The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles le Brun's "Conference sur l'expression generale et particuliere.'

Spying the love-smitten Juliet from afar, Shakespeare's similarly afflicted Romeo could know the state of her mind, even though she uttered no words: "She speaks, yet she says nothing; what of that? / Her eye discourses, I will answer it."(1) If it is true that facial expressions can "speak," their subtle visual eloquence is ultimately in the mind of the beholder, who must interpret their meaning. Thus, Lady Capulet elsewhere advises Juliet to "read" the features of Paris, her hapless suitor (1.3.81-86):

Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face, And find delight writ there with beauty's pen; Examine every married lineament, And see how one another lends content; And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies Find written in the margent of his eyes.

Painters and sculptors of the Renaissance tradition also knew the expressive capacities of the face, and many sought to exploit its possibilities through careful observation and imitation. Leonardo, who theorized that "the [pictorial] figure is most praiseworthy which by its actions best expresses the passion of its mind," also sought universal rules for facial expression, instructing, for example, that a man who is angry should be portrayed with his hair bristling, his brow knit and lowered, his teeth clenched, and the corners of his mouth grimly set.(2) Leonardo and his contemporaries could also rely upon the ancient literature of physiognomics; for example, David Summers has shown that the scowling face of Michelangelo's David, with its mane of curly hair extending down to the nape of the neck and its intensely knit, "cloudy" brow, may reflect the "leonine" character type described in the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica.(3) Both examples suggest that artists perceived the necessity for a universal theory of facial expression, but this need must have become even more urgent for 17th-century artists such as Domenichino and Poussin, for whom the expression of human sentiment was, if not the whole point of painting, at least its most powerful persuasive strategy. Thus, it is not surprising that Domenichino's pupil, the painter-biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri, should have lectured on physiognomics at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome as late as 1675, or that Poussin's admirer, the great French painter Charles Le Brun, should have lectured on the same topic at the Academie Royale in Paris only a few years earlier.(4)

Le Brun also developed a highly sophisticated and comprehensive theory of pathognomics, that is, a theory of how the expressive movements of the features may reveal the passions, as distinguished from physiognomics, the discipline more properly concerned with the judgment of human character from the features themselves. For Le Brun and his contemporaries; both disciplines pertained to the larger matter of pictorial "expression," which may be defined as that set of techniques which enable the artist to communicate sentiments to the beholder. Although Le Brun's pathognomic theory is known through the text of his academic lecture on the subject, …