Stafford, Peculiar Marks

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"Peculiar Marks": Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished ThoughtAuthor(s): Barbara Maria StaffordSource: Art Journal, Vol. 46, No. 3, Portraits: The Limitations of Likeness (Autumn, 1987),pp. 185-192Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777031 .Accessed: 09/06/2014 16:58

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Peculiar Marks' : a v a t rn d t h ountenance

o f Blemished Thought

By Barbara Maria Stafford

Peculiar marks, I hold to be, gen-

erally,if not

always,defects.

Sir Joshua ReynoldsPeculiar marks are the only merit.

William Blake

In his Annotations to Sir Joshua Rey-nolds' Discourses (c. 1808), William

Blake challenges that academician's dis-approval of the idiosyncratic pictorialmark. He then continues his criticism ofthe Fifth Discourse by responding "In-fernal Falsehood " to Reynolds's asser-tion that "peculiarities in the works ofart are like those in the human figure ...they are always so many blemishes."'One aspect of this longstanding andfundamental connection between theways of talking about a physiognomyand those of discussing surface in anartistic object is the subject of thisessay.2 The analogy involves assump-tions concerning the regular or irregu-lar, healthy or diseased, aspect of forms.Two corollary issues will also be exam-ined. First-and maintaining this keyaesthetic-physiologic comparison-foreighteenth-century thinkers especially,any "skin" or material "dress" carried

imprints of a hidden, subcutaneousrealm. Therefore, debates on what con-stitutes the likeness of that "other,"internal world, and how to represent it,involved questions of decorum: definingthe proper "look" of the human body,the characteristic "portrait" of themind, and the harmonious "appear-ance" of an artistic composition. Sec-ond, and specifically in the context ofNeoclassical aesthetics and Enlighten-ment biology, any peculiar or unlikecreation that did not resemble or imitateits parents was deemed to be a monster.3

Freakish mixtures, in life as well as art,are unnatural because, in their conspic-uous incoherence, they stray or deviatefrom their normative and homogeneousoriginals.

A basic thesis of this paper is thatmost of the things that need to be seen inlife are concealed, shadowy, or dis-torted. The representational issue, then,becomes, first, whether identity, or whatis out of sight, can be made to surface byfixing the likeness of a unified characteror deep-seated soul; or, second, whetherthe elusive psyche can only be capturedby pursuing superficial appearances,heterogeneous traits, or through theassemblage of the unlikely. The mimetictradition in the West-steeped in theclassical unities, on which the canons for"correct" similitude and accurate por-traiture are based-is predicated on thebelief that, at any given time, only onesurface of an object "faces" the light.4Further, this plane must unambiguouslyreveal its typical features by casting allthat is contradictory, ephemeral, orpeculiar to the moment-and thereforeunlike true being-into the shade.

By "true being" is meant a unifiedand nondeviating character, thatanciently firm and immutable essence

which underlies the motley coveringsand modern disguises of the externalself. It is that "ideal" and lasting frameof mind which the Grand Style por-traitist excavates and exposes to lightfrom the confusing and obscuring welterof superficial detail. Thus JonathanRichardson, in the The Art of Criticismand The Science of a Connoisseur,speaks of the need for a "general histo-ry" or abstraction in art. He states thatthe business of painting is to raise and

improve, to omit the incongruous, and tomake the "best choice" of nature. Thisprocedure results in a "good portrait,from whence we conceive a better opin-ion of the beauty, good sense, breeding,and other good qualities of the personthan from seeing themselves and yetwithout being able to say in what partic-ular it is unlike." Or, again, he claimsthat it

has been the practice of all politepeople in all ages and countries todisguise, or hide those saletes anddefects which though common toall animals are a sort of reproach

to our nature; and to endeavour toexalt our species as much as possi-ble to what we conceive the angelicstate: this also is one end of Paint-ing and Poetry; they are toimpregnate our minds with themost sublime and beautifulimages of things; and thus in ourimaginations do raise all naturesome degrees above what is com-monly, or ever seen.5

T he model for Richardson's methodof deriving a proper or "pure" like-

ness of the human body-and, by exten-sion, the paradigm for Neoclassical the-orists in general-was a fusion of Neo-platonic and mathematical logic: thearrangement of the work of art is seen asidentical to the structure of a rationalargument that logically unfolds orreveals what is already implicit in thepremise. Further, logical progressionitself horizontally mirrors the proprie-ties of the vertical procession of being, acontinuous universe or chain of creationdescending, without gaps or breaks,from the immaterial to the material.6Just as it was inappropriate o wander or

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stray from the straight path and the pithof the argument into a surfeit of excur-sive physical details, so, too, it wasimproper or the portraitist to digress ordeviate into dirty anomalies, to deducean awkward, sheepish, affected, carica-tured, ugly, silly, or ridiculous resem-blance from a man made in the image ofa perfect and simple God.7 Aristotle, inthe Posterior Analytics (2.12.96b25-97b15), had addressed the basic prob-lem of the composition and unity of the

subject and what is said or predicated ofit in a discourse. In logic, three essentialelements of a rational proposition areimportant: the concept, the definition,and the sequential process of inference.The concept must hold or grasp-andthereby reduce-the manifold nature ofphenomena into an orderly unity inwhich each member is subservient tothat which preceded it in the chain, andinferior effects gradually coalesce withthe superior cause. The definition refersthis multiplicity back to the originalunity (i.e., the genus in which it "rests";as, for example, in the Christian andNeoclassical view that all individuals"rest" in the unity of God). The defini-tion then exhibits the permissable differ-ence that an individual may displaywithin a common genus. In this way, thephenomenon that is to be defined-ahuman being or a face (transposingfrom writing to painting)-is anchoredin its general and necessary meaningand expressed n its rational or "middle"essence. The definition (the resultingportrait) expresses this "fixed" and"founded" generality. Phenomena arethus seen in a meaning that is predomi-nantly "universal." Accordingly, any-thing that is markedly individual, andbound to a horizontal development inspace and time, cannot be grasped inthis way. In such a logical system basedon vertical or deductive reasoning, con-stantly shifting appearances remaindeceptive illusions-aimless, un-founded, and without norms-fictionsor fables until they are inferentiallytraced back by a series of definitions totheir initial premises. Essential reality,the "nature of things," stands above orbehind the manifold, particular, dif-

ferent, and relative as the general oruniversal that must be purified orabstracted through cognition from allthese temporal permutations. This apriori system, developed especially bylate Neoplatonists such as Proclus andincorporated rom him into Neoclassicalmimetic theory, aims at the compositionand knowledge of existence according toeternal principles. It provides a repre-sentational method for "reconstructing"the human world and man according toa seamless hierarchical order of being,not according to the individual percep-tion of multitudinous situations, variety

of customs, or all those things that occurhere and now.8

The most thoroughly documentedquest in the eighteenth century for

this "central form" or the charactero-logical mean reflected in a harmoniousface-and for its corollary, the enumer-ation of any morphological distraction,errancy, or wandering from the norm-was Johann Caspar Lavater's (1742-1801) monumental classificatory system

for mapping the topography of theunseen. The Physiognomische Frag-mente (1775-78) marks the zenith ofthe classical tradition of physiognomicsand, in its reliance on the paradigm of anewly quantified science of anatomy, adeparture, as well.9 In Lavater's deduc-tive scheme each external trait-as inthe bust of Voltaire (Fig. 1)-defines,or is made to correspond exactly andinvariably to, a timeless disposition ofthe detached and self-consistent soul.What there is of truth in the writings oractions of a man, he tells us, ought alsoto be found in his mind. "And

whatpasses in the mind should be traceable,in like manner, in the face which is themirror of it."10

The inadequacy of such a calculus ofstatic resemblance for getting at shiftingappearances, at anomalous, unmeasur-able experiences or variegated emotionsthat do not have a name or an imageuntil they are fabricated, was suggestedby Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99)." This Gottingen physicist was astudent of pathognomy-that is, of the"Semiotik der Affecten"-or of thatamorphous language of the inchoatefeelings which exists below the rationalarticulation of the canonical Cartesianpassions (Fig. 2). His esteem for alle-gorical caricature, and for the nonsym-metrical grotesque and the monstrous ngeneral, hinges on a metaphoric aes-thetic that values fractured, patched-together, and discordant mixtures thatdestroy any still, noble simplicity or"general parallelism of the human fig-ure. "2 If Lavater's geometric theory ofthe proper "face" of being may befirmly grounded in late Neoplatonism,Lichtenberg's anticlassical aesthetic has

its roots in an Epicurean and Sophistictradition that focused on life as lived.Thus his Commentaries and Aphorismsfind expressive the "unnatural mingle"of fashion, crude gesture, and ignobledeportment. As he wittily observed:"Everyone possesses a moral backsidethat he does not exhibit except underduress, and that he conceals as long aspossible under the trousers of goodbehavior."'3 Unlike the logical conven-tions for decorous and generalizing"face-painting," which abstract, blend,or reduce colorful circumstances to themonochromatic flatland of a homo-

Fig. 1 T. Holloway (after Pigalle),Voltaire, 1792, engraving. From J.C.Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, II,Part I, p. 90.

Fig. 2 J. Hogg (after Chodowiecki?),Rage, 1792, engraving. From J.C.Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, II,Part I, p. 68.

geneous character, caricature, as com-posite portraiture, externalizes a cor-rugated inscape by conspicuouslymisjointing variegated bits of reality-the thronging chaos or "inner multi-

tude"'4-normally hidden from politeview behind a seamless surface.'5Caricature refuses to dwindle down

multiplicity into aesthetic or moralcoherence. Lichtenberg had lived inEngland and was familiar with WilliamHogarth's, William Dent's, H.W. Bun-bury's, James Gillray's, and ThomasRowlandson's obviously pieced-together"real" fictions. These jumbled and seem-ingly haphazard mixtures-as in Row-landson's rebus portrait of Napoleon(Fig. 3)-can present more than an epi-grammatic mosaic or map of inlaid con-tradictions. They can also give form to

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NAPOLEON

Fig. 3 Thomas Rowlandson,Hieroglyphic Portrait of Napoleon,1813, etching. Washington, NationalGallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection1945.

psychic conflict and capture-as in Row-landson's Hypochondriac (Fig. 4)-theillogical "portrait" of a vacillating anddisorderly state of mind.'6 The unseemlyexhibition of the imagination's ncalcula-ble vagaries-rambling, patching to-gether irrational, far-fetched fears, andpursuing shifting alternatives-must beseen as analogous, in social terms, to theillicit display of one's emotional "back-side" in public. The pictorial strategy atwork is that of making visible nonnarra-tive snatches of shapeless sensation, ofreversing the rules for seizing a properclear and distinct epitome or rationalmental likeness, in order to capture-byvisual cacophony-what is temporaryand yet perennial.'7

Heterogeneous surface clutter (whatWilliam Blake termed the "imperti-nent" in character), or the monstrousdin of caricature, lies hidden from anOlympian vantage that views humanityfrom afar.'8 From above, the portraitistsees only the schematic (as in logic);that is, the large outlines, the white

silhouettes or diagrams of flattened andenduring features that are not fleshedout (Fig. 5).19 This aloof and distantperspective-whether of the geographyof the world or the topography of theface-is subverted by the vulgar impro-prieties of caricature in which the body'sand the personality's blemishes areallowed immodestly to poke through auniform and cloaking veneer. Private,unedifying, clashing sensations, likeundisguised epidermal ugliness, becomeobtrusive and protrusive public knowl-edge when seen from all angles, and

Fig. 4 Thomas Rowlandson (after James Dunthorpe), The Hypochondriac, 1792,etching.

Fig. 5 Alexander Cozens, SimpleBeauty, 1778, outline engraving. FromThe Principles of Beauty, PI. I.

from the pedestrian level. What is clearand consistent when viewed sublimelyfrom afar becomes obscenely discordantand obscure at close range.

ichtenberg's awareness of man'sability to be unlike his supposedly

invariant temperament-to suffer, to beeccentric, to act out of role-caused himto question Lavater's affirmation of theuniversality of physiognomic discern-ment. Lavater defined it as that skillwhich "determines for every passion theseat of its residence, the source fromwhich it flows, its root, the fund whichsupplies it."20 His desire to piercethrough the "coverings" of rank, condi-tion, habit, estate, dress in order toarrive at a man's "real" character is

a self-proclaimed advance over the

longed-for discovery of the Glass ofMomus. In this madness, Momus, theRoman god of Folly, proposed to place awindow opposite the heart of man. Butthat strange aperture, Lavater cau-tioned, would never have furnished themeans for plumbing humanity's depths.In Lavater's view, not hidden thoughtsor obscure intentions but visible bonestructure-as the Creator manifestshimself in the Creation-is the properobject of the physiognomic science.2'

As a pathognomist, Lichtenberg fo-cused instead on the "foreign and the

contingent,"on the

misshapenmarks

imprinted on any facade by the environ-ment, disease, custom, or clothing. Inshort, he observed those accidental orartificial blots and blemishes that Lav-ater, the physiognomist, believed "mayconceal or disguise" character. Uninter-ested in motionless and changelesstraits, Lichtenberg approached thefluidity of the intimate, the shapeless,and the internal by means of the convex-ities and concavities that disfigure anyplane. He realized that not everyone oreverything is marked identically bylife.2

Lavater, on the other hand, modeledhis efforts to get to the bottom of a faceafter the practice of the anatomist whodisassembles the human body only toput it back together logically or "fitting-ly" (Fig. 6). The dissector who digs deepinto physical man believes that the mus-cled exterior of the ecorche is merelythe reflection or resemblance of theinterior, the true lineaments of the soul,planed out at last without annoyingdigressions.23

This static paradigm of taking apartan individual piece by piece, in order

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Fig. 6 Jacques Gamelin, AnatomyTheater, 1778, etching. From Nouveaurecueil d'osteologie.

better to know him, underlies Lavater'spractice of taking portrait silhouettes. It

is evident by his search for the precisionand perfection that comes only withdeath.24

The dead furnish a new subject for[physiognomical] study ....Death puts an end to the agita-tions to which the body is a perpet-ual prey. It stops and fixes whatwas before vague and undecided.Everything rises and sinks to itslevel; all features return to theirtrue relation [i.e., from the per-spective of eternity]25

The flat and unbroken silhouette ormonosyllabic "skiagram"-signifyingboth shadow and shade-not onlystands at the mythic origin of themimetic tradition of art (Pliny's Corin-thian potter and his daughter) but is theperfect analogue for the Ideal simplicityof the divine One not disrupted by theunlike pointillism of the mottled andworldly Many.26 Similarly, the undi-vided and schematic contour broadlydiagrams character and obliterates anyunreconcilable oppositions or "peculiarmarks." For Lavater, silhouettes, al-though admittedly "the feeblest of por-

traits," are the most definitive andtherefore the best tool for the physiog-nomist. They present only a single line ofthe figure in which one sees "neithermotion, nor light, nor color, nor volume,nor features."7 In short, they are bereftof the colorful and the circumstantial.Again, composite caricature offers thevivid and performative antithesis to thesilhouette's anatomization by continu-ous line of an inert and imprisoned sit-ter. As with Rowlandson's hieroglyphicNapoleon (see Fig. 3), caricature takesa man apart-in a parody of patholo-

gy-in order to put him back togetherillogically, imaginatively, from an ob-viously slanted point of view. Diverseand contradictory pieces of common-place imagery war against each other,thus presenting a nonresembling "mis-fit" who, nevertheless, is like actual,entangled experience.

F urther, implicit in Lavater's Neo-classical and moralizing aesthetic is

the assumption that just as there is only

one form of Beauty so, too, there is onlyone perfect face of health. Variegatedpatchwork, whether of body or work ofart, is symptomatic of grotesque diseasethat pits and pocks an ideally smoothskin. Yet neither the corrosive pointillismof smallpox (variolae)28 Fig. 7) nor the"black medical seal" of syphilis29 Fig.8)-those eroding "taches de mort,"30 sthey were called in the eighteenth cen-tury-constituted the original mark ofdeviancy in Lavater's system. Accordingto the theological premise of his physiog-nomics-that man is made in the image

and likeness of a simple, luminous,and

homologous God--it is the heteroge-neous birthmark that ostentatiously ex-hibits that paradigmatic and fundamen-tal stain "which children bring into theworld upon them."3' As the shamelessvisual manifestation of the primal markof affliction-the original sin of multi-plicity willfully repeated with each act ofmultiplication-it obscures the beautifulsignature of the divine on the make ofthings. It cracks the veneer of incon-spicuous mitation by the false attempt atcreation and exposes the fallen state ofthe world by once again blotting its origi-nal purity, soiling its structural ntegrity,besmirching its surface appearancethrough ill-sorted contraries. This crea-tive error, identical to the monstrous, s,Lavater tells us, an imperfection result-ing from a mother mprinting her unbornchild through the force of an impure andcovert longing. It represents a grotesquedeviation from the norm-the continu-ous and gradual procession of being-into the formless, the disproportionate,the indeterminate.32

Whereas for the nineteenth centurythese irrational drives and their materi-

alization as an epidermal divisionismwere the butt of the satirist (Fig. 9), forthe eighteenth century such a "mob" ofdisorderly spots revealed the furtive pro-cesses and misadventures of genera-tion.33 This becomes evident in Lavater'spejorative description of the confusedand incoherent birthmark. He under-scores the potential for deviant ideas,flawed desires, or unnatural affectionsto "surface" by creating an actual darkimpression on the skin-a counterfeit orcorrupt beauty patch run amok.34 Thus,like the conventionally ugly conglomer-

Fig. 7 Moreau-Valvile and Fresca,Varicelle pustuleuse, 1833, stippleengraving. From J.L. Alibert, Cliniquede l'Hbpital Saint-Louis, P1. 9.

ates of caricature, the birthmark-in itspublic display of an "assemblage of dis-cord" that ought to remain masked bythe standards of good taste-turns aperson inside out.35 Significantly, onlyfalse, failed, or misbegotten thoughtsmar the skin by their insistence since,like the properly blended complexion,beautiful ideas should remain delicatelymixed and therefore

imperceptible.The

birthmark, then, demonstrates that thewandering imagination can, during itsdetours, make something out of noth-ing-even if only a grotesque. A mentaltattoo, the birthmark can give shape touncivilized longings and conceive theinconceivable by barbarously stainingand disfiguring the epidermis.36 More-over, the advent of the monstrous chal-lenges the very notion of similitude andmimesis, since its existence proves thatlike does not necessarily generate like.37

Georges Buffon, in his essay on thewhite negro or "les blafards" (followed,significantly, by the chapter "Sur lesmonstres") in the Histoire naturelle del'homme (1749), had addressed thispoint but shifted the discussion from thevagrant imagination to the pathology ofthe skin (Fig. 10).38 Black albinos, ofcourse, belong to an established tradi-tion of particolored caricatures of uni-formly colored prototypes found, forexample, in Liceti and the classical liter-ature on monsters (Fig. 11).39 Liceti'selegant natural harlequins adhere to theRenaissance notion of curious, comical,and diverting bizarreries. Paradoxical-

ly, however, Buffon's naive ethnologicalspecimens are disturbingly unnatural,vested as they are in a monstrous skinaffliction (vitiligo) or "diseased" chia-roscuro. For Buffon, moreover, thesevariegated embodiments of a defectivebiological process (that is, one neverproperly expressed on the surface) werealso a threat to the ideal of a clear,distinct, and repeatable whole. Theysuggest that a person's appearance didnot reflect his character but might beamassed or created by chance from aheap of haphazard things. Their ugly

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Fig. 10 Anon., L'Enfant negre-pie,1749, engraving. From Georges Buffon,L'Histoire de l'homme, IV, p. 253.

Fig. 8 William Hogarth, Death of the Harlot [Clad in Flannel Cure orSyphilis], 1832, engraving. From A Harlot's Progress, P1. 5.

* If X :^ ^::: :^t :

Fig. 11 H. Bary, ParticoloredMonsters, 1665, engraving. FromFortunius Licetus, De Monstris, p. 149.

Fig. Y Pigal, Les Envies de emmes grosses, 1comique de pathologie pittoresque.

bodies in torn domino signify illegitima-cy, the refusal to copy or mix with theskin of their parents. The impropriety ofappearing so idiosyncratic (that is, ofpresenting oneself as so glaringlyunmixable, uncivilized, or stripped of allprior models) may be compared-keep-ing Lichtenberg's comment in mind-tobeing undressed in public. In a classicfigure-ground reversal, the blafard'sripped white (ideal) skin permits the

concealed patches of black to show, orvice versa. It is as if he were wearing asecond, diseased skin, a nonsymmetricalcostume of shreds and patches thatoffends propriety by being too tight-fitting and thus improperly revealing.As a nonresembling monstrosity (be-cause his spots belong to no one buthimself), the speckled albino was inter-preted by philosophes, such as themathematician-astronomer Maupertuis

(in Le Negre blanc, 1744, and La Venusphysique, 1745), and by Buffon asexhibiting the infraction of the correctorder of things, the reverse of properimitation.40

In this context it is illuminating tocontrast these ill-bred portraits of way-ward blacks or incomplete whites (theyare specific individuals with names)-"dressed" in the torn remnants of theperfect silhouette and the ruined con-tour-with George Stubbs's likenessesof obviously supremely well-bred dap-pled horses and piebald spaniels andhounds.41 Subbs highlights the animals'sleek or shaggy pedigreed backs check-ered with characteristic and inheritablemarkings. Such caprices were consid-ered the distinctive marks of legitimacy,a result of the "happy accidents" ofchance within an otherwise impeccablypure lineage born from repetition andimprovement. They were scherzi, ac-ceptable in an inferior order of creation,occurring in the cultivated and con-trolled sequence of reproduction. Con-versely, Lavater's illogical and uglybirthmark s the botched and uncalcula-

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Stafford, Peculiar Marks