Figures des passions: La pathognomonie de Charles Le Brun

King Louis XIV's official painter, Charles Le Brun, elaborated two models of “reading”; the body. The first one, inspired by the ancient physiognomists, surveys the analogies between human and animal features. The other, ushering in a modern pathognomy partly inspired by Descartes, codifies the signs of passion displayed on human faces: in such a perspective, the movements of the body (and more specifically those of the eyebrows) are supposed to express clearly and distinctly all the emotions of the soul by which they are produced. Thus, using the cartesian physiology as his starting point Le Brun built a semiology of gesture and a rhetoric of emotion that he systematized in the illustrated lectures held at the Royal Academy in 1668. They exemplify how classicism joined the picturesque and the discursive, the natural and the convention, the meaning of gesture and the meaning of words.     

Qohelet 4,13-16

It is suggested that Qohelet 4,13-16 consists of two loosely connected units: a gut-spruch unit (Qoh 4,13-14); and, an observation unit (Qoh 4,15-16). The gut-spruch unit asserts that a wise child is from birth endowed with the intelligence to eventually rule, while a foolish king has been intellectually deficient from birth, being in office would not improve him, and his liability increases with age. The observation unit records that having an old but foolish king many people would naturally vie for his heir, only later to become disappointed, because the heir is apparently no different than his father. The moral of both units is that there is advantage to innate intelligence.     

The singular vision of William Charles Wells (1757-1817)

William Charles Wells retained an interest in vision throughout his life. His first book was on single vision with two eyes; he integrated vision and eye movements to determine principles of visual direction. On the basis of experiments and observations he formulated three principles of visual direction, which can readily be demonstrated. In the course of these studies, he also examined visual acuity, accommodation and convergence, visual persistence, and visual vertigo. Insights into visual processing were mainly derived from observations of afterimages that were used to provide an index of how the eyes moved. His experiments enabled him to distinguish between the consequences of active and passive eye movements (later called outflow and inflow) as well as describing nystagmus following body rotation. After providing a brief account of Wells's life, his neglected research on vision is described and assessed.