The authors try to review, critically summarize and enlarge the knowledge about different editions of Hagecius' metoposcopical writing. In the first part of the paper, the date of Hagecius' doctorhood in Bologna, the date of his journey to H. Cardano and relationship of the famous scholar to young Thaddaeus are newly clarified. The next part enriches our knowledge about the role of an unknown personality of Proxenus in the French translation of the book. The third part brings a detailed comparison of the first and second Latin edition. A brief description and evaluation of a newly discovered German translation forms the content of the last part.
Physiognomy is a method of recognizing the mental characteristics of a human while relying on his appearance, first of all the features of his face (the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the height of the forehead and the like). It was already known in the antiquity (Aristotle); it enjoyed great popularity in the late 18th century (J.K. Lavater). This article comprises three parts. The first contains the review of Aristotle’s physiognomy studies. The second reports the course of the discussion on physiognomy in the second half of the 18th century; it earned critical comments from I. Kant who called it “a cheap merchandise,“ and also from G. Hegel and G. Lichtenberg. The third part reviews the selected texts on Lavater and physiognomy published in the early 19th century Russian magazines; it also describes the way the face used to be presented in sentimental stories (a beautiful face being tantamount to a good heart) and presents direct notes on Lavater in The letters of a Russian traveler by N. Karamzin and in The journey from Petersburg to Moscow by A. Radishchev.
The author, reputable Czech theatre theoretician, produced a comprehensive and for theatre important monograph on the role of an actor's work with his/her own face in the rendition of a dramatic figure and, hence, the function of the actor's face in the process (not only strictly limited to facial expressions) of change of an actor to a dramatic figure. The author examines this process from the different angles and traces back the less-known areas of perception and the use of the face in the theatre cultures of the Far East. The paper focuses on the elucidation of the presence of physiognomy in ancient Chinese culture and in ancient theatre. It is concluded by the author's statement that Roman pragmatism, certain indifference to the metaphysical problems of early philosophy, was outweighed by an interest in concrete specificities, in the present or about to begin time of the foreseeable future. The Roman art of divination, which interpreted omens, both seen and heard, and built on the art of 'reading from the face', served the above purpose. Here the Romans availed the classical knowledge of Greek anthropometry and physiognomy and given principles of corporeal beauty.
This essay reconstructs the genealogy of the electro-physiognomic experiments which Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne conducted in the second half of the 19th century, and highlights their impact on the media dispositive of the early 20th century. The photographs in Duchenne’s Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (1862) are discussed as part of an epistemological shift from the semiotic regime of expression to the medial regime of switching by which they are indissolubly connected to the history of galvanism and electromagnetism on the one hand, and to the history of hypnotism and Expressionist film on the other. Due to this perspective, a main focus of this article is the archaeology of Duchenne’s special feature of the gliding cardboards that introduces the on/off operation of switching into both photography and “the body,” and its echo in films such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919/20) or Frankenstein (1931).
The article deals with three manuscript sources for study of the natural sciences and magic in the royal court of Wenceslas II. At first it is focused on MS Num. 513 in the Public Library in Bern called the Lapidarius et Liber de physionomia Aristotelis. This treatise was written in honour of Wenceslas II. and would be inspired by the Secretum secretorum. The next MS from the Vatican Library (Pal. Lat. 1253) contains medical treatises, supplemented with marginal notes, which relates to the use of laxatives by personalities of the Wenceslas II’s royal court. The third MS (Pal. Lat. 1253) contains treatises relating to medicine, use of talismans and other astrologicalmagical texts as well as drafts and copies of still unknown charters and letters from the time span 1285–1288.
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