Charles le Brun (1619–90) had a practical problem. Charged in 1669 with decorating Versailles, he had to fill crowded allegorical scenes with emperors and slaves, despots and demimondaines — and make each instantly legible. His solution was physiognomic typology: ox-faced men are dependable laborers, fox-faced men are thieves. Mathilde Montpetit’s note in The Public Domain Review traces where that system came from and what it carries.
The object itself has a strange history:
- Le Brun lectured the Académie royale de peinture on human-animal physiognomy on March 28, 1671; the text was lost
- The 1806 Dissertation reconstructs it through his protégé Claude Nivelon, published by the Musée Napoléon with an introduction from its curator of prints and drawings
- It contains thirty-seven etchings and engravings after le Brun’s drawings
- It follows the far more influential Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698), which turned Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul into a drawing manual — emotion has an external effect, so faces must be legible and impassive medieval faces are out
- The heroic template: aquiline nose, wide raised forehead, thick eyebrows, eyes angled with inner corners above the horizontal line. Anything else means Minerva has not visited
- The raven-man is prone to the “most condemnable” passions; the parrot-man’s beak marks him as a babillard outré, an extreme babbler
The curator insists this is not a lesson in morality but “the advancement of Art,” a rebuke to those who would read moral defect out of physical defect. The system cannot hold that line. Prominent men have prominent noses, everyone since Aristotle agrees, and virtue, class and guilt end up assigned by the shape of a face.
Read three hundred years later, it is an early draft of the race science and criminal anthropology that followed. A court workshop’s practical need generated a grammar of naturalized inequality — and the engraving has outlived the palace.