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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.

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.

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]

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.

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]