The Language of Emotions : from the Physiognomy of Giovan Battista della Porta to the Neuroscience

Physiognomy as a doctrine has fascinated artists, scientists and ordinary people over the centuries, in every society. The intention, in this contribution, is to propose an interpretation of physiognomy as a “doctrine” (or a summa of suggestive intuitions) developed since antiquity by scholars from various disciplines, who have devoted a particular attention to deducing, or inferring, the psychological and moral characteristics of persons from the shape of their bodies. From those early pseudoscientific knowledge pathways, new interpretations developed at the turn of the 20th century in disciplines with authentic epistemological status, such as anthropology in the wake of Darwin’s studies (cf. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals edited in 1872) and medical anthropology. Both were founded on discoveries in anatomy and physiology. The psychological and cognitive sciences were also born, as well as experiments in psycholinguistics, paralinguistics, sociolinguistics and, eventually, the current discoveries produced by neuroscience. All without forgetting, however, the contribution of the psychoanalytic approaches that broadly influenced 20th century art and literature, social representations and even common life.