From the New Yorker issue of July 6 & 3, 2026, under the heading “A critic at large” (on-line, 6/29/26, “What happened to your face: How the human countenance become something to study, edit, optimize, and scan”; in print, 7/6/26, “Regression to the mien: How mirrors, selfies, and surveillance have changed what we make of our faces”) by Cal Revely-Calder (with some subheads added by me):
[A tarnished Swiss star] … One unexpected consequence of the return of realism [in portraiture] 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.
[Fleeting emotions] … As genetics, psychology, and neuroscience ascended, the twentieth century sent physiognomy back into disrepute, and today, from Lavater to Lombroso, its promoters may seem a racist shade of quaint. Yet the conviction that your face will, if read skillfully, betray your hidden qualities has never gone away. The most influential facial theorist of the late twentieth century was the psychologist Paul Ekman, who argued that seven “universal emotions” — happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear, and contempt — recur across all cultures. Their display, he argued, can be too fleeting to control. Spot these “microexpressions” and map them, perhaps through Ekman’s proprietary Facial Action Coding System, and you’ll have a key to the human soul. Ekman’s ideas travelled unusually well: he wrote popular books, worked on the Pixar film “Inside Out” and the Fox series “Lie to Me,” and provided training to Scotland Yard, the T.S.A., the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. The appeal is plain enough. It promises a portable science of human disclosure. The trouble is that there is no context-free understanding of a social phenomenon; every use of a word like “anger” is imbricated in its past and helps shape its future. Ekman’s seven-point system, however useful as a package, leans toward rigidity, turning the face once again into a surface to be decoded.
Reflections. From my 7/29/20 posting “Portrait of a man: the head and bare torso image”:
The noun physiognomy in its several senses (from NOAD), senses a and b being the relevant ones here:
noun physiognomy: [a] a person’s facial features or expression, especially when regarded as indicative of character or ethnic origin. [b] the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics. [c] the general form or appearance of something: the physiognomy of the landscape.
Some extracts from the Wikipedia entry:
Physiognomy (from the Greek φύσις physis meaning “nature” and gnomon meaning “judge” or “interpreter”) is a practice of assessing a person’s character or personality from their outer appearance — especially the face
… The practice was well accepted by the ancient Greek philosophers, but fell into disrepute in the Middle Ages when practised by vagabonds and mountebanks. It was then revived and popularised by Johann Kaspar Lavater before falling from favour again in the late 19th century. Physiognomy as understood in the past meets the contemporary definition of a pseudoscience.
… Physiognomy also became of use in the field of Criminology through efforts made by Italian army doctor and scientist, Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso, during the mid 19th century, championed the notion that “criminality was inherited and that criminals could be identified by physical attributes such as hawk-like noses and bloodshot eyes”
(Physiognomically, I have a weak, “feminine” face: large eyes well spaced, heart-shaped face with a classic “weak chin” (which I have concealed behind facial hair since 1969) — plus no Adam’s apple. All this marks me out as a queer, which in this case is entirely accurate. But of course millions of straight guys look like this too.)
Meanwhile, we certainly do understand people to be conveying emotions through facial expressions — I blog frequently on the phenomenon, especially during sexual encounters and more generally through various smiles (I am a highly smile-sensitive bear) — but this is one more case where bits of behavior are just stuff, open to no end of specific interpretations or understandings in context. You have to know the territory, and the territory is astonishingly huge and diverse. It’s not chaotic; but it is a huge fabric of conventionalized associations, of many different sorts.
It was a great achievement of 20th-century sociolinguistics to develop tools for analyzing this multi-factorial fabric of multiply interacting associations. Now to advance further on the psychological side, developing more ways of comprehending the subjective experience of producing and perceiving these associations. (I seem to have cycled back to William James; welcome to the late 19th century.)
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