Renaissance Studies

DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2007.00480.x

© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2007 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKRESTRenaissance Studies0269-1213© 2007 The Author Journal compilation © 2007 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.XXXOriginal Articles

Montaigne’s

On Phyiognomy

ADRIANA BONTEA

Montaigne’s

On Physiognomy

Adriana Bontea

Despite the abundance of physiognomic treatises published and republishedduring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, France, and Englandthe art of physiognomy never entered the classical philosophical tradition.Different from the theories of passions taken into account in various degreesby Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau or Kant when envisaging theforms and limits of rationality, the art of physiognomy interested mainlyphysicians and painters.

1

Given the wide spread of books on the subjectduring the Renaissance and the little credit they received from early modernphilosophers, it seems that the art of physiognomy proved to be incom-patible with subsequent philosophical inquires. The reason may be that itcrosses boundaries between the outer and inner worlds and identifies a junc-tion point inassimilable to the physical and mental parts, which philosophyattempted to unite. By providing access to the intermediary zone of ‘thepurest, the most exalted sensations’, as Lavater puts it, physiognomy suppliesan additional eye for a perception educated by experience. According tohim, its study and practice are among the most useful of human enterprises.On the one hand they increase natural perception, allowing not only theobserver to see more but also to enjoy what is to be seen: ‘Where the darkinattentive sight of the inexperienced perceives nothing, there the practicalview of the physiognomist discovers inexhaustible fountains of delight,endearing, moral, and spiritual.’

2

On the other hand, physiognomy cutsdown the number of probabilities accounting for men’s actions; as theydepend upon a multitude of circumstances, a distinct perception helps toreduce them by selecting only a few. On these grounds Lavater envisagedphysiognomy among the sciences to come, compatible at least in part withCartesian and Kantian epistemology. Similarly with other forms of knowledge,physiognomy is an arrangement of profuse information that the outsideworld sends out, assailing the sensory organs. By observing varieties andmaking distinctions, the physiognomist omits, amplifies or reduces somedata. What he keeps, is revealed in the signs he establishes, the words he

1

Marin Cureau de la Chambre, one of the king’s physicians, publishes in 1640 les

Caractères des passions

and Charles Le Brun, the president of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, gives several publiclectures on

L’Expression des passions

(1668 and 1678) and on physiognomy.

2

Essays on Physiognomy

(1775–1778), trans. by Thomas Holcroft (London: William Tegg, 1860), 43.

2

Adriana Bontea

invents, and the general propositions he forms. His contribution to knowl-edge is revealed by the adequacy of language to the sensation he seeks tocapture, sensation that is prompted in each individual when meeting theexternal world. There is ‘not a man who does not more or less, the first timehe is in company with a stranger, observe, estimate, compare and judge him,according to appearances, although he might have never heard of the workor thing called physiognomy’.

3

Lavater’s famous essays were an attempt to give to an old practice a newdignity. To achieve this he had first to discard its dishonourable past. Wellaware of the obscurity characterizing the earlier treatises on the subject, hebarely mentions them, for they are the source of confounding a sublimescience with the folly of divination and the puerility of chiromancy. Toperuse them would be enough, and the reading of Giambattisa della Porta’s

De humana physiognomonia

(1586) could count for having read them all. Nomatter how plainly Lavater dissociated himself from his predecessors, hiswritings did not achieve the intended purpose. While his observations andthe illustrative plates that accompanied them continued to be studied byapprentices and painters, the disrepute of physiognomy deepened in thenineteenth century, when the general knowledge of man’s countenanceoffered a basis for scientific racism, alongside physical anthropology andphrenology. And thus the oblivion, which engulfed physiognomy because ofphilosophers’ lack of interest in its premises and methods, was furthered,against Lavter’s intentions, by what was supposed to rehabilitate it, namely byits scientific procedure. How are we to understand such distrust in a form ofknowledge so often reformulated over the two centuries before Enlighten-ment that both philosophy and eighteenth-century physiognomic studiesrefrained from legitimizing? One of Montaigne’s last essays offers a key forassessing the scope of physiognomic inquiry beyond the suspicion with whichit was already met in sixteenth century.

The particular attention the chapter

Of Physiognomy

received from scholarsin the last three decades has been mainly triggered by Montaigne’s intrigu-ing writing practice. Considering the convoluted layout of the essay and theprominence of the figure of Socrates, several interpretations emphasized thestrategy and the degree of self-disclosure to which the fragments conjointlyconcur. Depending on the chosen framework, their integration has beenconsecutively understood as affirmation of paradox, emblematic self-portrait,or rhetorical makeover resisting the representation of the self.

4

Despite

3

Of the Truth of Physiognomy

(1783),

ibid

., 17.

4

Joshua Scodel, ‘The Affirmation of Paradox: A Reading of Montaigne’s

De la physionomie

(III: 12)’,

YaleFrench Studies

, 64 (1983), 209–237; Hope. H. Glidden, ‘The Face in the Text: Montaigne’s Emblem Self-Portrait(

Essais

III: 12),

Renaissance Quarterly

, 46/1 (1993), 71–97; Lawrence D. Kritzman, ‘The Socratic Makeover:Montaigne’s

De la physionomie

and the Ethics of the Impossible’,

L’Esprit Créateur

, 46/1 (2006), 75–85. Differentfrom previous studies, the present approach is an inquiry into the principles of the art of physiognomy as abranch of natural sciences during the Renaissance, and of its treatment by Montaigne.

Montaigne’s

On Physiognomy 3

differences of approach, all these readings share the common tendency ofconsidering physiognomy as a trope. Its function can be summarized underthree headings: to mark the continuity between nature and art, to state thedesire as well as the limits of transparent representation of the self, and toassign to us the role of decipherers in the process of reading. In all theseinstances, the guiding principles of sixteenth-century physiognomy booksappear to be deeply challenged by Montaigne’s essay. However true this maybe, it is worth considering the essay within the context of these treatises,which subsume the description of human characters under the general clas-sification of natural sciences. Because physiognomy disappeared from thecatalogue of our sciences after leading the way towards biological typologiesof human races, modern readers tend to refer to it only briefly. Yet itdeserves full consideration in order to comprehend Montaigne’s overallproject and to assess its place in history. The essay

On Physiognomy

can beconsidered as a key text for understanding the guiding principle ofMontaigne’s writings bringing together various matters: ancient and recentbooks, customs from home and from afar, past and present events, individualexperiences. It is with respect to the content alone that the topics can beregarded as heterogeneous for, as far as form is concerned, there is ananalogy between them, which the example of physiognomy makes it possibleto define. The analogy consists in the absorption in the writing form itself ofmaterial, which has been already circulated by previous books and which canbe used again for a different purpose.

The address to the reader states the aim of

Essays

as an attempt to leave tokinsmen and friends a genuine record of ‘mes conditions et humeurs’ with-out study or artifice.

[. . .] car c’est moy que je peins. Mes défauts s’y liront au vif, et ma formenaïfve, autant que la revrence publique me l’a permis. Que si j’eusse estéencore entre ces nations qu’on dict vivre encore sous la douce liberté despremiers loix de la nature, je t’assure que je me fusse tres-volontiers peinttout entier, et tout nud.

[. . .] for it is my own self that I’m painting. Here, drawn from life, youwill read of my defects and my native form so far as respect for socialconvention allows: for had I found myself among those people who aresaid still live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I assure youthat I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and whollynaked.

5

5

Au Lecteur

, Vol. I, 3. All French quotes are from P. Villey’s edition of the

Essais

, (Paris: Presses Uinversi-taires de France, 1988). The English translation is taken from

The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

, translated andedited by M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Press, 1991).

4

Adriana Bontea

Right from the beginning, Montaigne presents his project in terms commonto knowledge made available by the study of human nature derived fromphysiognomy. Detached as they are here from the more or less comprehen-sive treatises on the subject, concepts such as ‘character’ and ‘humours’seem to lack the proper sense they received when used to account for thenatural disposition of men based on physical features. Yet they still possessome of this familiar sixteenth-century meaning in so far as they help toarticulate the constraints of an endeavour essentially different from the newBaroque poetics of writing and painting. These terms represent condensedexpressions of necessary relations, which give to the essays their frame ofreference. Neither simple nor univocal, the physiognomic reference estab-lishes a kind of invariance of experience, characterizing the pattern accord-ing to which Montaigne’s chapters organize their content as a continuousreflection upon this very content.

The art of physiognomy provides Montaigne not so much with a set ofclassifications as one may find it in the several treaties of the time, where thenotion of character is derived from the shape of the forehead, eyebrows,nose, and mouth, sometimes the ears and other body parts.

6

It is not theidentification of character (vain or unfaithful) derived from the appearanceof features that calls his interest; even less the ability to prognosticate thefuture, according to obscure connexions between the constellation of starsand the balance of humours;

7

rather it is the principle of giving to sensiblequalities an interpretation which remains within the reach of sensibility.‘C’est une faible garantie que la mine; toutefois elle a quelque considera-tion.’ (‘Looks are a weak guarantee, yet they have some influence’ [III, xii,1200]). Gentle features contain a promise nature has imprinted on fore-heads, which actions can confirm or betray. The consideration of outerappearance supplies Montaigne with an auxiliary criterion for judgingaspects of human actions, which legitimate and recognized decision-makingpractices overlook. The formulation and application of human laws, forinstance, ignores the full extent of vile deeds. As they stand, laws prescribepunishment according to the wrong done to someone; yet, venturesMontaigne, had he have to whip an offender, he would show more severitytowards those whose kind faces are contradicted by malice. For they offendnature and pervert its work. If he gives credit to the art of distinguishingbetween happy and unhappy faces, between affable and dull ones, and thinksit worth discerning between severe and harsh looks, malicious and sad,scornful and melancholic, it is because there is value in differentiating

6

Bartholemæi Coclitis Phsyiognomiæ & chiromantiæ compendium

(Bologna, 1504) and Jean de Indagine,

Chiro-mancie et Physiognomie par le regard des membres

(Strasbourg, 1522) give a catalogue of features expressive ofcharacter, by mapping features to temperament in a comprehensive tabulation. Reprinted several time overthe century, they fixed the interpretation of human character to features of the face, colour of skin and lips,and lines of the hand, by succinct description supported by engravings of heads and palms.

7

On Prognostications

, I, xi, 44 and III, xii, 1201.

Montaigne’s

On Physiognomy 5

between overlapping qualities. These examples, favoured by physiognomictreatises, offer to Montaigne, the now retired judge, a terminology for describingexperience in line with the very perception supporting the constitution ofexperience as it is authorized by nature. Such a view into human dispositionssaves the richness of natural phenomena, which judicial decrees obliterate.Furthermore, the examples challenge the opposition between virtues andvices established by ethics. A century later, La Rochefoucauld’s maxims andmoral reflections would limit the works of nature in human actions to self-love (

amour propre

), the drive responsible for the highest and lowest deeds.Blurring their distinction, for both originate in the uniformity of humannature, the moralist will deny any reliance on appearance and thus willimpoverish the stock of natural expressions. The elegance, brevity, and sub-tlety of his aphorisms echo the lost faith in a nature that may serve us.

8

Montaigne’s essay shares with the physiognomy books of his time the trustin appearance as well as the conviction that natural forms and shapes informthe knowledge of the physical world, to which man and his arts also belong.Yet it evades the dogmatic explanation of character, which sixteenth-centurytreatises took for straightforward evidence when asserting direct linksbetween bodily features and human character. The example of Socrates’face, of whom the Greek pysiognomist Zophyre said that it reveals a vile anddistempered nature, as much as La Boetie’s ugliness, which was contradictedby a very beautiful soul, undermine the reliability of any positive decisionderiving moral virtues from appearance. However appearance is to betrusted. How far then? And under what circumstances?

In the opening lines of the chapter

On Physiognomy

, Montaigne reconsidersCato’s actions and speeches, by comparing them to Socrates’ common wayof representing human nature ‘ny eslevée, ny riche; il ne la represente quesaine, mais certes d’une bien allegre santé’ (‘as neither high-soaring norabundantly endowed: he portrays it simply as sane, though with a pure andlively sanity’ [III, xii, 1174]). No doubt Cato’s high merits recounted byPlutarch’s

Lives

, captivate our memory, yet Socrates’ discourses and deeds, asrecorded by his disciples and friends, provide an insight into a more vigorouscomplexion every encounter of his life confirms: war, calumny, tyranny,death, marriage.

‘Complexion’ is a term belonging to the vocabulary of physiognomy; itrefers to the combination of the four humours present within the humanbody, which themselves are a mixture of four sensible qualities: heat, cold,humidity and dryness. Each of them corresponds to one of the four simpleelements the Greeks have identified as parts of every existing body: fire, air,

8

‘Il semble que la nature, qui a si sagement disposé les organes de notre corps pour nous rendre heureux,nous ait aussi donné l’orgueil pour nous épargner la douleur de connaître nos imperfections’ [36],

Maximes

,edited by Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier, 1967), 14. (It would seem that nature, which has so wisely orderedthe organs of our body for our happiness, has also given us pride to spare us the mortification of knowingour imperfections).

6

Adriana Bontea

water and earth. Complexion or temperament designates the agreement ordisagreement between these qualities permeating the body and influencingits health. The art of physiognomy sought to introduce correlations betweenthese qualities and aspects of the body. The shape and arrangement of bodyparts was held for the visible counterpart of these occult qualities. Featuresof the face or limbs represent nature’s own means of expression, a repositoryrevealing the invisible mixture of humours while disclosing it.

9

Physiognomictreaties of the Renaissance do not always clarify these associations, but mostof them include engravings of human faces as evidence for the relationshipbetween melancholic or choleric humours and shapes of forehead, eyes orlips. The role of illustrations was to provide a visual guide registering theoutline of features considered as significant characteristics of temperaments.The growing number of images delineating human traits as much as thefluctuation in visual representations from book to book, contributed to thedisentanglement of physiognomic interpretations from the four initialhumours. The emphasis put on the variation of features overshadowed thesimplicity of the Greek doctrine of temperaments, which became a back-ground often difficult to recognize. Thus the increasing role of images, tak-ing over the explanations provided by texts that often repeat previousdescriptions, favoured the perceived distinctions and variations of thehuman traits over the constant four composing elements. The obliterationof the constancies of nature may well be responsible, among other reasons,for the subsequent philosophical indifference towards physiognomic trea-tises. And the attachment to the visual accuracy rendering the expression ofcharacter by the relative aspects of the body parts justifies their authority onthe art of painting and of medicine, as well as their handy use in everydaylife.

These books, which evolved into handbooks for physicians, painters, lay-men and kings, develop a double tendency of the time. On the one hand,they continue the Hippocratic notes establishing the progress of illnessesand eventually the remedy according to the natural disposition of thepatient.

10

On the other, they follow the thirteenth century divinatory prac-tices and astrological interpretations, which relate the body (face, spots, andlines of the hand) to the stars, and invest them with the power to foresee the

9

‘La physionomie consiste envers deux choses: à savoir composition et complexion du corps humain quidéclarent et montrent manifestement les choses qui sont en l’homme par dedans par des signes extérieures;comme par la couleur, la stature, par les mœurs des membres et figurations B. Colcles,

Le Compendion

(Paris,1560), 2.

10

The concept of ‘prognosis’ was developed by Hippocrates, whereby a physician can predict the courseand outcome of a disease based upon previous observation of similar cases. The progress of an illness wasinferred from the shape of the nose, vivacity of eyes, temperature of the ears and fingertips, colour of theface, roughness of the forehead. Compared to the usual constitution, they were supposed to assess theimbalance of humours and foresee imminent death or recovery. These notes form the first collection of datagiving to body parts the power of a sign denoting a qualitative composition and alteration, which later art ofphysiognomy will develop into reading of character.

Hippocrates

, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann,1923), Vol. II, Ch. 1.

Montaigne’s

On Physiognomy 7

future.

11

Montaigne disregards the second kind of interpretations out of hand,yet he retains the first. The consideration of natural dispositions, however,goes beyond the interpretative art of physiognomy limited by the doctrine oftemperaments. The borrowed terminology gives him the opportunity toarticulate a relationship between nature and humanity, outside the Christiandoctrine according to which everything natural in man is a sign of the Falland a regression from his first paradisiacal state. The antique examples ofSocrates’ discourses or of Cato’s speeches are, for Montaigne, on a par withthe natural qualities exposed by physical constitution: they are indicative ofa sound or strong complexion. The recurring term throughout the essayspostulates that particular forms of rhetoric, style or idiom, refer to equallysingular, but concealed natural properties. Its use envisages the relationbetween the two as itself sensible. Pleasure and utility derived from readingsgo hand in hand.

Careful interpretation of certain passages from the Bible had granted legit-imacy to astrology and physiognomy as far as their use is limited to practicalknowledge. Jean Bodin traced the sphere of their validity: they record knowl-edge of phenomena supported by ordinary experience that associates certainqualities with others outside any causal relationship.

12

Because the nature ofthe association is unknown, they are called ‘occult sciences’. Therefore theserelationships are not necessary, but only probable. For Montaigne, the worthof these associations has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the associ-ated terms. However, given the fact that they form the basis of current prac-tices and knowledge, including medicine, they deserve attention as far asthey recognize the continuity between various natural formations. Astrology,physiognomy and medicine place the living body in the overall picture of auniverse where active forces interact one with another. Even if the guidingprinciple of these associations remains obscure, the chain of establishedcorrespondences has its own value, for it renders the richness of a worldwhere all matters: plants, animals, metals, seasons, complexions, age, planetaryconjunctions, and body parts.

13

Despite the reservations he has about thetheories of causation that natural sciences of the time propose, Montaigneconstantly refers to the connections they institute. For, on the one hand they

11

The main shift in the interpretation of

complexio

from medieval treatises to Renaissance studies, concernsthe integration of astrology and divinatory practices based on similitude between the human body, animalfeatures and planetary movements. They will form the base of the ‘doctrine of signatures’ bringing under acommon denominator second properties, such as shapes, colours, dryness or heat, and qualities of tempera-ment, courage or fear. The human body in all its parts is a surfacing of active physical forces linking all beingsin a chain of infinite correspondences. Particular ways to classify the natural appearance of bodies in theRenaissance treatises of physiognomy written by Savonarola, Cardan and Giambattista della Porta aredescribed by Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche,

Histoire du visage

(Paris: Payot, 1994), 50–81.

12

De la Démonomanie des sorciers

(Paris: Jacques de Puys, 1581), I, V, 36–40. Montaigne responds indirectlyto this book where Bodin argues for highest punishments for sorcerers in the chapters

On the Lame

(III, xi).

13

On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers

, II, xxxvii, 883–4.

8

Adriana Bontea

remind him of an order where everything has its place; on the other handthey stipulate links between realms of experiences evading Christian teachingwhich privileges man’s position within the overall act of creation.

Nostre bastiment et public et privé, est plein d’imperfection : mais il n’ya rien d’inutile en nature, non pas l’inutilité mesmes, rien ne s’est ingeréen cet univers, qui n’y tienne place opportune. Nostre estre est simentéde qualitez maladives : l’ambition, la jalousie, l’envie, la vengeance, lasuperstition, le desespoir, logent en nous, d’une si naturelle possession,que l’image s’en recognoist aussi aux bestes.

Both in public and in private we are built full of imperfections. But thereis nothing useless in Nature – not even uselessness. Nothing has got intothe universe of ours which does not occupy its appropriate place. Ourbeing is cemented together by qualities which are diseased. Ambition,jealousy, envy, vengeance, superstition and despair lodge in us with sucha natural right of possession that we recognize the likeness of them evenin animals too. [III, i, 892].

The experience of his own body in pain as much as the contemporaryhistorical scene, when reformation led to deformation and public order wasinstated by disorder, prompt the consideration of a larger picture of theuniverse more respectful of the contingencies of life. The numerous associ-ations he invokes help Montaigne’s own attempt to connect random eventsoccurring in distant realms of experience. Illness and war, reading andadministrating justice equally contribute to the faithfulness of the picture hepromises to his readers.

Having to live at a time of violence and sedition, the public office heassumes on several occasions, confronts him with a historical landscape oneneeds to become fit to live in. Hence his relentless seeking of a state ofequilibrium allowing the contemplation of the historical setting beyondpathos and grief. One way to envisage a happy state beyond unhappy eventsis the search in the catalogue of previous knowledge and writing forms, fora temperance which is not exhibited but grown, not exposed but embeddedin the stuff of life. The language of philosophy, more than its teaching,renders the benefits of a balanced constitution. Identified and describedinitially by physiognomy, where it designates a healthy mixture of humours,the borrowed term receives in Montaigne’s writings a larger explanatorypower. Besides its relevance for describing his own illness and its criticalstages, the expression becomes fit for underpinning the political crisis of thetime as much as contemporary Baroque rhetoric. Backed by various stylisticforms, experience is not envisaged solely as a given, such as one may havelived it; it also entails what one may hope for. To this extent the essays aremore than the image of an empirical life recorded by the one who lived it;

Montaigne’s

On Physiognomy 9

they are also the image of a life worth living despite adverse events, be theywars or aging. Commentary upon favourite ancient authors, as much asdescription of current events, enriches the notion of character disclosed byphysiognomic treatises with more endearing expressions.

By offering a mould able to contain realms of experience coming fromseparate aspects of life, the physiognomic reference in Montaigne’s essays issimilar to semantic or aesthetic invariance, characterizing a set of trans-formations they help to shape. They occur as much in records of solitaryreading as in testimonies of parliamentary office or seigniorial deeds, offriendship, travel and aging. Thus character is a valuable term for describingthe work of nature in men, not because it refers to a raw product of natureas physiognomy tends to consider it, but a carefully shaped product gener-ated by human doings, be they books, political events, or private actions. Ithelps Montaigne to label expressions in language as well as historical orindividual actions. It also justifies the patchy form of the essays close to thepractice of record keeping, piling up reading notes and occurring events.Such a catalogue, no matter how heterogeneous and arbitrary it may seemto us, serves well Montaigne’s purpose to live behind a lively image of him-self. Such various matters are taken into account because they provide amemory for relatives and friends. But they also account for a way to catego-rize experience that the essays share with the natural sciences of the time,including physiognomy. And thus they augment the data upon which theexisting catalogue was based and subsume expressions that previous observa-tions ignored under its headings. In this respect, memoranda on books servethe same purpose as the record keeping of contemporary events. Both con-tribute to the enrichment of the catalogue, by including historical facts andpersonal experiences.

Of all usages provided by books, Montaigne favours the ones that supplyhim with good images he can borrow and use in his own writing. The quo-tations, paraphrases, and references offer him a collection of ready-madephrases he solicits precisely when his French prose falls short. In the chapter

On Books

he justifies this practice as a constructive way to measure his naturalabilities correctly by weighing them on the same balance where Virgil, Lucre-tius, Catullus and Horace stand. Compared to their inventions, his stock isfairly poor:

Car moy, qui, à faute de mémoire, demeure court à les tirer, par cognois-sance de nation, sçay très bien sentir, à mesurer ma protée que, monterroir n’est aucunement capable d’aucunes fleurs trop riches que j’ytrouve semées, et que tous les fruits de mon creu ne les sauroient payer.

Myself, who am constantly unable to sort out my borrowings by my knowl-edge of where they came from, am quite able to measure my reach andto know that my own soil is in no wise capable of bringing forth some of

10

Adriana Bontea

the richer flowers I find rooted there and that all the produce of my owngrowing could never match. [II, x, 458]

Rather than recording a failing, Montaigne gives here an exact account ofthe linguistic vernacular means at hand, able to express his ‘natural faculties’as opposed to the acquired ones. The modern poetical forms of the Spanishand Italian poets who wrote in their language are above all to be avoided.When compared to the Latin old poets, the new poetry of Boscán, Garcilaso,and Ariosto indulges in fantastic Petrarchic elevations, which make the orna-ment of all succeeding verse. Affectation and abundance of form are forMontaigne the signs of an exaggeration synonymous with an overstatementwhich, different from the ancients, is the main characteristic of modernwriters, who ‘montent à cheval puisqu’ils ne sont assez forts sur leursjambes’ (‘get up on their horses because they cannot stand on their ownlegs.’ [II, x, 462]).

Sketching a brief parallel between the

Æneid

and

Orlando Furioso

in themanner of Plutarch, Montaigne identifies the poetic style with birds’ flight:one trusts his wings and soars the heights always following his aim; the other,fluttering and jumping from tale to tale in short flights, perches at every turnlest his vigour should fail him. The association of qualities of style and birdflights suggests that meaning does not coincide with intention or matter ofbooks. Their sense goes beyond the identification and treatment of a topic.It hovers above them, releasing an ampler knowledge, which, like differentspecies of birds’ flying patterns the Romans believed are indicative of a goodor bad omen, discloses nature as a basis for all human undertakings. Divin-atory arts founded on auspices, before claiming to foresee the future, assertfirstly that natural phenomena ground and inform all man’s activities. Con-sideration of bird flights provided at the same time facts for natural historyand for scrutinizing events to come. Interested exclusively by the first, Mon-taigne attempts to asses writers and stylistic forms as legitimate headings ofnatural history. Plutarch, Seneca or Socrates may well furnish such entries onthe same account Pliny fits in his table of contents chapters on man, hisbirth, his organization and the invention of the arts, alongside sections onthe natural history of terrestrial animals, fish and birds.

14

In a brief remarkon the title of his chapters, Montaigne notes that the names of Scylla, Cicero,Torquatus are proper names designating both historical figures and forms ofeloquence.

15

In his introductory notice to

On Books

, Pierre Villey, who produced the firstmodern complete edition of the

Essays

1922–3, strongly emphasizes that thechapter is but a ‘chat’ (

causerie

) on the readings of the author and on hisparticular way of catching himself in their net. One learns of his taste and

14

Natural History

, Book VII, VIII, IX and X.

15

On Vanity

, III, ix, 1125.

Montaigne’s

On Physiognomy 11

judgment of several writers, ‘and nothing else’. And, continues Villey, hereall is personal, shedding light on Montaigne, and not on the books. In thisrespect, he warns, this is not scholarly literary criticism in the sense thediscipline was conceived in the editor’s time by the historians of ideas.Rather its relevance comes from being the critique of a man of taste, of agentleman.

16

Does this final distinction try to prevent the reader fromcomparing Montaigne’s practice to the objectivity Lanson began to grant toliterary history and himself?

17

And in more general terms, is literary criticism,understood as a tool for shaping the history of thought, to be conceived onlyin the light of the categories Lanson himself had defined at the beginningof the last century? Or would it be possible to secure a positive view on booksand their use by adding to the list of informed knowledge (‘circle’, ‘publics’,‘mentalities’), much older types of correlation, which, despite having losttheir meaning to us, belong legitimately to the history of literary practices?

If Lanson’s categories describing literature as an event occurring onseveral thresholds where readers and writers, sources and borrowings, thebiography of the author and the life of works meet, are not universal buthistorical, then one can expect that different associations formed in otherways can claim objectivity, even though they do not pave the road towardsthe sociology of literature or the history of reading. It is quite possible,therefore, that Montaigne’s chapter on books holds more than just an illus-tration of his taste. It may be that the function he ascribes to reading issimply not the same as the editor’s and his contemporary scholars’. WhenVilley opposes Montaigne’s enterprise to modern scholarly criticism, heactually points to the fact that what was understood in his time by literarycriticism and its methods is inseparable from the constitution of literaryinstitutions, be they universities, scholarly editions or academic publishers.Indeed, Montaigne’s endeavour remains outside this particular history. How-ever, his project falls into another history where it is possible to conceive ofcommon categories for describing eloquence and aspects of nature. It maybe that his essays contain the features of a humanism which the next threecenturies forgot twice: once when they detached the sciences and theirrationality from the totality of experience and favoured among all itspossibilities the constitution of proof and again when they severed humansciences from natural sciences. The growing interest in Montaigne’s bookthroughout the last century corresponds to the acknowledgment of writingas the original production of meaning which one can identify more preciselyafter Baudelaire, Proust and Valéry. Their works, no matter how different interms of genres and themes, allowed for a new integration between the mostconcrete aspects of material life, including the mute life of the physical body,

16

Essais

, Vol. II, 407.

17

Lanson’s programme for literary research was laid out between 1903 and 1910 in several conferencesand articles published together in

Essais de critique, de méthode et d’histoire

(Paris: Hachette, 1965). His study on

Les Essais de Montaigne

dates from 1935.

12

Adriana Bontea

and the life of language they shaped. Within this discontinuous history, Mon-taigne’s is not a precursor, neither are his essays an origin, rather a momentshedding light on both the questions of his time and ours.

18

The preference he shows for Latin poets contains not only a statement onthe modern vernacular Spanish or Italian style that his French prose seeks toavoid. It also points to a steadier attempt to shape a form and its idiom,which are in agreement with both the experience of books and a livedexperience layered by contingent life. The first takes in Montaigne’s essaysthe form of an undeniable pleasure urging him to respond to the Latinletters of Seneca or to Cato’s French sayings, as rendered by Amyot’s trans-lation of Plutarch. Yet the response is always a diversion from the originaltopic towards a lived experience that the matter of the book allows him toformulate. The lack of memory he invokes every so often indicates not somuch a deficiency of the mind as a natural inclination to receive and hosthis favourite pages in the same way one welcomes guests in his own house.Forgetting or, as he puts it, failing ‘retention’, hinders him from consideringbooks as objects only to endow them with the presence of lively beings. Thequotations, references or paraphrases are the bodies that give them the fea-tures of a lived experience. If his choice of books goes to Latin poetry, it isbecause its turns and images are highly evocative of the very things theyendow with expression. Such is his pleasure; and the practice of quoting isto bring colour to realms of experience ignored by antiquity.

In this respect, Montaigne’s commentaries also succeed in constructing apattern of connections, analogous to physiognomy. As arts of expression,both capture human beings in their natural nakedness. Like the anonymousheads illustrating the books on physiognomy, where lines and curves delineatethe temperament, discursive forms reveal the physics of the human constitu-tion on which metaphysics, that is the overall positioning of man’s existencein respect to nature and religion, rests. At a time when the art of paintingreserved the representation of nude bodies exclusively to pagan gods,Montaigne envisages physiognomy as a paradigm for his own project to painthimself, and thus to adjust the means to the matter. In this respect philoso-phy and poetry are equally instructive readings. He expects from both ‘quela science, qui traicte de la connoissance de moy mesmes, et qui m’instruiseà bien mourir et à bien vivre’ (‘only that branch of learning which deals withknowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well’ [II, x, 459]).This preference is far from being a metaphor. Rather it discloses the recog-nition that, different from animals and plants, which receive from nature thenecessary organs to survive, human beings need to shape their own. A versefrom Propertius introduces here the image of the rider who reins in his

18

A similar historical positioning of Montaigne’s

Essays

from the perspective of the meeting place betweenRenaissance and modern concerns is theorized by Richard L. Regosin with respect to the concept of justicein ‘Rusing with the Law: Montaigne and the Ethics of Uncertainty’,

L’esprit créateur

46/1 (2006), 51–63.

Montaigne’s

On Physiognomy 13

horse and makes it keep a poised pace: ‘Hac meus ad metas sudet oportetequus’. In this sense the endeavour to present himself according to theshape nature gave him, is closer to the natural sciences than to the art ofpainting. As a science of the concrete, physiognomy, offers a leading threadfor identifying qualities as an active force surfacing in organs and limbs asmuch as in language and deeds. The minute notes on health and eatinghabits, on taste for food, drink, love and books, are an attempt to ascribe toperception its organs. Such notes supplement the natural organs with addi-tional ones fit to render the experience of pleasure or pain to which noneof the five senses correspond. If the book is worth writing, if it takes so manydetours, it is because so many views are to be eliminated before the self canidentify its own standing point. When he writes that he is able to furnish‘essays in flesh and blood’

19

, Montaigne refuses any ready-made position thathas not been grounded in experience.

Several studies have emphasized the techniques of self-portraiture andhave established analogies between the essays and the art of painting.

20

How-ever, the address to the reader, opening the first edition of the essays in 1580when compared to Montaigne’s portraits representing him richly dressedand adorned with necklace and medallion, the difference is striking. Some-times he is portrayed as a gentleman with his coat of arms, and sometimesas the author of the

Essays

with all the encoding attributes of

vanités

paint-ings. Borders of flowers, serpents, geometric instruments, empty shellsand open books, common to Baroque imagery, testify to the remoteness ofnature, no longer accessible as a whole to the contemporary perception ofnature. It is only through fragments, removed from their original settings,that natural forms are recuperated as allegories of time. In this context,Montaigne’s project is an attempt to recover the vividness of nature and hiswriting practice a way to restore the confidence in its creations. The endeavourto present himself naked is nothing but the foreboding that its forms stillsupply fitting patterns for describing the whole range man’s experience.

One way to achieve nakedness as opposed to masking, artifice and deceitis to keep the rhetoric of writing in tune with the perception of the self. Theart of citation from ancient authors he so often resorts to, reveals a blank inhis language as much as it points to an unnamed region of his faculties he

19

On Some Lines of Virgil

, III, v, 951. The French expression is ‘des essays en chair et en os’, p. 844.

20

Trois portraits de Montaigne: essai sur la représentation à la Renaissance

(Paris: Nizet, 1990) by Marc. E.Blanchard identifies under the emblems of friendship, cannibals, and Sabina Popeea’s veil, the art of portrai-ture fitting for rendering the moving image of Montaigne’s description of the self;

The Matter of My Book:Montaigne’s Essais as the Book of the Self

by Richard L. Regosin (Berkley: California University Press, 1977)opened in Chapter 8, ‘On the Face of Things’, a new perspective on literary self-portrait by relating it toRenaissance techniques of portrait-painting, especially to Clouet’s continuous search for the physical, substan-tive quality of his canvases in order to achieve a ‘speaking’ likeness; and the

Essays in self-portraiture: acomparison of technique in the self-portraits of Montaigne and Rembrandt

(New York: Peter Lang, 1996) byAndrew Small, focuses on the quest for fidelity and on the essential nature of the model, and what the likenessof painting must grant beyond surface and appearance.

14

Adriana Bontea

is gaining access to. We may call it spontaneity. Extracts and references donot always comply with the rhetoric of amplification.21 Sometimes they fulfila reverse function by avoiding dressing a judgement or a topic in an osten-tatious linguistic turn. When Montaigne invites the reader to observe not theamount of his borrowings but the art of choosing and adapting them to hisown invention, he indicates a retrenchment of his prose. He thus retreatsbehind the most fitting figures, and let them speak what he means. ‘Je necompte pas mes emprunts, je les poise.’ (‘I do not count my borrowings,I weigh them.’ [II, x, 458]) One reason for such a practice is openly stated.In order to protect his pages from hasty judgments thrown upon recentvernacular writings produced by living authors, willingly to argue that withthe vulgar tongue, conception and purpose of new works are vulgar too,Montaigne takes refuge under those whose credit is not at stake. And thisconfounds the temerity of censors who might believe they attack him whenactually they strike Plutarch or criticize Seneca.

Weighing books and compiling quotations transform a wide Renaissancepractice of anthologizing, ranging from collections of poetical turns ( florilèges)to lists of arguments and rhetoric inventions (inventio), from adages to biblicalapophthegms,22 into features Montaigne assumes as his own. Such an appro-priation is possible because good images from books and the expressionsthey provide have a life of their own, streching beyond the original contextin which they first appeared. Montaigne’s weighing of citations and com-ments is recognition of their expressive power outside the immediate frame-work supporting them. Considering the cruelty of his time, Plato’s views thatno violence should be done against the peace of the country, even to cureit, come to mind. When he writes ‘j’estois Platonicien de ce costé là, avantque je sçeusse qu’il y eust de Platon au monde’ (‘I was a Platonist in that way,before I ever knew there had been a Plato in this world.’ [II, xii, 1180]), heenvisages a common ground all human beings share, and which make them

21 Amplification and development as current practices of Renaissance text production have been studiedby Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1979) and André Tournon, Montaigne, la glose et l’essai, (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983). Bothprovided a framework for understanding the essays as an original response to the ancient concept of imitation(copia) and to the medieval commentary (glose). Yet, from the perspective of contemporary vernacular writ-ings, the essays oppose the circumvallated poetical turns, to be later associated with Baroque forms. On theirbackground Montaigne’s writings are an understatement. In Montaigne’s Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in theEssays (London: University of London Press, 1974), Margaret McGowan mentions it among the most eloquentways to place the reader at the right distance and capture his attention and interest (17–19). Yet there isanother aspect of reduction, which all art products relay upon. Choosing only a few from among all propertiesof an object, the painter gives up the volume, the sculptor the smell or colour, in order to present the objectaccording to his art, means and tools, which in turn bring forth new qualities, be they light or depth. Pushingthe analogy further, Montaigne’s essays undertake the same task when he rephrases, amends or transformsold sayings to extract from them what is his own.

22 Among the most famous collections are Erasmus’ Adages, continually composed and recomposed, pub-lished and republished over thirty years (1502–1532), changing in focus and attitude, with new passagesadded, sections extended, and editorial alterations throughout. Montaigne’s writing practice is at times similarto Erasmus’. And the inscriptions on the beams of his library reveal the same attitude of plumbing old textsand giving them a fresh use.

Montaigne’s On Physiognomy 15

communicate one with another over times and between philosophicalschools. Here the brief invocation of Plato’s is not so much of an exampledrawn upon, since he already followed it before he knew he was doing so, asof a truth he perceives and communicates to Plato’s texts. ‘Car je fay direaux autres, non à ma teste, mais à ma suite’ (For I make others say for me,not before but after me.’ [II, x])23 summarizes his practice of reading andwriting well. If cultural productions are transmissible, if certain truths travelfrom one age to another, it is because their meaning is symptomatic ofcertain natural features, which differing from the eye or the ear, do not haverecognizable organs. The numerous passages commenting on written textsare a way to identify these organs and to establish the opaque connexionbetween properties of style, but also historical events or laws, and humannature. The nudity of man is retrieved from his cultural achievements. It isnature’s imprint in man that allows us to talk about ‘force’ or ‘beauty’ ofdiscourse. The high esteem Montaigne has for Amyot is due to the ‘simplicityand purity of his language’ and to his ability to successfully smooth andunravel Plutarch’s intricacies in French.24 Proper style delivers an insight intothe natural complexion of men, which, in turn, is responsible for rhetoricalqualities as much as for the wars they wage and the laws they invent. In thislight, Montaigne’s essays are a perpetual inquiry (inquisition) into a culturethat holds the key for understanding its forms. And his project to painthimself is but an attempt to construct an objectivity bringing together theperception of self, located in his body and mind, and that of the reader.Their meeting point is conceived under the heading of nature. Its boldpresence felt in any human action is, however, mute and secret. It takeshuman consciousness to underpin it and to expose oneself as natureintended. Judgement of books and minute records of dispositions shed lighton each other.

As for the changing matter of the chapters, they multiply the interroga-tions and question the worth of making books, when they are already somany at hand. If there is to be a book, such an enterprise, while consideringfrom one’s own situation the divergent answers ancient philosophy, customs,religion have given to man’s position in the world, inevitably will eliminatefalse solutions such as Cicero’s view of philosophy as preparation for deathor Christian concord through civil discord. However, in order to removethese answers, they have to be judged in medias res where doctrines andteachings adhere to life. Montaigne identifies this medium in the self, con-sidered as a stage or scaffold, on which actions, thoughts, decisions, feelingsof pain and imagination, refer to the general heading of complexion.

It is commonplace when describing Monaigne’s whole body of essays toemphasize the lack of any systematic order. The quotations to be drawn from

23 This addition to the 1595 edition is left out in the Screech translation, but preserved in Cotton’s version,(1685–1686), revised by W.C. Hazlitt (London: Reeves and Turner, 1877), Vol. 2, p. 86.

24 Work can Wait till Tomorrow, II, iv, 408 and II, x, 463–464; ‘simplicity’ renders ‘naïveté’.

16 Adriana Bontea

the author’s own confession to support this view are undeniably numerous,especially when related to the doubt he expresses when confronting anyform of generalization that science and its teaching rely upon. Most often,he accuses science of prompting a gap between common experience and itsprocedures. Let us leave aside the question of whether this is justified or notwhen referring to Aristotle’s description of movement. The description ofmovement receives its complete meaning in the light of both the Aristoteliantreatises on interpretation and on categories.25 What Montaigne actuallyopposes is the splitting between the ancient perception of natural phenom-ena, which was particular to the Greeks, and the persistence of a teachingthrough modes and figures of reasoning thought to be able to reflect alsothe experience of the Renaissance man.26

Les sciences traictent les choses trop finement, d’une mode trop artifi-cielle, et differente à la commune et naturelle [. . .]. Je ne recognois paschez Aristote, la plus part de mes mouvemens ordinaires : on les a cou-verts et revestus d’une autre robbe, pour l’usage de l’eschole. Dieu leurdoint bien faire ! Si j’estois du mestier, je naturaliserois l’art, autantcomme ils artialisent la nature.

Erudite works treat their subjects too discreetly, in too artificial a style, farremoved from the common natural, one. [. . .] I cannot recognize mostof my ordinary motions in Aristotle: they have been covered over and cladin a different gown for use by schoolmen. Please God they know what theyare doing! If I were in the trade, just as they make nature artificial, I wouldmake art natural. [III, v, 988]

Despite this misinterpretation of Aristotelian epistemology, which, after all,has a long history, Montaigne outlines a project he undertakes, which meetsthe same endeavour the Greek arts and sciences have formulated, no matterhow unfamiliar this formulation seems now to be. Science is not criticizedhere from the Sceptics’ point of view, which has been so often attributed toMontaigne, but for its ostentatious apparatus, interrupting the obvious com-munication between the object of enquiry and the way it represents theobject. The reserve is close to the remarks on vernacular poetry and itstendency to adopt a tone betraying common experience. To the rhetoric ofexcess and the hyperbolic style of poems corresponds contrivance in therealm of a philosophy fit for teaching, but inadequate for living. In this

25 The phenomenology implied in Aristotle’s categorization and its relation to the treatises on physics andon poetics, have been thoroughly studied by Claude Imbert in Phénoménologies et langues formulaires (Paris:Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 191–210.

26 Antoine Compagnon relates Montaigne’s scepticism to a critique of nominalism. ‘Si les universaux sontdénoncés, il doit donc être clair qu’ils le sont comme ressemblances détachées des supports sensibles ethypostasiées par le langage’. Nous, Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 30.

Montaigne’s On Physiognomy 17

context, contemporary physiognomic treatises meet the requirement of mod-elling their theoretical apparatus on lived experience, as their very existenceis the result of gathering information accessible to everyone. Moreover, theirclaim to be useful in everyday encounters depends on the assumption thatthe knowledge they provide is in accordance with common perception. Mon-taigne refers to this art, for it represents the last link between the trust innature codified by ancient sciences and late Renaissance experience.

The essay On Physiognomy brings together a eulogy of Socrates, reminis-cences of ancient books, reflections on their utility for a sixteenth-centurywitness of the religious wars, famines and plague, accounts of aging, and twoshort narratives relating two dangerous events that end happily. The first tellsof the invasion of his castle by a neighbour and his soldiers; the secondrecounts the event of a voyage when, crossing a forest, he is taken captiveand dispossessed of all his belongings. How does the title of the chapteraccount for such various matters? Writing on his headings, Montaigne warnsthe reader that the titles of chapters do not always embrace the whole mat-ter; they often denote it by some token, which he will add later, such asAndria or The Eunuch.27 The examples taken from Terence’s plays, where thetitles conceal under a common name the proper name to be revealed onlyin the end, suggest that Montaigne’s practice of writing constructs relation-ships which remain hidden yet perceivable through a recognizable sign. Thissign appears as an index bringing together intermittent experiences andidentifies a sensible connection between events occurring in distant spheresof one’s life. Historical events, philosophy and personal adventures call uponeach other in the essays and their writing is both a reflection on the gapbetween these experiences and an attempt to bridge it. Thus the title OnPhysiognomy points to perceived similarities between heterogeneous realms ofexperience while proposing a way to secure its whole range. Such an endeav-our, its purpose and its significance, are an alternative mode of categorizingexperience if compared to Aristotelian or Stoic categories.

On Physiognomy offers a privileged insight into the performative aspects ofwriting as a pursuit for significant relationships to be drawn outside thecause–effect connection legitimized by Stoic physics and metaphysics thatcontinued and refined Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises. Both philo-sophical investigations were conducted under the authority of physics, whichalso supplied the speech forms describing experience in terms of perception.Plutarch’s lines on Pericles’ eloquence bear witness to the way rhetoric andpersuasive style are governed by physics when he mentions that his sayingswere ‘thundering and lightning’ when he harangued the people, and thathe wielded ‘a dreadful thunderbolt in his tongue’.28 An avid reader of theLives, Montaigne takes upon himself the praise of natural style to be derived

27 III, ix, 1125.28 Plutarch’s Lives, trans. by John Dryden, (London: J. M. Dent, 1927), Vol. 1, 233.

18 Adriana Bontea

from the adherence of experience to its expression. If the matter of the bookturns out to be the self, it is not by statement of purpose, but by the verypractice of writing. When Montaigne writes ‘Je m’estudie plus qu’autresubject. C’est ma metaphysique, c’est ma physique’ (‘I study myself morethan any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.’ (III, xiii,1217]), he means that the subject he is treating is shaped by its very treat-ment. Neither physics nor metaphysics can offer full explanations of man;rather they are ciphers of the human tonality in the overall harmony of theworld.29 The art of physiognomy is one way, among more reputable forms ofinquiry, to acknowledge the nature of man as a question without answer, achase without catch. This endless inquisition pursued over centuries, to beyet started over again, is, for Montaigne, the sign of man’s healthy constitu-tion and of the natural vitality pressing him to tend further; ‘s’il ne s’avance,et ne se presse, et ne s’accule, et ne se choque et tournevire, il n’est vif qu’àdemy’ (‘it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, gettingdriven into a corner and coming to blows.’ [ibid, 1211]). Divergent schoolsof philosophy, customs, religious doctrines, historical events, are the exactmeasures of the life animating all human actions. If they are called upon, itis because they can be held for sensible signs to be associated sometimes withsound and sometimes with ill symptoms, as much as the minute register ofone’s own mood, health, or aging. The physiognomic description extendsfrom bodily human features, to historical time and philosophical teaching,in an attempt to secure the life of phenomena as lived experience. Wellaware of the heterogeneous aspects touched upon by his essay, Montaigneadmits the enigmatic correspondences the spheres of experiences share withone another. Their ambiguity rests on the very way language opens uptowards something which is beyond it, already there, yet shaped in the act ofutterance. Like Apollo’s prophetic speech, the art of physiognomy is butanother perplexing mean sorting experiences in terms of natural affinities.Thus, Montaigne not only recasts the Delphic inscription ‘know thyself ’ as‘what do I know?’ in his book and on the ceiling of his library, covered bycaptions on the vanity of knowledge. He also secures a place for an integraltruth embracing the whole sphere of the human. The essay On Physiognomy,while refusing the direct link between features of the body and moral char-acter, allows keeping nature among legitimate matters of enquiry. On theone hand, the chapter instructs us about the level of accessibility of natureto late Renaissance man; on the other, it fractures the ancient continuitybetween cosmic and human order by suggesting more indirect connections.Both are mirrored in the structure of the essay: it proposes to the reader thepieces of a puzzle to be combined together.

The common ground between the emblematic figure of Socrates, persua-sive style, wars and danger in one’s own home or on roads, is envisaged in

29 See on this point Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Lecture de Montaigne’, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 255.

Montaigne’s On Physiognomy 19

terms of feeling and perception. ‘Rien ne chatouille, qui ne pince’ (‘Nothingthrills without hurting’ [III, xii, 1185]) is the formulation under which thebloody theatre of history, Socratic examples of the everyday chosen amongthe sayings of carters, joiners, cobblers, and masons, and Montaigne’s bothown reflection on peasants and the account of his encounters with armedmen and robbers, all come together. Their association, no matter howremote, envisages different areas of experience as a radiant energy that feedsthe very writing of the essays. The drama of public death, which Montaigneconfesses to be content to witness, as much as Plutarch’s accounts of sedi-tions, Socrates’ last hours, like the peasants struck by illness, and the twoshort narratives communicate together in the most distant way: all of themare links in a long chain of connections between humanity and nature prov-ing the authority of the first over the second. Giving up on the ancient unitybased on common sense, which provided the concord of antique sciencesand arts, Montaigne is searching for another basis able to account for thetotality of human experience of his time. Looking for such correspondencesunder the heading of physiognomy is the trademark of Montaigne’s endeav-our to secure for natural phenomena the same richness they used to have inGreek and Roman antiquity. Then the universe was packed with meaning ineach of its forms: birds’ flutter, animals’ shapes and organs, rock formationsand human features. To this extent, his humanism reaches far beyond erudi-tion or mere adaptation of ancient tools to modern concerns. His task is tocapture the experience of his time, including historical and individual expe-riences as natural formations, and thus to liberate human events from sorrowand repentance.

The passages describing the desolate state of the country ruined by con-flicts present the civil war as a ravaging poisoning illness. Its confusing courseand wide spread annul any rational justification, be it in terms of doctrineor law, and refer human actions to the convulsions of a body infected fromhead to foot. The diagnosis of history in terms of epidemic disease removesthe faculties of reason from their original place. The image of a body, rav-aged by fits that the head is powerless to contain, pictures the overall dis-order that magistrates and chief commanders follow instead of commanding,giving up their ‘good and generous natures’ that are capable of justice.Corruption of the governing body is but a variety of corruption undergoneby all natural phenomena, plants, animals and human beings. It is not amatter of a primary cause, but of recognizing the process. In this respect, theessay On Physiognomy contains an illuminating reflection on the objectivity ofexperience and on its appropriate form of expression. Both are captured bywhat he calls ‘le pire visage des choses’ (‘the worst face of things’). The uglydeformity of historical events is likened to a head and body of ill appearanceforeboding death. Human history regresses to natural history, governed byconstant corruption and generation. In the realm of human beings, it takesthe form of destructive passions. Ambition, avarice, cruelty, vengeance are

20 Adriana Bontea

the features under which history exposes the lost creature whose communi-cation with the creator and with the rest of his work is gone astray. ForgettingGod’s promise of redemption, the created men dwells solely in the realm ofhistory where devotion and reformation appear as mere deviation from theoriginal order of creation. In this context, history takes the form of a tragicplot whereby the desire for salvation turns against itself, leading to damna-tion. On the scene of contemporary history the Christian drama preservesthe cruelty of ancient tragedies: ‘desmembrant sa mere et en donnant àronger les pieces à ses anciens ennemis, remplissant des haines parricides lescourages fraternels’ (‘dismembering of his motherland, tossing parts of herto be gnawed by her ancient foes, filling brotherly hearts with parricidalhatreds.’ [III, xii, 1181])

However, this is only one part of the picture. The same nature undergoingcorruption in some of its parts offers also a different insight. The two anec-dotes Montaigne recounts have a happy ending, like Terence’s plays. Thearmed men and their chief retreat from his castle peacefully, and the robberswho captured him give him back his possessions and let him go. Bothinstances tell of surprising events, which Montaigne weaves into the fabric ofthe chapter. The fortunate outcome evades rational explanation, if rational-ity means establishing causal connections and distancing the descriptionfrom sensible apperception. Yet there is justification if one trusts the appear-ances not as rigid determinations proposed by the treatises of physiognomy,but as an immanent life of the body, which is penetrated to all its parts bythe soul. The last lines of the chapter disclose the sensible qualities the bodyholds as an expressivity which invades the fragments of matter with spiritualmarks: ‘Si mon visage ne respondoit pour moy, si on ne lisoit en mes yeux,et en ma voix, la simplicité de mon intention, je n’eusse pas duré sansquerelle, et sans offence, si long temps’ (‘If my countenance did not vouchfor me, if people did not read in my eyes and in my voice the innocence ofmy intentions, I would never have endured so long without feud or offence.’[III, xii, 1205]) Meaning is not only certainty, as Descartes will envisage it, bysplitting the mind and body, and giving to the first all the authority herefuses to the second. There is also an ambiguous meaning, a lateral senseof events, which Montaigne seeks to bring forth by keeping the junctionbetween body and soul always a matter of inquiry. The enigma of the bodyhe presents here is that of an expression one is not aware of, yet one com-municates boldly. Thus Montaigne reshapes the art of physiognomy into anart of reading character on the face of events, of what happens. These con-tingencies do not teach us about tight determinisms, but about a freedom atwork, feeding the very happenings coming Montaigne’s way. Physiognomyceases to be the passive reception of nature’s work by a body that receivescharacter in the same way one gets the colour of one’s eyes. Throughout theessay, it becomes an active power that has its share in what happens. This iswhy physiognomy cannot prognosticate future events. It only can offer a

Montaigne’s On Physiognomy 21

paradigm for a body whose organs are open to different functions, whichactions determine in one way or another. Socrates’ ugly face so severely inter-preted by the physiognomist Zophyre, is one natural feature, but not the onlyone to account for his complexion. His discourses, if they contradict someappearances, reveal others, for language too is an organ, able to touch evenif difficult to localize. It renders body and soul interconnected, as Proust’s longsentences refer to his breath and his anxiety he may lose it before involun-tary memory stops pouring the perfume of the past. For Montaigne, physi-ognomy holds the sensible indices of an interpretation where signs are notfixed by treatises, but await to be equally drawn from deeds and words, fromhistory and personal encounters. Fitting them together in a single chapter isa way to admit that any ordering is superior to chaos, for establishing con-nections on the basis of sensible qualities instructs on the heuristic value ofany associative process. It grounded much of Renaissance knowledge.

One of the most famous books of natural science of the sixteenth centurypublished under the title of Magia Naturalis was a mixture of useful recipes,observations, experiments and quotations from classical writers, who areoften cited to support or challenge the property of plants or minerals. Writ-ing about his experiments, Giambattista della Porta lists together the oilsobtained from the seeds of citron, orange and lemon, and the earth broughtfrom the Isle of Malta among the most efficient antidotes against snakepoison.30 Modern biochemistry and geochemistry have respectively con-firmed these properties. Experiments conducted in specially equipped labo-ratories have made it possible to analyse their components and to find thatthe limonin, a bitter, white, crystalline substance identified in orange andlemon seeds, and kaolin, act as antigens, prompting the response of thebody’s immunization system. Yet for della Porta, their efficacy was based ontesting them in natural conditions, and their subsequent classification wasjustified by an equivalence based on shape and colour. The white pointedpips of citrus fruits and the pale clay stones appeared to him, beyond theireffectiveness, similar enough to the snake’s teeth in order to enter togethera sensible correlation and to infer, on the basis of their likeness, that one canfight against the other. In the terminology of the time, natural magic was adirect continuation of Aristotle’s, Theophrastus’ and Pliny’s natural history.The term ‘magic’ described an observation undertaken by the naked eye,opposed to examination by means of instruments, such as polished lenses orthe telescope, which Galileo was to construct at the beginning of the nextcentury, but which della Porta had already envisaged in a sketchy form inone chapter of the Magia Naturalis.31 Allowing for such connections was, for

30 Magia Naturalis, Book VIII, Ch. IX (Naples, 1558). The treaty was a best-seller for several decades. Re-issued five times in Latin editions during the next ten years, it was translated into Italian (1560), French(1565) and Dutch (1566). The English translation appeared in London in 1658.

31 Ibid., Book XVII, Ch. X describes the use of a combination of convex and concave lenses for viewingobjects far off or near at hand.

22 Adriana Bontea

della Porta, a way to confine himself within observations backed by naturalperception, without help from other tools or equipment. In the same line,he composed a physiognomic treatise, gathering analogies between humanand animal appearances.32 His classifications, no matter how heteroclite andarbitrary they may seem to us, preserve the richness of the catalogue. Decid-ing that all counts, animals, plants, metal, stones, he contributes to the cre-ation of a ‘memory bank’, that later undertakings, using different methods,may confirm or infirm.

Montaigne’s enterprise to paint himself naked and without artifice belongsto the same attempt to register all that matters: actions of the body, passionsof the soul, quotations, record of historical events and personal adventures.Their materialization is a further step taken in reshaping the physiognomicillustrations of Cardan or della Porta. To their diagrams of anonymous headsand bodies, he opposes a portrait in which all elements are expressive ofboth nature and humanity according to virtues equally declared by corporaland moral features. Painting likeness in a portrait of nature’s work requiresincluding oneself in the picture, one’s concrete situation, determined by thebody, the time, the culture. The taste for books, like the taste for certainfoods, is the testimony of choices Montaigne makes to confront adversity,and keep healthy when plague or war strikes his house. And his art of phy-siognomy is both physics and metaphysics.

University of Sussex

32 De Humana Physiognomonia (Vico Equense: G. Cacchi, 1586).