The artist as anthropologist: the representation of type and character in Victorian art

sciences, maths and physics, than with the "human" aspects of the sciences which directly concern daily experience and the quality of life. Furthermore, the contributors are literary critics and historians, not scientists proper. Though this book is essentially a project initiated by the Humanities Faculty, it should be of wider interest. Its strength is its diversity; while the editors hanker after a "full and coherent theorization" of the study of literature and science, the evidence of the essays proves that science and literature, individually and in conjunction, generate a profusion of forms. The role of the study of physiognomy in the history of art has been known but not appreciated. Clearly, any study of the "types" represented in Leonardo's sketchbook needs to refer back to the omnipresent tradition of physiognomy, which makes up a rich heritage of Western culture from the first written records. (Indeed physiognomic treatises are to be found in Babylonian cuneiform.) Mary Cowling looks at a period when the theories of physiognomy had a most specific location in Western thought, the age following its reestablishment as a "6science" in the writings of the Swiss pastor Johann Gaspar Lavater. This "Storm and Stress" (i.e., anti-Enlightenment) view of the relationship between mind and body was in no way new, nor was it scientific by any use of the term in the eighteenth century, but it was so understood by Lavater's contemporaries. Cowling picks up the story at the height of the Victorian era (70 years after Lavater) and presents us with a reading of two major works of art, W. P. Frith's panoramas Derby Day (1858) and Railway Station (1862), which were considered to be the major works of art of the day (at least by Queen Victoria, who was amused ...). This is an intricate and well-done study. But it remains only part of the story. Using the Frith paintings, Cowling shows us how the theories of physiognomy became part of the visual commonplaces (icons) of Victorian culture, so much so that one could use a "flat nose" or a "high brow" to represent class as well as character. Her opening chapters, which cover the discussion of physiognomy (type and character) from Camper through the phrenologists are richly illustrated and form a composite handbook. The guidelines which she evolves are then applied to the Frith paintings, in order to show us how they were read by his contemporaries. …