I have said, already, that symmetry is a characteristic of thinking beings, and I have explained the reason of this. The present case admirably illustrates it. This symmetrical arrangement of the hair bestows an intellectual air; and it well may, for, when natural, it derives its tendency to fall on each side, from the top of the head, either from the general elevation of the calvarium, or from the particular elevation of the forehead, which is characteristic of beauty in woman.
It accordingly announces in the individual higher observing faculties: hence, the ancient sculptors never omitted this in their highest personages: hence, we find it in the heads of Raffaelle and Guido.
“A fair hue, ξανθὸς,” says Winckelmann, “has ever been regarded as the most beautiful; and flaxen-colored hair was assigned to the most beautiful, not only among the gods, as Apollo [χρυσοκόμαν Απόλλωνα, golden-haired Apollo] and Bacchus, but also among the heroes: Alexander the Great had flaxen hair.” The modern Italians call Cupid “Il biondo Dio.”
Having concluded what I have here to say of the parts of the face, I may observe, that the different effects of the same face, even in a state of repose, have often been observed, never explained. I have, however, in another work, shown that the face is composed of motive, nutritive, and thinking parts or organs. Now, circumstances bring these variously into action; and the different effects alluded to, in reality depend on the motive, or the nutritive, or the intellectual expression being at the time, respectively, most apparent, or most attended to by us. The study of this subject, which I have not space here to develop, is of infinite importance to the man of taste, the physiognomist, and the artist. The latter cannot easily excel without understanding it.
Another curious fact, not hitherto observed, is, that though beauty of face is, owing to the power of the vital system, almost universal at a certain age, there is always a faulty feature, which the physiognomist may observe, and which ever continues to exaggerate, until it terminate in relative ugliness. Thus we scarcely observe the long upper lip during youth, in some women; and yet it afterward gives to them the sober grimace of baboons. We admire in youth the spirit of the piercing eye, and aquiline nose in others, to whom these afterward give the look of so many old hawks. In others, still, we are charmed with the round, rosy, and innocent cheeks, which, when they become paler and more pendent, confer on them the aspect either of seals or of mastiffs, according to other circumstances of temper and disposition. I could easily trace these, and many more, from youth to middle age, and illustrate them convincingly, by drawings: but I have no room for it here.
Each, indeed, of the subjects of the two immediately preceding paragraphs, is worthy of a volume; for the first is as essential to all judgment of existing beauty at the instant of its being before us, as the second is to all prescience of what beauty will very soon be—to all who have no love for a leap in the dark.
I add to this chapter but a few words on the very different organization of the head and face, and the very different mind, of the Greeks and Romans.
Whoever, for the purpose of comparing the heads of these two nations, may walk into the British Museum, will be struck with the difference between them.
The forehead is almost always rather narrow, and rather high, in the most illustrious Greeks; and this could not so uniformly have been so represented, in sculpture, unless it had been so also in fact. This is verified, in the third room of the Townley collection, by the heads of Homer, Hippocrates, Epicurus, Pericles, &c.—by the almost universal conformation of Greek heads, to which there are but few exceptions: Sophocles, in this room, and Demosthenes, in the eleventh, are rather broader.
On the contrary, the forehead, the face, the jaws, are excessively broad, and the cranium is depressed and low, in the Romans—in Severus, Nero, Caracalla, &c., in the sixth room, and in Tiberius and Augustus, in the eleventh; nor is this owing to the circumstance that these generally were men degraded in feeling or intellect, for nearly the same configuration is found in Trajan, Hadrian, &c., in the fourth, sixth, and other rooms. The faces of the Romans are not less ugly than their heads; and those of their women are absolutely detestable, as may be seen in Faustina, Plautilla, Sabina, Domitia, &c., in the sixth of these rooms.