Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

Fig. 98.

When one starts to make the first draft of an ornamental design, it often happens that the proportional relations are based upon certain geometric figures that might be called the skeleton of the ornamental design that is being constructed from them. Accordingly, when an artist wishes to judge of the harmony of proportions in a drawing, a painting, or a statue, he often reconstructs with his eye a geometrical design that no longer exists in the finished work, but that must have served in its construction. In short, there exist certain secret guiding lines and points which the eye of the observer must learn to recognise, to trace and to judge.

This is the way that we should proceed in studying the facial profile.

Let us take or assume a person with the head orientated (i.e., with the occipital point resting against a vertical wall, and the glance level). The line uniting the point of the tragus (the little triangular cartilage projecting from the auricular foramen), with the juncture between the nasal septum and the upper lip, ought, in the case of an æsthetically regular face, to be horizontal. We may call this line the line of orientation. If it proves not to be horizontal, but oblique, slanting either forward (long nose) or backward (short nose), this in itself denotes an irregularity which is plainly perceptible, even to the casual observer. But it is only in exceptional cases that this line is not horizontal; its horizontality constitutes the norm, in our hybrid races.

Naturally, it is horizontal only when the head is orientated in the manner above stated. Hence in normal cases its horizontality is an index of the orientation of the head. The orientated head is perfectly upright; and the line in question marks its level.

Everyone knows that this position of the head is known as that of "attention" and constitutes the position which formerly only soldiers, but now school children as well, must assume as a sign of salutation and respect toward their superiors. It is also the anthropologically normal attitude (as we may see in statuary). And it is a known fact that it is a position exceedingly difficult to assume intentionally with absolute accuracy.

In fact, it corresponds to an attitude which has to be called forth by some inward stimulus of emotion, and for this reason I would call it the "fundamental psychological line." The man who is conscious of his own dignity, or who hopes for his own redemption; the man who is free and independent involuntarily holds his head orientated.

It is not the vain man, or the proud man, or the dreamer, or the bureaucratic official, whose head assumes this involuntary horizontal level that is characteristic of the most profound sentiments known to humanity; persons of such types hold their heads slightly raised and the line shows a slight backward slant.

The man who is depressed and discouraged, the man who has never had occasion to feel the deep, intimate and sacred thrill of human dignity, has on the contrary, a more or less forward slant in the psychological line of orientation.