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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]

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]

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 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.