Divine Fury (35 page)

Of course, it took a special eye to read the revelations, a “physiognomic genius” most subtle.
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Lavater quoted Rousseau to suggest, none-too-subtly, that he himself had what it took to know. When in possession of such a gift, cultivated by the appropriate training, a physiognomist of genius such as Lavater could readily single out the features and discern the signs. He focused, fittingly, on the lamp of the soul. “Geniuses have stars of order (
Ordenstern
) in their eyes,” Lavater declared cryptically, emphasizing that the eyes of geniuses were distinct, set apart not only by their “glance, fire, light, and juice” but also by their “outer shape.” That last feature was “essential for genius,” though it was subtle and difficult to detect. Even painters of quality overlooked it. Other features were easier to see. “Intensive geniuses” (those who focused on one subject) were strong-boned, with “firm flesh”; they were also “slower and heavier in their movements” and had more pronounced foreheads than “extensive geniuses,” who tended to have elongated faces, and were by comparison delicate, light, and loosely built. Then again, “there are many kinds of foreheads and shapes,” Lavater observed, “of which you can say for sure that they are not built for genius.” He illustrated the point with a series of sketches revealing “stupidity in a high degree,” facial “flabbiness without any tension,” and other deficiencies. A pair of drawings of Voltaire, by contrast, was supplied to illustrate how a genius should appear.

Lavater’s two major treatises on physiognomy are filled with such musings. The face of Descartes, for example, clearly reveals his universal genius. “A physiognomy like his cannot possibly be misunderstood,” Lavater writes. Similarly, “in all the works of Rubens, you feel the spirit
of his own physiognomy piercing through,” whereas “the vast and powerful genius of Shakespeare” is “reproduced in characters perfectly legible in each of the four parts of his face.” Had Newton never written a single equation, “we should want nothing now but his portrait, to assure us of his deserving to be ranked among the greatest geniuses.”
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Observations of this kind make clear that Lavater’s own “genius” lay in his ability to tell people what they thought they already knew. Like a skilled astrologist or fortuneteller, he knew what they wanted to hear. To fail to recognize signs of genius even after they had been pointed out was to confess to one’s blindness. Genius looked like genius, after all. The truths of physiognomy were self-confirming, made manifest in a simple wrinkle or a line. That said, Lavater was prepared to acknowledge in his more candid moments that it was easy to be fooled. “The most transcendent physiognomic genius will be frequently in danger of deceiving himself, and of misleading those who implicitly confide in him,” he confessed. The same charge was leveled often enough in the nineteenth century by those who came to dominate the scientific study of genius, forgoing the face to focus on the brain and the skull. Dismissing Lavater’s subjective methods, they vaunted their own, allegedly more objective, approach. Yet the truth is that their methods were not all that different. Whereas Lavater believed in a one-to-one correspondence between inner force (genius) and outer expression (the face), scientists in the nineteenth century simply shifted the focal point of privilege, seeing in the size, shape, and distinctiveness of the skull and brain the outward expressions of inner power. Like Lavater, they focused on the exceptional and the distinct, seeing departures from the norm as worthy of the closest scrutiny, discovering genius in genius. And also like Lavater, who trained his acolytes to pay minute attention to the endless variations of the human countenance, those who succeeded him pored over their specimens with assiduous care.
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The similarity is easiest to detect in the German-born Franz Joseph Gall, the founder of “cranioscopy,” or what his student and collaborator Johann Caspar Spurzheim redubbed “phrenology,” from the Greek
phren
(mind), and
logos
—the knowledge of the mind. Given that phrenology, like physiognomy, would come in the second half of the nineteenth century to be judged of dubious merit by the majority of practicing scientists (despite, or perhaps because of, its tremendous popular success), Gall may seem like an easy target, and in some respects he is. Yet Gall’s foundational role in the development of subsequent research on the skulls and brains of geniuses was crucial. For although Europeans had suspected since the time of the ancients that the head might be the locus
of intelligence and the generative life-force of genius, Gall did more than anyone before him to establish its privileged place. As a medical student in Vienna in the 1780s, he had been impressed by the capacity of certain fellow students to retain large quantities of information. They seemed to him to share a common feature: large eyes. But after initially entertaining this physiognomic hypothesis, he abandoned it in favor of another correspondence. Individual differences in the composition of the brain, he came to believe, explained differences in aptitude, character, faculties, and traits. What the ancients had called
ingenium
, and what many into the eighteenth century continued to attribute to the confluence of the bodily humors, Gall attributed to the sticky matter housed within our skulls.
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It was that attribution, made publicly with increasing fanfare in the 1790s, that earned Gall the wrath of the Catholic Church and a subsequent expulsion from Vienna. His theories smacked of materialism. In a revealing early hypothesis—suggested in part by his autopsies of prison inmates and residents of asylums—Gall speculated that there was such a thing as a faculty of murder or theft. Later, he elaborated a whole series of attributes that corresponded to what he identified as the twenty-seven “organs” or modules of the brain, enumerating faculties such as a sense for sounds and music; a sense for mechanics, construction, and architecture; a “moral sense”; parental love; and “the instinct of self-defence” and courage, to name only a few. The particular configuration of one’s organs, he argued, left traceable impressions on the skull, and the nature, size, and shape of the skull, in turn, down to the narrowest crevice or ridge, could be read as a key to the contents within. The skull was the map of the brain, and the brain a map of individual character, a belief that later phrenologists put to dramatic effect, claiming to be able to read the mind according to the “bumps” or impressions made on an individual’s (living) human head.

Gall maintained a distance from his more enthusiastic proponents, who went on to establish movements of great popularity on the Continent, in Great Britain, and in the United States. Notwithstanding its bizarre expressions in practice, his theory of localized brain function—whereby individual regions of the brain correspond to particular faculties of the mind—was prescient, anticipating contemporary psychological and neurological accounts of cerebral compartmentalization. In a further irony, however, it was this aspect of Gall’s theory that most scientists who studied genius in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries chose to reject. Whereas Gall’s theory made room for multiple intelligences—a different genius for different kinds of things—his successors increasingly
regarded intelligence as a reified unitary constant, capable of different applications, certainly, but fundamentally alike across types. A gifted artist shared the same “thing” as a gifted scientist, philosopher, statesman, or general. And this “thing”—call it genius or call it intelligence, for gradually the two were conflated—could be located, described, and measured with precision.
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It was that conviction—that genius could be precisely located and accurately described through study of the skull and brain—that owed most to Gall. For although most nineteenth-century scientists rejected his view of the mind, they borrowed heavily from his methods of investigation. Gall’s deep conviction that intellectual and creative capacity was innate—inscribed in the brain, and recorded in the skull—served as the point of departure for subsequent craniometry. And his practices of collection and observation—closely studying brains and skulls, recording their dimensions, noting their similarities, and taking account of their differences—were the sine qua non of subsequent research. Gall in fact was a skilled (if largely self-taught) anatomist, and he developed important new techniques for the brain’s dissection. As a collector of skulls and casts of heads, he set a precedent for the whole of the century.

From very early on, Gall perceived the value—as well as the utility, from a public relations standpoint—of amassing a collection of notable heads. He had begun to collect them himself in the early 1790s, and in one of his first formal reflections on his work—a private letter that was later edited and published in a prominent Weimar journal by the noted German poet Christoph Martin Wieland—Gall called attention to his cranial needs as well as the prejudices that stood in the way of their satisfaction. Long-standing taboos against the desecration of the body were still in place, and although it might be permissible to pilfer the corpse of a common criminal or an idiot from the madhouse, what Gall desired were the heads of celebrated men. “If only you could make it fashionable for geniuses of every kind to make me the heir of their heads,” he observed, “then within ten years I would erect a splendid building, for which I have at present only a few exhibits.” Gall joked that it “would be dangerous” for geniuses like Kant or Wieland if he had the means to quickly dispatch with their heads, though he offered to contribute his own in recompense (“like a good Christ”). In the meantime, he looked forward to a future when one might bring together in a kind of cranial museum the “elect of the human race.” He regretted that past ages had not had similar foresight, preserving for posterity the skulls of Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, Hippocrates, Alexander, Frederick, Joseph II, Catherine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Bacon, Newton, and the like.
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As it turned out, Gall did leave his own head to posterity, and although it took somewhat longer than ten years to construct the kind of splendid building of which he dreamed in 1798, such buildings would, in fact, be built. Already by the time Gall was chased out of Vienna in 1805, he had established an informal museum of sorts, consisting of several hundred human skulls and plaster casts. When, after a hugely popular lecture tour through the German lands, he relocated to Paris, he began amassing new specimens. By the time of his death in 1828, his famed collection included busts and plaster casts of brains as well as the skulls of 103 notable men, 69 criminals, 67 mental patients, 25 pathological cases, and 25 “exotics” (non-European races).
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The inclusion of the skulls of so-called exotics in Gall’s collection, along with those of criminals and the mentally ill, is an important reminder that research on the brains and skulls of persons of eminence was conducted from the beginning in a context of comparison. “Average” individuals, as well as women, non-Europeans, and pathological outliers (criminals and the insane) provided a continuum on which geniuses were placed. As Gall and his student and collaborator Johann Caspar Spurzheim observed in 1812, “there is an important difference between three sorts of skulls: the skulls of idiots; the skulls of those humans who are mediocre; and the skulls of those outstanding humans who are great geniuses. The former ones are characterized by their small size, the latter ones are characterized by their magnitude.” The two organologists did not mention in this instance the non-European races, although already in the eighteenth century European scientists were judging the brains of Africans and others to be smaller than those of their allegedly more developed counterparts—a prejudice that would then be “confirmed” by countless studies in the nineteenth century. It is likewise true that Gall and his contemporaries (unlike their successors in the second half of the nineteenth century) generally did not compare the various specimens on their continuum directly, but chose instead to focus explicitly on single outstanding examples. It was largely for this reason that the skulls of known geniuses were so prized. Surely they would offer infallible signs of their singularity, revealing to science the secret of genius’s special election. Gall salivated at the prospect of acquiring a genuine relic of this type, actively making inquiries until his death in 1828. Only the year before, upon receiving a new plaster bust of the head of Goethe by the German philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano, he wrote back to say that such materials were invaluable “for a researcher of the organ of the brain.” “I implore you to bribe the relatives of this unique genius to preserve his head in nature for the world,” he told Brentano. Gall, to his
consternation, never secured this prize; when Goethe died in 1832, his skull and body were safely sealed in the crypt of the Duke of Weimar.
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Not all geniuses were so lucky. Indeed, in what has been described as a European-wide wave of “cranioklepty” inspired by the very studies that Gall did so much to promote, geniuses throughout Europe lost their heads. In 1809, at the death of Haydn, an admirer of the “Gall system” bribed a funeral worker to remove the skull, which he venerated privately in a handsome glass case until his own earthly departure. The skull was bequeathed, in turn, to the Viennese Society of the Friends of Music, where it was finally received in 1895 after a circuitous translation. There it was housed until after World War II, when it was at long last reunited with the rest of Haydn’s remains at the crypt of his patron, the prince of Esterházy, in Eisenstadt. The skulls of the Spanish Romantic painter Francisco Goya and of the Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg were similarly pilfered intact; Beethoven’s was picked over in parts. The composer may have vowed, famously, in a letter of 1801, that fate shall not “bend and crush me completely,” but fate had considerable success with his skull, which was broken into fragments in a crude autopsy performed in 1827. Several pieces were chipped away then, never to be seen again, and several more went missing at an exhumation in 1863. The latter “miraculously” resurfaced in San Jose, California, only recently. Their authenticity confirmed by DNA analysis, the bones were duly put up for sale.
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