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SUMMARY:Impressed upon the countenance: knowledge and visibility in Lavate
 rian physiognomy - Stephanie O'Rourke (Columbia University)
DTSTART:20130429T120000Z
DTEND:20130429T131500Z
UID:TALK44697@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:29667
DESCRIPTION:An English reader perusing the Henry Hunter translation of the
   controversial and enormously popular treatise 'Essays on Physiognomy' in
   \nthe 1790s would have encountered something rather strange: a text that
   disputes itself. This dissonance\, staged in illustrations\, footnotes\,
  and  \ncaptions\, concerns the problem of how to illustrate physiognomic 
  knowledge\, a field predicated on the representation of human truths on t
 he  visible surface of the body. Crucially\, Lavater insisted that physiog
 nomy  provided an avenue to scientific knowledge because the interior natu
 re of  things was 'impressed' upon the perceptible world. However\, Fuseli
 's  illustrations for Lavater's text\, 'impressions' of a different order\
 ,  appear to undermine and contradict this claim at every turn.\n\nThe com
 peting textual and visual layers of 'Essays on Physiognomy' give  voice to
  a bitter dispute between the Swiss minister Johann Caspar Lavater  and hi
 s compatriot\, the artist Henry Fuseli. I will argue that Fuseli and  Lava
 ter's dispute over the relationship between copy and original\,  legibilit
 y and visibility\, was also\, and more deeply\, a dispute about how  one k
 nows things to be true\, about the possibilities for and limitations  of p
 erceiving and communicating knowledge of the natural world at the end of t
 he eighteenth century. I will suggest today that Fuseli's  illustrations r
 egister a deep instability in certain epistemological structures\, and sig
 nal their imminent collapse.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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