlying the discussion are questions about the kinds of obligations—both ethical and aesthetic—that might constrain the practices of restoration: what ought and ought not to be done in particular cases and how such decisions might be made. A broad conclusion is that different principles seem to operate in different cases and accordingly that different obligations obtain. Consideration is given to what grounds such principles and obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although we experience many cultural artifacts by way of reproductions, there remains a particular thrill in experiencing genuine objects—‘real things’. I argue that genuineness is a property that possesses many dimensions of value, including aesthetic value. Typically, aesthetic qualities are perceptual, but genuineness is not a perceptual property. I investigate the aesthetic dimensions of genuineness by considering the role of touch in encounters with old things, using the example of an ancient bronze figurine whose reputation as genuine has waxed and waned, along with its aesthetic assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prehistoric artefacts are capable of great beauty, despite our usually being in ignorance of the kind of cultural and interpretive practices which occasioned them, and which would make clear to us what such artefacts meant (or indeed, if they were artworks in the modern sense at all). I argue that often our aesthetic response to these artefacts—where we have no firm knowledge of their cultural context—is bound up with their ability to present a kind of physiognomy of the historical relationship between such objects, the historical processes which produced them and went on to produce us, and ourselves. I claim further that this physiognomy, and the pathos associated with it, makes possible an aesthetic experience related to the dynamically sublime. I close by considering the consequences of this aesthetic experience for the restoration of prehistorical artefacts, and argue that it demonstrates and explains why—in these cases—a purist form of restoration is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Dadd (1817–1886) was a well-known Victorian artist who murdered his father, compelled by the delusion that a demonic force possessed his father’s body. He was one of the first to bypass execution by reason of insanity and spent the remainder of his life in the Bethlem and Broadmoor asylums. Dadd is rare both as a patient and an artist because he left behind nearly a 40-year record of artwork and journals, which constitute a unique medical and psychiatric resource at a time when the ideas on the relationship of facial expression and madness were changing. Sir Charles Bell’s (1774–1842) widely accepted views that the “face of madness” is bestial and anatomically distinctive were being challenged by such physicians as Sir Alexander Morison (1779–1866), who was also Dadd’s own “alienist” (i.e., psychiatrist). The purpose of this article is to explore the nature and extent of the influence of Bell and Morison on Dadd, which has not been brought out in the existing studies. By a comparative analysis, it will be shown that Dadd may have conveyed a different view in his works that foreshadows subsequent developments that are closer to a modern understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A printed portrait sounds like an oxymoron: black and white and bereft of the illusionism that painted portraits used to trick the eye, did printed portraits actually have any stakes in the game of establishing identity, or were they hamstrung by their medium? Although there certainly were prints that doggedly aimed to identify the sitter, many early modern printed portraits did not make rigorous claims to positive identification, but floated in the space between prototype and identity. From the confluence of new materials and new audiences brought about by print emerged new faces and new uses for them: character heads in genres such as physiognomies and cosmographies began to reflect the results of observation. Mid-sixteenth-century physiognomies, books that coached viewers how to read the profiles of their friends and neighbours, aspired to present empirical knowledge to their readers. Despite the tightrope they tread between mimesis and idealization and their heavy reliance on convention, early modern prints were confident about their ability to cue observations and calibrate sightings; and their organizational aptitude should not be overlooked. Game changers in shaping disciplinary activity related to empirical experience, generic portraits, as this essay will argue, developed skills like visual acuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the interest of artist Leonardo da Vinci in monsters, human beings with abnormalities and physical deformations, and the study of physiognomy. Other topics mentioned in this article include monstrosity, literary sources discussing monsters, and artist's preparatory drawings.

The article focuses on Ottoman imperial portrait books and the influence of Western artists and oil paintings from Venice, Italy. The article discusses the role of the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini at the Ottoman court, the portrait collection of Venetian physician Paolo Giovio and the significance of costumes to classify people in Ottoman portraiture. The article also discusses portraits of sultans including Mehmed II, Suleyman I and Murad III as well as the role of physiognomy in portraiture and the Ottoman portrait book the "Şemā'ilnāme" and book "Elogia" by Giovio.

Venetian patrician portraits of the late fifteenth century document deeply ingrained expectations of that class. Largely static and impassive, the subjects of independent portraits appear as slight variations on a theme, rather than as studies of individuals. In contrast, Titian's (Tiziano Vecellio, ca. 1488–1576) early portraits seem to represent a significant departure from tradition and reveal the artist's commitment to portraying personality, as well as physiognomy. In this article, I suggest that Titian's success was due in part to his knowledge of and sensitivity to the social constraints of late fifteenth-century Venetian culture. In turn, this allowed him to consciously accommodate traditional expectations of his patrician clientele while incrementally introducing the modern portrait. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines objects of everyday use in terms of their communicative efficacy rather than their function, highlighting the physiognomic illusion. Often based on anthropomorphism, the expressive form provided to such objects is of extreme importance in the emotional relationship established with their users. Art historian Ernst Gombrich discusses the expressive character of sounds, colours, and shapes.

The article discusses portrait sculpture by Italian baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his father Pietro Bernini, focusing on Gian Lorenzo Bernini's training in his father's workshop. The author discusses the portrait bust of Antonio Coppola at the San Giovanni dei Fiorentini church in Rome, Italy and attributes it to Pietro Bernini. The author also discusses the bust of Giovanni Battista Santoni at the Santa Prassede church in Rome, Italy and attributes it to both Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The author also examines Pietro Bernini's influence on Bernini's physiognomies.

This article offers the first in-depth comparison of two nineteenth-century French portraits of the Italian virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840): the pencil portrait executed in Rome in 1819 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867); and the portrait in oils by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), painted in Paris circa 1831 after Paganini's debut at the Opéra. Referring to and contesting a number of previous critical responses, and making reference in particular to Delacroix's Journal and the art criticism of Charles Baudelaire, the article presents the new thesis that Delacroix's portrait of Paganini was intended as a parodic reply to Ingres's 'beautifi ed' image, particularly in its use of features of style associated with the Romantic avant-garde: its merging of the grotesque and the comic, its use of exaggeration and distortion, and its employment of an abstract and poetic rendition of Paganini which aimed to evoke not just the physiognomy but also the personality of the violinist and the characteristics of his playing for which he was most renowned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two examples of a modernist concern for what Mina Loy, in her 1919 manifesto, "Auto-Facial-Construction," termed facial integrity, arguing that the act of building a face in many modernist texts is often an impersonal attempt to alter, even disfigure, the face as its expression consolidates a humanist personality. For Loy, the possibility of efficiently articulating just what one means necessitates a sculptural restructuring of the face as it consolidates an individual organized around categories of personality and subjectivity. This sculptural vision, I suggest, responds to a westernized notion of the face that developed in the nineteenth century, which predicated its expressive strength on the power of personality as a consolidation of the interior and exterior dimensions of the human subject. In contrast, the face-making I analyze in this article organizes the face as form against the possible diminishment of speech resulting from the invasive reading and analysis of expression. By divesting voice from face, both Loy's "Auto-Facial-Construction" and Gaudier-Brzeska's "The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound" critically engage with the trope of prosopopoeia where the making of face amounts to the making of a speaker and, in this modernist context, I contend, a personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1670 the French court painter and Academician Charles Le Brun produced a series of drawings featuring naturalistic animal heads, as well as imaginary heads in which he refashioned various nonhuman animal species to make humanoid physiognomies. What were the purpose and significance of these unusual works? I argue that they show Le Brun’s interest in what we today would call animal psychology: focusing upon the sensory organs and their connections with the animal’s brain, Le Brun studied his animals as conscious protagonists of the natural realm. One source that may have served him in this project was Marin Cureau de La Chambre’s De la Connoissance des bestes of 1645, in which the physician argued that animals possess a conscious soul grounded in the senses. However, Le Brun’s animal-humans have no clear place in the artist’s taxonomy* nor, indeed, in any seventeenth century understandings of species. It is rather John Locke, at his most skeptical, who offers the best parallel in the realm of natural philosophy to Le Brun’s unsettling animal humans. Probably without meaning to, Le Brun demonstrated through his eerie, boundary-crossing creatures the limits of visual classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the representations of various portraits of visionary visitors of William Blake that feature popular persons in traditional histories or mythologies. It highlights the four portraits that distinguish the common murderesses particularly from the 18th century which was assumed to came from the print media of contemporary pamphlets or compedia such as "Newgate Calendar." Moreover, it was assumed that the purpose of the information from the portraits is to determine whether the physiognomies of the murderesses disclose their character.

Explores the Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn's medical and psychological state with help of the series of self-portraits by him. Major events in Rembrandt's life; Changes in Rembrandt's physiognomy observed in his self-portraits; Effect of the normal aging process on Rembrandt's portraits; Modifications of Rembrandt's artistic style.

Discusses the fundamental connection between the ways of talking about a physiognomy and those of discussing surface in an artistic object. Concept of realism in art; Context of neoclassical aesthetics and enlightenment biology; Issue of representation in art.

Examines painter Charles Demuth's emblematic portrait of William Carlos Williams. Symbolism; Artistic style; Role of physiognomy in the art work.

Examines the influence of phrenology on the art of Hiram Powers. Background on the theory of phrenology; Criticisms toward the concept of phrenology in art; Works of Powers; Theory of physiognomy in art.

The article highlights the life and career of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. The section considers the art of Munch by interpreting the significance of drama for his imagery. According to the report, Munch was particularly interested in the art of drama and distinguished himself in the early years of his career by his sensitive and original rendering of people's faces and gestures. He kept himself from formal reproductions of people's countenance, and attempted instead to express their psyche and personality, sometimes exaggerating in order to stress important features.

The article focuses on the role of mimesis in the historiography of art history. The article discusses the prevalence of anthropomorphism in architecture in the 19th-century, other concepts in art history at this time such as hermeneutics and physiognomy and texts by scholars such as Johann Caspar Lavater, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Charles Blanc. The article goes on to discuss the establishment of the concept of character by Lavater, the concept of style in art history and the continued underlying role of the concept mimesis.

The discursive influence of the nineteenth-century genre of physiologies, such as "Les Français peints par eux-mêmes," has escaped the attention of art historians. Gustave Courbet however made extensive references to both the techniques of representation and the represented types presented in these texts. This article shows that Courbet engaged in a socio-cultural discourse on physiologies, which, in turn, aligns him with Honoré Balzac’s physiological methods of describing characters with physical traits and manners of dress and within topographic locales through which authors and readers identified the characters’ social status. Both artist and writer replicate the verbal-visual hermeneutic of the physiologies, thereby fixing contemporary social types in the collective visual and textual imagination during the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on 'Youth Making a Face,' a painting by 17th century artist Adriaen Brouwer. Biographical information; Brouwer's style of painting; Opinion that he was the master of physiognomy.