In late fifteenth century Florence, Renaissance humanists
rediscovered a secret, natural language hidden in the visual wisdom
of the proverb 'the eyes are the windows of the soul'. Through its
magical prism, the language of eyes, faces, voices, laughs, walks,
even stones, plants and animals, all became windows into the souls
of other people, of oneself, of nature, and ultimately of God. Some
saw in its words the perfect hieroglyphic language by which Adam
had first named nature, which, when combined with the art of
memory, could bring about a form of 'inner writing' or mystical
self-transformation. Yet many others dismissed it as a collection
of arbitrary conventions, superstitious enigmas, or 'gypsy'
riddles. Embroiled in the religious persecution of the Reformation,
rejected as a science during the Scientific Revolution, in the age
of Enlightenment physiognomy came to be seen as nothing more than
an amusing entertainment. But with the dawn of Romanticism, be it
in the realms of science, religion, or poetry, some began to see
that physiognomy was no game and the flame of serious interest in
physiognomy was once again rekindled. Combining book history and
visual history, Dr Porter reconstructs this physiognomical eye,
interprets the way in which books on physiognomy were read and
traces the wider intellectual, social, and cultural changes that
contributed to the metamorphosis of this way of beholding oneself
and the natural world from the Renaissance to the dawn of
Romanticism.
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