Skin deep: Barthes, Lavater and the legible body

Abstract

This article considers some of the issues raised by physiognomy in the work of its purported founder Johann Caspar Lavater and in the criticism of Roland Barthes. The major features of the discourse of physiognomy are considered in relation to aesthetics and literaryand artistic portraiture, then explored through an analysis of Barthes' Empire of Signs. The result is to bring to light a neglected and misunderstood doctrine of characterology and, more generally, to investigate the limits and possibilities of bodily description as a means of depicting personality.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.