The text we’ll be discussing follows on page 5 of this document. Since this is a book chapter

I've also attached a very preliminary synopsis of the book so participants in the seminar

can see where it fits into my overall thinking.

Synopsis: Book Proposal: Reading Faces: from Artificial Intelligence to Aristotle

Chapter 1: Introduction

Face as a dialogue between people - used to recognise individuals, ascribe characteristics and

emotions to them. AI systems being introduced to mimic this human activity with potential for bias,

inaccuracies and harm. Facial biometrics – present extent and future projections.

The aim of Reading Faces is to place the biases in AI systems that read the face in the long history of

the human understanding of the links between faces, character and emotions. Past histories

predispose people to accept results of AI as ‘common sense’. Direct lineage between history and

modern AI, e.g. expressions. Appeals to past in modern AI, e.g criminal face. Explore some of the

assumptions being made in past which are similar to modern AI. How history of fields may

predispose people to accept results of AI.

The book is concerned with the history of Western ideas about the face. Not a limitation because

narratives about the application and ethics of AI are consistently Western, and involve the USA and

Europe trying to force their ideas on the Global South. Are the ways of approaching issues,

languages, models from the West applicable elsewhere?

Such AI systems are seen as objective and dispassionate. Machines are supposed to ‘see’ without

bias but seem to be replicating older, historical ideas of the relationship between faces and

character. Important because AI/algorithmic systems are ‘decision systems’ – make decisions that

affect individuals. Is bias being written into AI once more? Theodore Porter – Trust in Numbers – if

people don’t know something they think using numbers/algorithms gives them objective knowledge.

But what is the ‘something’ they are numbering? Computers just run programmes – Ada Lovelace v

Turing. Garbage in Garbage Out (GIGO) – problems of data bias.

Chapter 2: Facial Recognition

Facial recognition in babies – human beings programmed to notice faces.

Facial recognition technologies at the borders. Live facial recognition in internal public space - China

and the Uighurs, the US Homeland Advanced Recognition technology system, policing in the USA,

European developments. Stigmatisation of the general public as criminal, invasions of privacy, and

systematic biases.

Identification before the camera. Problems of portraiture. Strangers in early-modern Europe – the

community as recognition/acceptance. Martin Guerre. Newspaper descriptions.

Alphonse Bertillon and anthropometrics – racial background of ideas. Problems with measuring

faces and bodies accurately in Bertillionage. Bertillionage really to professionalise police.

Bertillionage and dishonour. Bertillon and the mugshot – standardised face. The photofit.

Tichborne Claimant – problem of colonial fraud. Francis Galton and the profile. Fingerprinting

replaces biometrics.

Photographs as identity – criminals and passports. Lack of photographs in documents for citizens in

UK but not elsewhere. Colonial passports/passbooks. The photograph in South American

documentation. The international acceptance of the photograph in travel documents.

Facial reconstruction. History of the development of facial recognition technologies – a return to

Bertillon.

Chapter 3: Physiognomy and character

Digital physiognomy in the contemporary world – algorithms that read character from faces.

Potential inaccuracies and biases

Zhang, Qin, Dong, Gao, Xu and Hu, members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, writing in 2017,

claimed that the visual geometry in the photographs of 186 participants in their experiments was

quite strongly correlated with the latter’s scores personality tests. Other digital applications.

Projecting character onto others – psychometric research and the anthropology of Alfred Gell.

Physiognomy for the Greeks an innate understanding of the character of others. Aristotle’s optics

and the form of the soul. Greek physiognomy encompasses body as well as face and expression.

Absence in the Dark Ages? Reintroduced by 12th century renaissance. Neoplatonism – doctrine of

signatures on the body. We see ourselves in the mirror/selfie (Prudentia). Survival of physiognomy

despite Cartesian dualism. Physiognomy as humours – down into early 19th century and beyond.

Ying and yang in China.

Della Costa and Lavater – looking back to Aristotelian concepts of the Soul. Cuvier. Coleridge and

the romantics – form as immanent being. Hegel and the body as the sensuous soul. Fitzroy and

Darwin.

Continuation into the 20th century – contemporary parlour game or serious science?

Chapter 4: Identifying the Criminal Face

Digital attempts to identify the criminal face in the USA – racial biases and Black Lives Matter. But non-Western applications too - Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang, two Chinese academics from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, claimed (erroneously) in 2016 to have identified the criminal physiognomy fromanalysing 730 images of the faces of convicted criminals. Also, Sudhinta Sinha, an indian psychologist, believes criminals have a particular personality and links this to Lombroso.

Kalokagathia – beauty is virtue/ugliness is criminality from the Greeks to the modern world. Popular

concept of the ‘face of evil’.

Branding/mutilation of the body/face in Europe and colonies. Self-tattooing equated with race and

savagery.

The fear of the recidivist. Lombroso and the theory of evolutionary recapitulation – animals as

savage/savages. Lombroso’s aura of criminality – return to common sense optics? Lombroso a

spiritualist.

Francis Galton and types – far more important to him than fingerprints. Galton’s composites and his

concept of phenomenology. Galton assumes types exist prior to his production of composites –

hence ignores data to save his thesis.

Bertillon’s mugshots opposite of Galton – only the expert could identify the criminal.

Professionalization/scientific image of police. Bertillon’s images are objective but his archives of

criminal faces creates a stigma through social sorting – return to the problems of skewed data sets in

digital attempts to identify the criminal face. Replacement of physiognomy by psychology.

Chapter 5: The face of race

Problems of race in facial recognition/Google.

Includes profiles with faces – early societies such as Egypt and Assyria used profiles in non-sculptural

representations. Racial profiles.

The question of ‘race’ as a category.

Shift from Enlightenment belief in race as environmental to 19th century ideology of biological race.

Monogenesis v polygenesis in Europe and North America. Darwin and race. 20th century rejection of

race as a category.

Natives ‘look similar’, whether in European colonies or the Chinese in USA. Psychological

underpinnings? All natives as criminal types – Indian Raj, Lombroso and recapitulation.

Racial surveys – contemporary and projection into past histories. Racial photography and the

existence of types. Craniometry – supposed size and structure of the brain. Racial photography in

the Third Reich.

Galton and racial fingerprints – like reading palms? Galton and racial composites reflects his racist

assumptions. Composites are visual expressions of Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve. Eugenics to

refine central type not to create supermen – the Englishman is the superman.

Bertillon, anthropometrics and race – the bias inherent in police databases.

Short history of the jaw in Western thought as an example of racial science.

Craniometry and evolutionary science of the Piltdown Man.

Chapter 6: Facial expressions and character/emotions

Digital emotion detection in business and policing - Affectiva, Microsoft Azure, Paul Eckman Training.

Gavrilescu and Vizireanu, go one step further and map changes in facial expressions from video

footage of 64 subjects onto the latter’s 16PF scores to link expression with character. Inaccuracies

and potential injustices.

Greek understanding of expressions as part of total physiognomy of the soul. Le Brun/Descartes -

expressions reflect the motions of the soul, and the strange role of the pituitary gland. Explanations

of expressions. Buffon and Duchenne. Sir Charles Bell, the hand, the nervous system, and the soul,

in early nineteenth-century science.

Nineteenth-century materialism. Oken’s physical arguments. Charles Darwin’s Expression of the

Emotions as a naturalistic repost to expressions as spirit ‘speech’. His retention of the universality of

expressions and monogenesis. The problems of the lack of photographic objectivity.

The modern rediscovery of Darwin’s ideas by Silvan Tomkins, Paul Ekman and his colleagues, and the

idea of the facial repertoire, and their impact on digital emotion detection. Overlap of expressions

with facial character – habitual expression, or the impact of habitual expression on life histories.

Modern developments/controversies in the psychology of expression – non-universality of

expression and their understanding, the importance of context. Linkage of critiques to history of

expressions

Chapter 7: Conclusions

The relationship between historical and contemporary narratives of the face – can they be linked?

Why is the application of AI to the face so prevalent in non-Western scientific discourses? Why a

return to older ways of understanding the face – how does the present reflect the past? What are

the human rights issues with respect to the modern concepts of liberty, self-determination, and

personhood, of a return to seeing the person written on the body?

Chapter 4: Criminality and the Face of Evil

Digital ‘Capture’ of the Criminal Face

As we have already seen in Chapter 2, digital facial recognition systems run the risk of importing

racial biases into the identification of individuals as known criminals. However, attempts to go

beyond this to use AIs to identify facial features that indicate supposed criminal propensities in

individuals, who may never have committed any crimes, are plainly even more problematic.

Early in 2020 a press release from Harrisburg University in the United States claimed that two

professors and a graduate student had developed a facial-recognition system that could predict,

solely on the basis of a picture of their face, whether someone would be a criminal with ‘80 percent

accuracy and with no racial bias’. The release said the paper would be published in a collection by

Springer Nature, a leading academic publisher. Nearly 2,500 machine-learning specialists,

sociologists, historians, and ethicists, subsequently released a public letter condemning the paper,

and Springer Nature then confirmed that it would not publish the research.1 Those signing the

letter, collectively calling themselves the Coalition for Critical Technology (CCT), went on to argue

that the paper’s claims ‘are based on unsound scientific premises, research, and methods which …

have [been] debunked over the years’. The letter argues it is impossible to predict criminality

without racial bias, ‘because the category of ‘criminality’ itself is racially biased’, especially given the

racial biases in the training sets of images used to ‘educate’ AI systems.2 The emphasis here on race

in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and concerns about racial profiling in the USA is

understandable3, and the whole question of the history of the ‘face of race’ will be examined more

closely in the next chapter. However, it should be noted that there are examples of similar claims

for the ability to identify the criminal face in other contexts where the issue of racial profiling has

less overt relevance. The question is, therefore, not simply whether the face can be linked to

criminality through race but whether the face can show criminality at all. Why should anyone think

that there is such a thing as a criminal face in the first place? How can the criminal be a ‘type’ when

the definition of crime changes over time. Did the signators of the US Declaration of Independence

have criminal faces because the majority (41 out of 56) owned slaves?

In the case of China, for example, we have already noted the work of Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang,

whose article on the ‘Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images’ carried such a ringing

endorsement of the objectivity of AI systems.4 Their analysis was based on the photographs of 730

criminals, of which 235 committed violent crimes including murder, rape, assault, kidnapping and

robbery; the remaining 536 were convicted of non-violent crimes, such as theft, fraud, abuse of trust

(corruption), forgery and racketeering. The assumption here is that murderers and thieves share a

common quality, ‘criminality’, which sets them apart from law-abiding citizens, although some of the

1 Wired website: https://www.wired.com/story/algorithm-predicts-criminality-based-face-sparks-furor/ (accessed 06/11/2020)

2 Medium.com website: ‘Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline: Crime prediction technology reproduces injustices

and causes real harm: https://medium.com/@CoalitionForCriticalTechnology/abolish-the-techtoprisonpipeline-9b5b14366b16 (accessed 06/11/2020)

3 Carlos Torres, Azadeh Shahshahani and Tye Tavaras, ‘Indiscriminate power: racial profiling and surveillance since 9/11’, University of Pensnylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, 18 (4), 2015, pp. 283-310.

4 Wu and Zhang,‘Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images’.

‘law-abiding citizens’ will, of course, be people who have committed crimes but have not been

caught. Wu and Zhang claim that their photographs of criminals are not mugshots but normal ID

photos but 330 of the ID photos were provided ‘by the ministry of public security of China’, and the

others by a city police department. These were then compared to the faces of ‘non-criminals’ taken

from the web. They claim that their system is able to identify criminals with 90% accuracy. When

looking at the specific features that distinguished criminals from non-criminals they point to the

curvature of the upper lip, the distance between the two inner eye corners, and the angle enclosed

between lines from the nose tip to the two corners of the mouth. The distance between the two

eye corners is shorter in criminals, i.e. their eyes are closer together. However, in a YouTube

presentation with the expressive title of ‘Calling Bullshit 5.5: Criminal Machine Learning’ the US

computer scientists Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West have argued that Wu and Zhang have merely

developed a ‘smile detector’, since they are comparing sombre official portraits with jollier

promotional photographs.5 It should be noted that psychological testing appears to show that happy

mouths (smiling) and angry eyebrows (frowning) affect whether people see others as trustworthy or

scheming.6

Despite such issues commercial companies are making claims that that they have developed

software that will allow the identification of criminal behaviour from faces. Faception, a business

based in Tel Aviv, claims to be able to:

analyze faces from video streams (recorded and live), cameras, or online/offline

databases, encode the faces in proprietary image descriptors and match an individual

with various personality traits and types with a high level of accuracy. We develop

proprietary classifiers, each describing a certain personality type or trait such as an

Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist. Ultimately, we

can score facial images on a set of classifiers and provide our clients with a better

understanding of their customers, the people in front of them or in front

of their cameras

They also claim that the software can identify white collar offenders and paedophiles.7 The company

appears to base these assertions on the conflation of two arguments, that personality is genetically

determined, and that genetics plays a large role in determining face shape.8 The fallacy here is that

even if both personality and faces are genetically determined, itself a contentious argument, there is

no reason why the two sets of genes should be linked in any way.

Linking criminality to biology can also be found in the work of an Indian psychologist Sudhinta Sinha,

who in 2016 published a paper based on a study of 37 male criminals in the district jail of

Dhanbad (Jharkhand) in India and 36 ‘normal’ controls.9 Each participant was given a personal

datasheet and Cattell's 16 personality factors (16PFs) questionnaires for assessing their socio-

5 Carl T Bergstrom and Jevin West ‘Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big data’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=rga2-d1oi30 (accessed 03/04/2019)

6 Alexander Todorov, Face Value: the Irresistible Influence of First Impressions (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 80-2, 116-17.

7 Faception website: ‘Our technology’: https://www.faception.com/our-technology (accessed 30/7/2020)

8 Faception website: ‘About us’: https://www.faception.com/about-us (accessed 30/7/2020)

demographic variables and different personality traits.10 Once again, the range of crimes

committed was wide - murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, forgery, ‘dacoity’ (banditry), and so on.

The results for the criminals indicated high scores on intelligence, impulsiveness, suspicion, self-

sufficiency, spontaneity, self-concept control factors, and very low scores on emotional stability

on Cattel's 16 PFs scale as compared with the ‘normal’ controls. To support her findings Sinha

continues:

we can quote the study of Lombrosso (1836–1909), who is regarded as the father of

criminology, [who] … proposed that some people are born with an innate

predisposition to criminality and antisocial behaviour. He believed on the basis of his

study that criminals are a separate species who had not evolved in the same way as

“normal” humans. Further, he concluded that criminals had distinguishing physical

features that set them apart from the noncriminal population.11

This formulation reveals a misreading of Cesare Lombroso’s ideas, to which we will return later.

However, it is also an indication of the manner in which the field of criminal psychology, and

attempts to identify the criminal face digitally, can hark back to historical precedents. Given the

attempts of the British during the Raj to do this with respect to its Indian subjects, which we will

discuss in the next chapter, It is somewhat ironic that an Indian scientist should try to do something

similar today. In what follows the long history in the West of the belief that certain facial features

indicate criminality, if not ‘evil’, will be examined.

Kalokagathia – the Beautiful as Virtuous, the Ugly as Sinners

Although the concept of the criminal ‘type’ tends to be understood in the contemporary discourses

discussed above as an aberration from the ‘normal’, ancient Greek thinkers also saw virtue as having

a positive value, and being associated with the beautiful. This was summed up in the term

kalokagathia, which implied both physical and moral beauty. It should be noted that ‘beauty’ here

is not that ideal standard of feminine beauty that Naomi Wolf castigated as a tool of male patriarchy

in The Beauty Myth12, since the original Greek concept was an ethical concept, and could be applied

both to men and women, and indeed perhaps most properly to the former.

In Platonic thought that which is good, as a ‘reflection’ of the ideal Good, can only be beautiful, and

vice versa.13 As Plato wrote in the Lysis: ‘For I affirm that the good is the beautiful’.14 This united the

9 Sudhinta Sinha, Department of Psychology, S.S.L.N.T. Women's College, Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India,

‘Personality correlates of criminals: A comparative study between normal controls and criminals’ Industrial Psychiatry Journal, 25 (1), 2016, pp. 41-46

10 Heather E. P. Cattell and Aland D Mead, ‘The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF)’, in Gregory J Boyle, Gerald Matthews, Donald H. Salofske (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment: Personality Measurement and Testing (Volume 2), pp. 135-59.11 Ibid., p. 42.

12 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (LondonL Chatto and Windus, 1990).

13 Anthony Synnott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 79.

14 Plato, Lysis, or Friendship: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/lysis.html (accessed 10/11/2020)

outward appearance with an inner quality. In a simplified manner one could say that only he (and it

was always he) who possesses both qualities (who is handsome, fair, but also honest and upright)

can be considered beautiful. Similarly, Aristotle saw physical beauty as having order, symmetry and

moderation, which also applied to moral beauty and virtue15 Much the same argument was made by

the Greek lyrical poet Sappho, for whom, ‘He who is fair to look upon is good, and he who is good

will soon be fair also’.16 The ideal of a balance of qualities of body, will, and mind can still be found

today in the Fundamental Principles underlying the Olympic Movement’s Charter.17 The corollary of

this is, of course, that the ugly lack virtue and ‘the Good’. In this context the criminal body is linked

to the lack of the intrinsic quality of Goodness, and so to its polar opposite, Evil. The Greeks, as we

have already noted in Chapter 3, thought in terms of the physiognomy of the whole body but the

face has increasingly become the focus of Western beauty and, of course, of the ‘face of evil’.

In this view of the imperfect body the Greeks were seconded by that other key source of Western

thought, the Old Testament Bible. According to Leviticus Chapter 21, verses 16 to 21:

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

17 Speak unto Aaron, saying, Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that

hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God.

18 For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man,

or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous,

19 Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded,

20 Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or

scabbed, or hath his stones broken;

21 No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer

the offerings of the LORD made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to

offer the bread of his God.

Thus, the disfigured and deformed were in some sense polluted.

However, the ancient Greek philosophy of aesthetics appears to have been mostly lost in the wreck

of the classical world with the fall of Rome. Patricia Skinner has noted when discussing

disfigurement in the tribal societies of the first Christian millennium in Europe, that deformity or

scarring seems to have been seen as a sign of defeat and disgrace rather than of evil. The disfigured

were more objects of ridicule than of fear.18 Indeed, mutilation preceding, or equated with,

15 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Beauty’: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/#ClaCon (accessed 10/11/2020)

16 Sappho, Poems, III, 98: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_Sappho/Chapter_3#P98 (accessed 10/11/2020)

17 Heather Reid, ‘KALOKAGATHIA: Understanding Olympic Ethics in Terms of Beautiful Goodness’: Academia website: https://www.academia.edu/7039424/KALOKAGATHIA_Understanding_Olympic_Ethics_in_Terms_of_Beautiful_Goodness (accessed 14/11/2020)

martyrdom, could guarantee some form of veneration in Byzantium.19 However, the rediscovery of

the texts of the ancient Greeks during the twelfth-century, consequent upon the Christian

reconquests of the Islamic libraries of Sicily and central Spain, infused Christian philosophy with

Greek notions of kalokagathia that influenced much subsequent thinking. Thus, Abbot Guibert of

Nogent (d.1125) echoed a similar sentiment to Aristotle regarding physical appearance: ‘If their

internal models are beautiful and good, those who manifest their image, especially if they do not

depart from their measure, are beautiful, and hence they are good.’20 Six hundred years later the

English philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, could still understand beauty

and virtue as linked:Tis impossible we can advance the least in any Relish or Taste of outward Symmetry and

Order; without acknowledging that the proportionate and regular State is the truly

prosperous and natural in every Subject. The same Features which make Deformity,

create Incommodiousness and Disease. And the same Shapes and Proportions which

make Beauty, afford Advantage, by adapting to Activity and Use. Even in the imitative or

designing Arts, (to which our Author so often refers) the Truth or Beauty of every Figure

or Statue is measur’d from the Perfection of Nature, in her just adapting of every Limb

and Proportion to the Activity, Strength, Dexterity, Life and Vigor of the particular

Species or Animal design’d. …

Shou’d not this, one wou’d imagine, be still the same Case, and hold equally as to the

MIND? Is there nothing there which tends to Disturbance and Dissolution? Is there no

natural Tenour, Tone, or Order of the Passions or Affections? No Beauty, or Deformity in

this moral kind? Or all owing that there really is; must it not, of consequence, in the

same manner imply Health or Sickliness, Prosperity or Disaster? Will it not be found in

this respect, above all, “That what is BEAUTIFUL is harmonious and proportionable; what is

harmonious and proportionable, is TRUE; and what is at once both beautiful and true, is,

of consequence, agreeable and GOOD?21

One could point, of course, to Shakespeare’s Richard III, his witches in Macbeth, or Caliban in

The Tempest, as obvious examples of the early-modern tendency to equate deformity and

ugliness with evil.

It is important, however, not to take these arguments too far. Naomi Baker’s work on the

‘unattractive body’ in early-modern Europe, for example, points to the contradictory attitudes

held towards ugliness in that period. God could be seen as creating the ugly as well as the

beautiful, and all would be made beautiful at the final resurrection. Shaftesbury might see a

link between the nature of the soul and the beauty, or ugliness, of the body but the great

French philosopher Rene Descartes saw an absolute distinction between the two. A virtuous

mind could exist in a corrupted body. Additionally, beauty such as that of Eve could be seen as

18 Patricia Skinner, Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),

pp. 45, 105. See also, Patricia Skinner, ‘’Better off dead than disfigured?’ The challenge of facial injury in the

pre-modern past’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, XXVI (2016), pp. 25-42.

19 Ibid., p. 81.

20 Cited in Skinner, Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe, p. 105.

21 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 3 [1737]: Online Library of Liberty: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/shaftesbury-characteristicks-of-men-manners-opinions-times-vol-3 (accessed 12/11/2020)

only skin deep, and yet there was also a widespread popular belief that ugliness indicated a

blemished soul. Attitudes differed, of course, according to context, social status and gender –

ugly women were seldom given the benefit of the doubt.22

Nevertheless, the University of Texas labour economist Daniel Hamermesh has argued that

being seen as ‘attractive’ by others still has positive benefits today. Extrapolating from

research on how students estimate the attractive qualities of individuals, and factoring in 12

other categories (education, age, race, marital status, etc.), he argues that below-average-

looking men earn 17% less than those considered good-looking, whilst below-average-looking

females earn 12% less than their ‘attractive’ counterparts.23 Banks also seem to be more

willing to loan to those considered good looking, and voters are more likely to vote for them.24

‘Beautiful people’ seems to inspire confidence, and a desire on the part of others to be

associated with them.

It should be noted, however, that Hamermesh’s work was not based on any absolute criteria of

beauty, as the Greeks would have understood, simply on how participants in psychology

experiments rated the ‘attractiveness’ of individuals’ faces in photographs. These preferences

could be in part historically and culturally defined, as in the way that people in the West today

tend to think tanned and slim bodies are attractive, whilst well-to-do Georgians associated

these characteristics with outdoor working and poverty, preferring pale skin and a certain

plumpness.25 As Darwin was already pointing out by the late nineteenth century, differing

people around the world have very different ideas as to what constitutes beauty.26 The quality

of ‘attractiveness’ for Hamermesh’s students appears to have been associated to some extent

with being young, healthy, and possible white, which may reflect the makeup and preferences

of the young, healthy and white students whose estimation of beauty Hamermesh’s research is

based on.27 Hamermesh, it should be noted, dodges the question of whether racial features

are considered ugly or beautiful by considering race as a separate, but ‘similar’, variable to

‘attractiveness’.28 We shall return to the supposed relationship between race, facial features,

and character in the next chapter.

Of course, there might be biological reasons why students might be attracted to healthy

potential mates, with average features that might denote the absence of a potentially harmful

22 Naomi Baker, Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 2010).

23 Daniel S. Hamermesh, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful (Oxford: Princeton University

Press, 2011), pp. ???

24 Ibid., pp. 76-7, 145

25 Bruce and Taylor, Face Perception, p. 119.

26 Charles Darwin, Descent of Man Vol. 2 (London, John Murray, 1871)

http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1871_Descent_F937.2.pdf, p. 354. (accessed 25/02/2021)

27 Hamermesh, Beauty Pays, pp. 29-30, 127.

28 Ibid., pp. 58-9.

genetic endowment.29 Could this also be what underpins the notion of beauty as ‘balance’ and

‘harmony’ found in classical concepts of kalokagathia? Nevertheless, however we understand

‘beauty’ here, Hamermesh’s work does emphasise the positive connotations associated with

‘attractiveness’, and the negative view of those not so ‘gifted’. In addition, some other

psychological research has suggested that people do indeed associate ‘attractive faces’, with

people who have more desirable personality characteristics, higher occupational status,

greater parental competence, and greater social and personal happiness.30 This is not

necessarily an equation of certain facial features with a lack of virtue, moral failings, or with

evil tendencies, but the attitudes revealed provide a context in which it is possible to slip into

such ways of seeing, especially in colonial contexts. However, criminals and colonial peoples

were generally considered ugly, as we shall see below and in the next chapter, and to some

extent these terms were interchangeable in the early-modern and nineteenth-century periods.

Marking the Body: Criminality and Savagery

Even if the natural face in itself did not necessarily show evil in the early-modern period, those in

authority were eager to modify it through branding, tattooing and mutilation, to make this very

connection. As Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish, the criminal in the early-modern

period was not a person, rather he or she was a body that had rebelled against the authority of the

sovereign. This ‘out-law’ was to be physically punished in revenge by the State, rather than

imprisoned. Moreover, just as punishment was through the criminal body, so was identification.31

The deviant identity of the wrong-doer was to be written on the body itself. Certainly the Christian

West has always tended to regard the marking of the body for the purpose of identification as

indicating infamy, drawing in part upon the biblical injunction in Leviticus, 19:28, ‘Ye shall not make

any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord’. The Devil was,

of course, supposed to identify the bodies of his followers with witches’ ‘marks’, or ‘teats’ on which

their familiars were supposed to suckle.32

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that branding and ear-boring, as a means of marking

the deviant status of the criminal, was statutory punishments in England from at least the late

fourteenth century. A labour statute of 1361 declared that fugitives were to be branded on the

forehead with ‘F’ for ‘falsity’. The Vagabonds Act of 1547 (1 Edw. 6, c.3) ordered that vagrants

should be branded with a ‘V’ on their breast. Ear-boring was introduced in 1572, when a statute (14

Eliz. I c. 5) was passed requiring all those defined as vagabonds to be ‘grievously whipped and

burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron.’ By an Act of 1604, incorrigible rogues

were to be ‘branded in the left shoulder with a hot burning iron of the breadth of an English shilling

29 Bruce and Taylor, Face Perception, pp. 120-5.

30 Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster, ‘What is beautiful is good’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(3), (1972) pp. 285–290.

31 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House 1977). Originally published as Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison (Paris : Gallimard, 1975).

32 Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and evidence in early-modern England’, Past & Present 198 (2008), pp. 33-70;Heikki Pihlajamaki, ‘Swimming the witch, pricking for the Devil’s mark: ordeals in the early modern witchcraft trials’, The Journal of Legal History, 21 (2000), pp. 43-4.

with a great Roman “R” upon the iron.’33 Suspect criminals were invariably stripped and searched

for such marks on their bodies.34 Similarly, convicts at the Old Bailey, the central criminal court in

London, who successfully pleaded benefit of clergy35, or were found guilty of manslaughter instead

of murder, were branded on the thumb (with a "T" for theft, "F" for felon, or "M" for murder), so

that they would be ineligible to receive such leniency again. The branding was a public affair, and

took place in the courtroom at the end of the sessions in front of spectators. For a short period,

between 1699 and January 1707, convicted thieves were branded on the cheek in order to increase

the deterrent effect of the punishment, but this rendered them unemployable, and the practice

reverted to branding on the thumb.36 Such marking of the skin might be associated with other

forms of mutilation. Thus, the seventeenth-century Puritan William Prynne, who was punished for

writing pamphlets against Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, had his ears cut off

and his nose slit, as well as being branded with ‘SL’ (‘seditious libeler’) on his cheeks. Prynne

subsequently composed some Latin verses explaining that the 'S. L.' with which he had been

branded actually meant 'stigmata laudis' (‘sign of praise’, or ‘sign of Laud’).37

Such stigmatising of the criminal body was also found elsewhere in Europe and its colonies.

Branding as a method of criminal identification was exported to the British colonies. The colonial

East Jersey law codes of 1668 and 1675, for example, laid down that a letter ‘T’ should be branded

on the hand for burglary, and ‘R’ on the forehead for a second offence. Similarly, ’A’ for adultery

was also used as a mark in Puritan New England.38 In 1777 Thomas Jefferson and others worked

on a proposed new criminal code for Virginia in anticipation of the success of the American

Revolution. The proposed new sodomy law therein would have eliminated the death penalty but

replaced it with castration for males and the boring of a hole through the nose of a woman. The

proposal did not become law, but clearly showed that mutilation was still considered acceptable

under current legal thinking.39 The French system of branding used G or GAL for ‘galères’, TF

33 A.L. Beier, Masterless Men : the Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (London : Methuen, 1985), pp.

159-60.

34 Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: change, crime and control in the capital city, 1550-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 431.

35 In English law, the benefit of clergy was originally a provision by which clergymen could claim that they were outside the jurisdiction of the secular courts and be tried instead in an ecclesiastical court. Eventually the benefit of clergy evolved into a legal fiction in which first-time offenders could receive lesser sentences for some crimes (the so-called "clergyable" ones).

36 Proceedings of the Old Bailey Website: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Punishment.jsp#branding

(10/10/2008).

37 William Lamont, ‘Prynne, William (1600-1669)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn., ed.

Lawrence Goldman, January 2008: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22854 (Accessed on 9/11/08).

For the broader history of the identification of people in England see: Edward Higgs, Identifying the English:

Personal Identification 1500 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2011).

38 Simon A. Cole,.Suspect Identities. A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (London: Harvard

University Press, 2001), pp. 7-8.

39 Julian P. Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 325.

(‘travaux forcés’), R (‘recideviste’), V (‘vol’), and VV (‘recidive et vol’). Similarly, the 1532 Carolina

penal code of the Holy Roman Empire, which was still in operation in Germany in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, also provided for the branding of convicts.40

However, in line with the general shift noted by Michael Foucault from punishing the body to

punishing the mind41, such disciplinary practices began to be phased out in the late eighteenth

century. Branding as a punishment for those receiving benefit of clergy in England ended in 1779,

and the last convict sentenced to branding at the Old Bailey received the sentence in 1789.42 Much

the same happened in France, where the branding of criminals was abolished during the French

Revolution in 1791, reinstituted by Napoleon in1810, before being abolished finally in 1832.43 The

practice was also being abandoned in Prussia and Austria in the early nineteenth century.44

Nevertheless, the practice of tattooing the flesh was also regarded by colonial officialdom as a

mark of criminality, or savagery, well into the modern period. The Greeks and Romans

branded and tattooed slaves and criminals, although the Christian Emperors of the fourth

century AD forbade tattooing of the forehead or face.45 However, the British Raj in India was

quite willing to use godna, or penal tattooing, on its non-Christian subjects. In the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth-century penal tattoos were inscribed on the foreheads of

convicts convicted in the Bengal and Madras presidencies. A colonial regulation of 1797

directed that all Bengal Presidency life prisoners should have their name, crime, date of

sentence and division of the court by which convicted marked on their foreheads, although

there seems to have been great variation in the extent of the information so inscribed.46

Moreover, at least one important thinker, the early nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy

Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, could envisage a role for facial tattoos in the imperial

metropole. Bentham was much exercised by the need to ‘facilitate the recognition and finding of

individuals’, since, ‘Everything which increases the facility of recognising and finding individuals, adds

to the general security’. However, he believed that in England, ‘the indication arising from a name is

vague; suspicion is divided amongst a multitude of persons; and the danger to which innocence is

40 Clare Anderson, ‘Godna: Inscribing Indian convicts in the nineteenth century’, in Jane Caplan (ed.) in Written

on the Body. The Tattoo in European and American History (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 106-7.

41 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, passim.

42 Proceedings of the Old Bailey Website: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Punishment.jsp#branding (10/10/2008).

43 Stephanie Solinas, ‘Comment la photography a invente l’identité’, in Pierre Piazza (ed.), Aux origines de la police scientifique: Alphonse Bertillon, precurseur de la science du crime (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2011), p. 71

44 Peter Becker, ‘The standardized gaze: the standardization of the search warrant in nineteenth-century Germany’, in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: the Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 155.

45 C. P. Jones, ‘Stigma and tattoo’, in Jane Caplan (ed.) in Written on the Body. The Tattoo in European and

American History (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 2, 13.

46 Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004), pp. 15-24.

exposed, becomes the security of crime.’ He therefore advocated giving everybody a unique proper

name made up of the family name, a single baptismal name, and the place and date of birth.

Moreover, alluding to the common practice of sailors printing their names on their wrists in case of

shipwreck, he suggested that the entire population should have their names so tattooed. Bentham

recognised that English public opinion would not stomach this, especially after the French

Revolution, during which many persons owed their safety to disguise, but he hoped that education,

and the use of ‘great examples’ might bring them round. He therefore hit on the visionary, or

perhaps rather dotty, idea of getting the aristocracy to tattoo their titles on their foreheads, through

which ‘these marks would become associated with the ideas of honour and power.’47

However, the view that bodily markings should be shunned could be subverted by special or

marginal groups in the West in the past, and has become something of an anachronism in the

contemporary world. One standard interpretation is that the use of tattoos in Britain as part of

seafaring and criminal cultures followed the reporting in the late eighteenth century of native

peoples tattooing themselves in the South Seas, and became a part of bodily modification by the

middle of the nineteenth century. [Figure 4:1] However, earlier accounts in eighteenth-century

newspapers suggest that there was at least a nascent subculture of bodily marking among men and

women before that time, perhaps drawing on the practices American Indians. Thus, in 1739, for

example, one young convicted thief was described in London as:

a Rogue of about 15 years of age convicted of stealing Weights out of Sadler’s Shop in the Borough, from a Natural Propensity to Villainy, [who] had on his Breast, mark’d with Indian ink, the Poutraiture of a Man at length, with a Sword drawn in one Hand and a Pistol discharging Balls from the Muzzle in the other, with a Label from the Man’s Mouth, G-d d-amn you, stand. This the Rogue would have conceal’d, but a Discovery being made thereof, he was order’d to shew his Breast to the Court, who were all shock’d at so uncommon a Sight in so young a Ruffian.’48

47 Jeremy Bentham, ‘Principles of penal law’, in John Browning (ed.), The works of Jeremy Bentham

(Edinburgh; W. Tair, 1843), vol. 1, p. 557.

48 Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, ‘Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World’ Journal of Social History, Volume 39, Number 1, Fall 2005, p. 49.

Figure 4:1 William Hodges Portrait of a Maori Chieftain, October 1773

[Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15743088]

Whatever its origins, tattooing certainly appears to have been something that convicts transported

to Australia in the nineteenth century did to themselves on board ship. Thus, of a sample of 939

women arrested in Paisley in Scotland in January 1841 to November 1847, only 6 were said to be

tattooed, and the rate amongst Paisley’s arrested men at the same date was under 4% (78 out of

2,161). By contrast, of 1,226 male convicts sentenced in Scotland and disembarked at Hobart in the

years 1840 to 1853, 26% had tattoos. The records of over 2,000 female convicts transported from

Britain to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s revealed 25% tattooed on arrival.49 Another peculiar

subculture which was an early adopter of tattooing appears to have been the European aristocracy

and monarchy. One tattooist at the end of the Victorian period, Ted Riley, claimed to have tattooed

the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, Prince and Princess Waldemar of Denmark, Queen Olga of Greece,

King Oscar II of Sweden, the Duke of York, Lady Randolph Churchill and the Duke of Newcastle.

Edward VIII of England and his sons, including his successor as King, George V, were similarly

tattooed.50

there has plainly been a resurgence of interest in tattooing the body in the West since the Second

World War51, although the marking of the face still appears to be somewhat problematic. Thus,

British newspapers such as The Times were quick to pick up on the fact that Nanaia Mahuta,

appointed as New Zealand’s first Maori foreign minister in late 2020, had a moko, or traditional

Maori tattoo, on her chin.52 The New Zealand author Olivia Pierson went so far as to describe

Mahuta’s moko on Twitter as ‘ugly’ and ‘uncivilized’, which led to one publisher withdrawing her

books from sale.53 Like the concept of kalokagathia, role of tattooing is Janus-faced, both an

external ascription of criminality by authority, and an assertion of group belonging, or an expression

of inner identity. As such, it can be seen as both the opposite of physiognomy, or as a supplement

thereto.

Lombroso and the Criminal Face

49 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Ian Duffield, ‘Skin deep devotions: religious tattoos and convict transportation to Australia’, in Jane Caplan (ed.) in Written on the Body. The Tattoo in European and American History (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 128.

50 James Bradley, ‘Body commodification? Class and tattoos in Victorian Britain’, in Jane Caplan (ed.) in Written on the Body. The Tattoo in European and American History (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 135-55.

51 For an anthropological discussion of this phenomenon see, Enid Schildkrout, ‘Inscribing the Body’, Annual

Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), pp. 319-34

52 Times website: ‘Jacinda Ardern appoints Maori MP Nanaia Mahuta as foreign minister’: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/ardern-appoints-maori-mp-nanaia-mahuta-as-foreign-minister-nkvxksbn5 (accessed 19/11/2020).

53 New Zealand Herald website: ‘Author Olivia Pierson labels Nanaia Mahuta's moko 'ugly, uncivilised', Mighty Ape pulls books’: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/author-olivia-pierson-labels-nanaia-mahutas-moko-ugly-uncivilised-mighty-ape-pulls-books/WW6GEQON7BK4HADJW43Z3FPMEE/ (accessed 19/11/2020)

One late nineteenth-century figure who certainly saw tattoos as uncivilized, indeed savage,

and indicative of criminality, was the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), who

was professor of forensic medicine and hygiene, and later of criminal anthropology at the

University of Turin from 1878 onwards.54 Lombroso, whose work, as we have seen, still has

resonance with some contemporary criminal psychologists, rejected the established classical

school of criminology, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature.

Instead, using concepts drawn from physiognomy, degeneration theory, psychiatry, and Social

Darwinism, Lombroso's theory of anthropological criminology was based on the belief that

criminality was inherited by certain groups. In addition, someone ‘born criminal’ could be

identified by certain physical features, especially of the face, which confirmed them as savage

or atavistic.

The key to understanding Lombroso, and much other Western criminology in the late nineteenth

century was the rise of concern over the ‘recidivist’ or ‘habitual’ criminal. Rather than criminality in

general, criminologists across Europe were increasingly obsessed by the figure of the repeat

offender, who recommitted crimes even after they had been punished for earlier offences. These

‘habituals’ had to be distinguished from the majority of the ‘honest’ poor, or those who had been

tempted into a single crime by circumstances but who would respond to punishment by returning to

the norms of civilised society. This figure was officially recognized in Britain as early as the 1830s by

the Parliamentary Select Committee Report on Transportation, which described ‘habitual criminals’

as repeat offenders in need of special regulatory attention.55 Over a decade later, Henry Mayhew

and John Binny’s Criminal Prisons of London further differentiated ‘habitual criminals’ from ‘casual’,

‘occasional’, ‘accidental’ offenders, and law-abiding citizens.56 The British 1869 Habitual Criminals

and 1871 Prevention of Crimes Acts, drew a line between those to whom the rights of ‘free-born

Englishmen’ applied and those habitual criminals to whom they did not, and set out a system of

sweeping regulation of the everyday lives of the latter by the agents of the state.57 However, the

concept of the ‘habitual’ was not something peculiar to Britain. Zachary R Hagins, for example,

notes the concept in France in the pages of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables in the mid-nineteenth

century.58 French laws of 1885 (on transportation and restrictions on the rights of settlement), and

of 1891 (on suspended sentence), were also based on the principle of dividing offenders into two

categories, first offenders and recidivists.59 Lombroso also embraced this concept, and biologicalised

it by claiming that up to 70% of criminals were programmed from birth to commit crime.60

54 Mary Gibson, Born to crime; Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminolgy (London: Praeger, 2002), pp. ???

55 House of Commons Papers: Report from the Select Committee on Transportation; together with the minutes of evidence, appendix, and index, PP 1837, XIX, p. xx.

56 Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London: Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1862), pp. 88-9.

57 Martin J. Weiner, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (Cambridge: 58 Zachary R Hagins, ‘Fashioning the ‘born criminal’ on the beat: juridical photography and the Police

Municipale in fin-de-siecle Paris’, Modern and Contemporary France, 20 (3) (2013), p. 289

59 Martine Kaluszynki, ‘Republican identification: Bertillonage as government technique’, in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: the Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 123-4.

Various reasons have been forward for the constitution of the category of habitual criminal in this

period. Martin J. Weiner, for example, argues that the nineteenth century saw a decline in the belief

of individual will that undermined notions of sinfulness. Criminals were now no longer sinful, and in

need of atonement, but maladjusted/defective. This he puts down to the rise of scientific

naturalism; the statistical measurement of social trends which revealed deterministic laws; and the

rise of medical determinism, as in phrenology, and the development of psychology.61 However, it is

not very clear why this would have led to the drawing of hard and fast distinctions between habitual

criminals, non-habitual criminals, and ‘normal’ citizens. Neil Davie, on the other hand, puts down

the development of the concern with the habitual criminal in England to the ending of

transportation of criminals to the colonies in November 1867, just a few months before the last

public hanging, and five years after the end of public floggings. This meant that the British public

‘were no longer separated from their most dangerous criminals by a comforting stretch of salt

water’.62 There are also problems with this interpretation because, as we have noted, the concept of

the habitual criminal existed in England long before the end of transportation, and the latter does

not explain parallel developments in other European countries. It might be suggested that the

distinction drawn between the habitual criminal and the ‘normal citizen’ was one that derived from

changes in the nature and scope of the political nation. In England the year 1867 had seen the

extension of voting rights to some members of the working classes under the Second Reform Act,

and a decade later wider democracy had returned to France after the fall of the second Empire

under the French Constitutional Laws of 1875. The electoral franchise was also expanded in Italy in

1882. As the ‘poor’ in Western Europe increasingly became active citizens via political participation,

was it simply no longer permissible to think of all them as potentially criminal?63

Whatever the underlying causes of this shift of perception, it was one that found its most striking

manifestation in Lombroso’s work, especially in the various editions of his L'uomo delinquent

(Criminal Man) published from 1876 onwards. Lombroso believed that after examining the skulls

and photographs of criminals, he could identify certain physical traits they had in common, which set

them apart from ‘normal’ people. In much the same way as the modern computer analysis of facial

features is quantitative, Lombroso claimed that, ‘Anthropology requires numbers rather than

isolated and isolated generic descriptions to prove its theories.’ Thus, the first edition of Criminal

Man began with a description of 66 criminal crania, whilst in the fifth edition of 1896-7 Lombroso

claimed to have statistical proof of the ‘abnormalities’ of criminals based on an examination of 2,500

criminals and 1,200 ‘honest individuals’. However, he merely stated the percentage of the 2,500

criminals having jug ears, crooked noses, or over-developed canine teeth, without any attempt to

compare his data to his supposed control group. He went straight on from this to quote popular

proverbs to back up his ‘statistical’ arguments.64 Despite his claims to a new rigour, Lombroso’s

60 Neil Davie, Tracing the Criminal: the Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain 1860-1918 (Oxford: The Bardwell

Press, 2005), p. 130.

61 Martin J. Weiner, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (Cambridge: CUP,1990), pp. 159-71.62 Davie, Tracing the Criminal, p. 48.

63 Kevin Walby and Nicolas Carrier, ‘The rise of biocriminology: Capturing observable bodily economies of

'criminal man'’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 10 (2010), p. 267.

64 Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (tr. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter) (London: Duke University Press,

2006), pp. 46-9, 310-11.

methods were overwhelmingly subjective. [Figure 4:2] This appears to be a case of the old

computing adage, ‘Garbage In Garbage Out’ (GIGO).

Figure 4:2 Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Types

{Source:

https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/2f/62/43aee9f77cf368510028b08289cc.jpgGalle

ry: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0010111.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-

04-01): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/arzfbtbr CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35950893]

Moreover, Lombroso went still further and argued that he could associate particular physiognomies

with particular types of crime:

In general, thieves are noted for their expressive faces and manual dexterity, small

wandering eyes that are often oblique in form, thick and close eyebrows, distorted or

squashed noses, thin beard and hair, and sloping foreheads. … Habitual murderers have

a cold, glassy stare and eyes that are sometimes bloodshot and filmy; the nose is often

hawk-like and always large; the jaw is strong, the cheekbones broad; and their hair is

dark, abundant and crisply textured. Their beards are scanty, their canine teeth very

developed, and their lips thin. Often their faces contract, exposing the teeth. Among

nearly all arsonists, I have observed a softness of skin, and almost childlike appearance,

and an abundance of thick straight hair that is almost feminine.65

If arsonists were feminine, Lombroso argued that the crania of criminal women tended to be

masculine. He even claimed that amongst prostitutes ‘even the voice sounds virile’, although he

65 Ibid., p. 51.

did not indicate how he had discovered this.66 He elaborated on such ideas in his companion

volume to Criminal Man relating to women, La Donna Delinquente.67

This fascination with the heads of criminals seems to have been widespread at the time, at least in

Italy, as can been seen from the displays of skulls and skeletons at the 1885 Congress of Criminal

Anthropology at the Palazzo delle Belle Arti in Rome in the autumn of 1885. The largest single

collection on display there was actually that of Lombroso, including seventy skulls of Italian

delinquents, another thirty of epileptics, and the only complete skeleton in the whole exhibition,

that of a thief.68 This fascination with skulls reflected, in part, the influence of the pseudo-science of

phrenology, in which the topography of the skull was supposed to indicate the underlying structure

of the brain, and so determined character.69 However, it also needs to be placed in the context of

the contemporary development of ‘craniometry’, the measurement of skulls found in the work of

racial anthropologists such as Paul Broca, which will be examined in the next chapter.

This charnel house at the 1885 Congress formed part of what became the museum collection of

Lombroso’s Institute for Medical Jurisprudence, in Turin. Although closed to the public since 1914,

Susanne Regener, a cultural historian, gives a flavour of the collection from her description of a visit

to it:

Upon entering the badly lit archive at the Institute for Medical Jurisprudence, one finds

overflowing dark museum display cases and cupboards, an assortment of boxes,

cardboard signs, glass containers, models, human bones, and books. It is a picture of

mass chaos, although the following items can be discerned upon closer examination :

photographs, drawings, and lithographs, depicting criminals, psychiatric patients, and

prostitutes ; objects and pictures that were made in prisons and psychiatric institutions

by their inmates; brains and whole heads preserved in liquid; display boards, on which

an assortment of photographs is arranged - portraits, or photographs of perpetrators

with their tools of crime, or crime scenes; wax and plaster masks of fugitives, plaster

casts of ears and hands, preserved pieces of tattooed skin; a mummy in a cupboard, and

many skeletons.70

66 Ibid., p. 55.

67 Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, La donna delinquente: la prostituta e la donna normale (Turin, Editori L. Roux, 1893).

68 Andreas Broeckmann, A Visual Economy of Individuals: The Use of Portrait Photographyin the Nineteenth-Century Human Sciences (Berlin, Germany, 1996: revised version of the PhD thesis written for the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, 1995) https://www.academia.edu/24051183/A_Visual_Economy_of_Individuals_The_Use_of_Portrait_Photography_in_the_Nineteenth_Century_Human_Sciences, pp. 138-9.

69 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organisation of Consent in

Nineteenth-Century Britain Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Roger Cooter,(ed.), Phrenology in

Europe and America (London : Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 2001): John Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins

of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

70 Susanne Regener, ‘Criminological Museums and the Visualization of Evil’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2003), p. 45.

We sense here the workings of a man with a thesis to prove but an inability to evaluate types of

evidence, and to give them their due weight. This failure might also help to explain Lombroso’s

conversion later in life to Spiritualism, the belief in the appearance of occult forces in the mundane

sphere.71

Lombroso also sought to place the criminal in a supposed racial and evolutionary continuum, arguing

that the abnormalities’ of criminal crania , ‘recall the black American and Mongol races and, above

all, prehistoric man much more than the white races’.72 Again, he claimed:

Those who have read this far should by now be persuaded that criminals resemble

savages and the colored races. These three groups have many characteristics in

common, including thinness of body hair, low degrees of strength and below-average

weight, small cranial capacities, sloping foreheads, and swollen sinuses … .73

As we will see in the following chapter, the supposed differences between ‘Caucasian’ skulls and

those of colonial peoples was a basic trope of racist science. In a later edition of Criminal Man

Lombroso argued that biological anomalies in criminals resembled the physical traits of animals, and

attempted to compare the palms and palm prints of apes, monkeys, ‘normal’ men, and criminals.74

Hence also his belief that criminals were more likely to have prehensile toes, another trait linking

them to apes.75 He attempted in the 1884 edition of Criminal Man to place the supposed savagery of

the criminal in the context of the almost limitless predations of the lower animals and plants on each

other in nature.76 This, in turn, prepared the way for an interest in eugenics amongst Italian

intellectuals under Fascism, in order to purge society of supposed biological anomalies.77

This ‘insight’ into the predatory nature of the criminal was not based on a detailed analysis of data

but from a leap of imagination on examining a criminal cranium:

At the sight of that skull, I seemed all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a

flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who

reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior

animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones,

prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of orbits, handle-

shaped ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute

sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving for evil

71 Cesare Lombroso, Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici (Turin: Editrice Toninese, 1909).

72 Lombroso, Criminal Man, p. 46.

73 Ibid., p. 91. For Lombroso’s early interest in race, see Cesare Lombroso, l’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore: letture sull’ origine e le varieta delle razze umane (Padua: Premiata Tip. Editrice F. Sacchetto, 1871)

74 Ibid., p. 173.

75 David G. Horn, The Criminal Body, Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 45.76 Lombroso, Criminal Man, pp. 167-74.

77 Francesco Cassata (trans. Erin O’Loughlin), Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), pp. 10-20.

for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the

corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.78

We should note here the inclusion of tattooing amongst the signs of savagery, and Lombroso

spent much effort in describing and categorizing the tattoos found on the bodies of habitual

criminals.79 These ideas can also be seen in the general European belief in the degeneration of

sections of the lower orders, and the fear of a northern Italian intellectual of the disorderly,

savage south of the peninsula, and beyond, which threatened the unity of the new-born Italian

state.80

Lombroso also counterpoised the moral ‘insanity’ of the criminal with ‘that sense of

compassion, justice and scruple which comes naturally to well-organised and healthy men’.81

Indeed, criminality seems to come down to ugliness, since:

Some people, particularly women, have a criminal understanding of criminal

physiognomy. Although they have no knowledge of criminal anthropology, the feel an

innate repugnance for a face with irregular characteristics, which they identify as the

face of a malefactor.82

This appears in the final analysis to return to the ancient Greek concept of kalokagathia already

discussed - that physical beauty is associated with virtue and a well-balanced mind, and ugliness, as

perceived by Lombroso, is evidence of evil.

Some recent criminologists elaborating the concept of ‘bio-criminology’83 have attempted to

rehabilitate Lombroso by placing his ideas in a modern evolutionary and genetic context. For Aman

Amrit Cheema and Ashish Virk, for example, Lombroso was following Darwin, and in the light of the

proven genetic links to behaviour:

The belief in the born criminal appears in a somewhat different guise. The search for the

born criminal is not surrendered. Instead of insisting upon a morphologically

predetermined type – however the search now proceeds for the nature and character of

psychic or structural dispositions, temperaments, tendencies which in the socio-

economic setting are apt to lead to criminal behaviour.84

78 Quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (London: W. H. Norton & Co., 1981), p. 124.

79 Lombroso, Criminal Man, pp. 60-2.

80 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder, c. 1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989), pp. 74-96, 141,

81 Lombroso, Criminal Man, p. 272.

82 Ibid., p. 311.

83 The idea that criminality has biological and genetic roots first put forward in its recent form by James Q.

Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their Crime and human nature. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). See also, Walby

and Carrier, ‘The rise of biocriminology’, passim; Nicolas Carrier and Kevin Walby, ‘Ptolemizing Lombroso: the

pseudo-revolution of biosocial criminology’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 2014, 1(1),

pp. 1-45.

84 Aman Amrit Cheema and Ashish Virk, ‘Reinventing Lombroso in the Era of Genetic Revolution: Whether [the]

Criminal Justice System Actually Imparts Justice or is Based on ‘Convenience of Assumption’?’, International

Others point to the known genetic component in personality disorders and crime in order to link

Lombroso’s ideas to modern court procedures. Indeed, in Italy evidence on genetic and brain

activation patterns has been used in recent insanity defences in courtrooms, with judges upholding a

plea for a penalty reduction because of the ‘genetic vulnerability’ to aggressive and impulsive

behaviour of a murderer.85

However, these arguments tend to obscure Lombroso’s actual beliefs, and it is misguided to link

Lombroso’s ideas to the genetic revolution of the twentieth century. Although Gregor Mendel

published accounts of his ground-breaking work in the 1860s, his ideas on genetics were only

resurrected, and taken seriously, in the early twentieth century.86 Lombroso’s concept of the

‘throwback’, or the ‘atavistic’, in which the criminal was an example of an earlier, savage form of

humanity, relates to a rather different cluster of ideas linked to the theory of ‘recapitulation’. This is

the belief that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or

hatching (ontogeny), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the

evolution of the animal's remote ancestors (phylogeny). Thus, it was argued that the pharyngeal

grooves between the pharyngeal arches in the neck of the human embryo not only roughly

resembled gill slits of fish, but directly represented an adult ‘fishlike’ developmental stage, signifying

a fish-like ancestor for humans. Charles Darwin used this concept in his Descent of Man87 but it was

popularised, and extended much further, by his German follower Ernst Haeckel.88 How far Haeckel

fully understood Darwin’s argument respecting the evolution of humanity is, however, a

controversial question.89 For Haeckel embryology was a strict route map of evolution – a series

of necessary stages a creature had to go through in its development – a theory that has been

discarded by modern researchers.90 If a criminal failed to go through all these stages, he or she

would be left at an earlier stage of evolution. The ‘savage’ nature of the criminal was not, therefore,

a result of the specific ancestry of the individual recidivist but the influence of the past evolution of

Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory, Vol. 5, No.2, August 2012, p. 941.

85 Elisabetta Sirgiovanni, ‘Criminal heredity: the influence of Cesare Lombroso’s concept of the “born criminal”

on contemporary neurogenetics and its forensic applications’, Medicina Nei Secoli Arte E Scienza (Journal Of

History Of Medicine), 29/1 (2017), p. 167.

86 Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History (New York: Scribner, 2017), pp. 17-??

87 Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp. 15-17.

88 Richard J Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought

(University of Chicago Press: London, 2008), pp. 217-76.

89 Richard J Richards, ‘The Linguistic Creation of Man: Charles Darwin, August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and theMissing Link in Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Theory’, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267402422 (accessed 27/11/2020)

90 Alice Roberts, ‘The fetus, the fish heart, and the fruit fly’, in Jeremy Desilva (ed.), A Most Interesting Ptoblem:What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 34.

the species as a whole. It was more akin the concept of a ‘race memory’ than to an individual

endowment.

In practice Lombroso’s ideas had only a qualified impact on criminology outside Italy, although they

may have had more influence on novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.91 In

France the anthropologist Paul Topinard criticised the notion of the ‘born criminal’, maintaining that

that Lombroso presented nothing but impressions of clothes, hair, skin, and the redundant

affirmation that ‘this is a criminal’. It was poverty, filth, and fatigue, that made the difference

between the head and facial features of the criminal, and that of the ‘honest’ citizen.92 In the USA,

the early twentieth century saw the emphasis of criminologists and psychologists switched to hidden

deficiencies of the mind, rather than bodily traits, as the clue to criminality. The potential criminal

for Lewis M. Terman, the American psychologist, was to be identified by IQ tests rather than by

anthropometry.93 The rise of psychology, in which Mind rather than Body was the seat of criminality,

was a general features of the West at the turn of the century.94 Similarly, British criminologists of

late Victorian and Edwardian periods objected to Lombroso not so much because they rejected the

idea of a hereditary, criminal type, but because although some criminals did fall into this category,

there were many others who plainly did not. They also disliked the dogmatism of Lombroso, and his

lack of clinical experience and case notes.95

Galton, the Criminal Mean and Beauty

One man who typifies the British attitude to Lombroso’s work was Sir Edmund Du Cane, who from

1869 onwards was chairman of convict prison directors, surveyor-general of prisons, and inspector-

general of military prisons. Although he rejected Lombroso’s certainty as to the existence of the

born criminal with innate physical and psychological stigmata, Du Cane viewed habitual criminals as

predatory, self-indulgent, cunning, and reckless of consequence to others, and he regarded them as

an unreformable, and inferior, social group.96 He sought therefore to establish if there was indeed a

criminal facial physiognomy, and called upon the expertise of Sir Francis Galton in order to do so.

Galton responded by developing a technique he called ‘composite portraiture’, produced by

superimposing multiple photographic portraits of individuals' faces to create an ‘average’ face. We

91 Olson, Greta,’ Criminalized Bodies in Literature and Biocriminology’, in Sabine Sielke Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche, C. Winter (eds.), The Body as Interface: Dialogues between the Disciplines, pp. 248-50: https://www.academia.edu/7113070/Criminalized_Bodies_in_Literature_and_Biocriminology (accessed 07/07/2021)

92 Broeckmann, A Visual Economy of Individuals, p. 151.

93 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, pp. 143-320.

94 Nikolas Rose, The psychological complex. Psychology, politics and society in England, 1869-1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: FreeAssociation Books, 1999).

95 Horn, The Criminal Body, pp. 166-7.

96 Bill Forsythe, ‘Du Can, Sir Edmund Frederick’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: https://0-doi-org.serlib0.essex.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/32910 (accessed 30/11/2020)

have already discussed Galton’s contribution to the development of forensic fingerprinting but

composite photography was just as important to him, if not more so. Thus, whilst an account of his

work on fingerprinting takes up 5 pages of Galton’s 1908 autobiography, as part of a broader chapter

on his anthropometric laboratories, he gave a consideration of composite photography a whole

chapter to itself.97

Du Cane indicated his role in initiating Galton’s composite photography in his comments during the

discussion after Galton had given his first paper on the subject to the Anthropological Society in

1878:

To track crime to its source we must follow up the history of those who practise it, and

specially in such lines as are likely (as has been alleged) to contain the true clue to their

criminal career. Among these subjects for observation that of the hereditary disposition

is one of the most important, and to disentangle the effect of this from the effect of the

bringing up. Mr. Galton very kindly undertook to try and ascertain if anything could be

established on these points, and I therefore furnished him with the particulars of the

personal characteristics and career of a great number of criminals and with their

photographs. It seems to me to be a correct inference that if criminals are found to

have certain special types of features, that certain personal peculiarities distinguish

those who commit certain classes of crime; the tendency to crime is in those persons

born or bred in them, and either they are incurable or the tendency can only be

checked by taking them in hand at the earliest periods of life.98

In order to facilitate Galton’s work, Du Cane had arranged in the previous year for Galton to be

supplied with over 300 photographs of the inmates of Pentonville and Millbank prisons99, the

practice of photographing convicts having been initiated in Britain in the 1850s.100

Galton understood his composite portraits as a creating a mean image of a particular human type,

with deviations from that mean forming the haze around the centre of a distribution, like the tails

on either side of a bell curve.101 [Figure 4:3] As he explained the process in an essay in the

Fortnightly Review in 1880:

I threw magic-lantern portraits of different persons on the top of one another, on

the same screen, and elicited a resultant face which resembled no one of the

97 Francis Galton, Memoires of My Life (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 50-4, 259-65.

98 Francis Galton, 'Composite portraits made by combining those of many different persons into a single figure.'Journal of the Anthropological Institute 8 (1879), pp.143-4. See also, Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 259.

99 University College London Special Collections: Galton Papers composite photography: letters about

composite photographs 1877-1932: Joseph, C S [Home Office], 18 April 1877 GALTON/2/8/1/1/11.

100 Edward Higgs, Identifying the English: Personal Identification 1500 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 126-7.

101 Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey

(Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), p. 133; Allan Sekula, ‘The body and the archive’,

October 39 (1986), p. 48.

components in particular, but included all. Whatever was common to all the

portraits became intensified by combination; whatever was peculiar to each

portrait was relatively too faint to attract attention, and virtually disappeared.102

Figure 4:3 Galton’s Composite Photographs of Criminals Showing Central Mean and Deviations

(Source: https://galton.org/composite.htm)

He linked this phenomenon to the way in which Adolphe Quetelet, the nineteenth-century Belgian

statist, had attempted to create the figure of the average man (‘homme moyen) from aggregate

data in order to facilitate a ‘social physics’ for the purposes of informing state action. In many ways

these ideas were an extension of Galton’s statistical work on correlation, regression and the

standard deviation, itself an outcome of his work on human and animal inheritance. Galton wished

to measure how characteristics, such as ‘intelligence’, or ‘genius’, were shared by members of the

same family.103 The latter led in turn to his foundation of the ‘science’ of eugenics, in which various

forms of selective breeding were envisaged as a means of improving the racial stock.104 Galton’s

ideas were informed by his early travels in Africa105, which had left him with a profoundly racist

outlook, as will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter on the face and race. However,

unlike Lombroso, and contrary to Du Cane’ expectations, Galton regarded his attempts to

identify individual types of criminal - the murderer, the thief, men convicted of manslaughter,

and so on – as a failure, only showing what he described as a generalised ‘villainy’.106

102 Francis Galton, ‘Mental imagery’, Fortnightly Review, 28 (1880), p. 320.

103 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869)

104 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, ‘Galton, Sir Francis’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: https://0-doi-org.serlib0.essex.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/33315 (accessed 30/11/2020)

105 Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton. From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics

(Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 67-92.

106 Francis Galton, ‘Generic images’, Nineteenth Century 6 (July 1879), p. 161-2.

For Galton his composite photographs mimicked how he believed people grasped phenomena

more generally. Human beings, he argued, formed conceptions of specific entities in the outside

world by the repetition of similar stimuli forming ‘blended memories’, to which a linguistic label

was then given. He argued that:

Whenever any group of brain elements has been excited through an impression of one

of the senses, it becomes, so to speak, tender and liable to become again excited, under

the influence of other kinds of stimuli. Whatever may be the cause of any new

excitation, the result of its reproduction is to create an imaginary sense-impression,

similar to that by which the first excitation had been caused, and this we call memory.

Blended memories must necessarily follow the excitation of many associated groups of

brain elements, under the influence of a stimulus that sets them simultaneously in

action.107

Hence, if people saw enough dogs, they would form a pure blended memory of dogs (‘dogness’),

which would be different to that of the ‘catness’ of cats, and would call this to mind whenever they

saw a dog. The label ‘dog’ would also call to mind this blended memory.108

However, this theory of phenomenology assumed that there were specific things called dogs at the

outset. ‘Dogness’ could not be ascribed to dogs if the images combined in the blended memory of

dogs included those of cats, trees, and so on. Some ability to recognise what was a dog was

assumed at the outset.109 This is a fundamental problem with the type of inductive reasoning

championed by Galton, in which we are supposed to be able to move from independent

observations to general principles. In his composite photographs he assumed from the outset,

therefore, that a criminal type existed. This meant, in effect, that he assumed the existence of

what he wanted to reveal, and this led him to fall back on torturous arguments when his

composites showed nothing of the sort. As he himself admitted, when the faces of criminals were

combined the ‘special villainous regularities in the [composites] have disappeared and the common

humanity that underlies them has prevailed. They represent not the criminal, but the man who is

liable to fall into crime’.110 As he put it on another occasion, the composite face of the criminal was

‘the type of face that is apt to accompany criminal tendencies before (if I may be allowed the

expression) the features have been brutalised by crime’.111 However, if it is a life of crime that leads

to the creation of a criminal face, then why did Galton need to assume an original criminal

character in the first place? Even his intellectual heir, Karl Person, who carried forward Galton’s

statistical and eugenic research in the early twentieth century, regarded the latter’s arguments here

as fallacious.112 Psychological experiments show that prior knowledge about individuals affects how

107 Galton, ‘Generic images’, p 158.

108 George Pavlich, ‘The Subjects of Criminal Identification’, Punishment & Society, 2009, 11(2), p. 180.

109 Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images, pp. 78-9, 84.

110 Francis Galton, ‘Composite portraits’, Nature, May 23, 1878, pp. 97-8.

111 Galton, ‘Generic images’, p. 161.

112 Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, Vol. II (Cambridge: CUP, 1924), p. 286.

they are seen by others – knowing a person is a criminal tends to make people interpret their face

as showing more untrustworthy, threatening and criminal characteristics.113 This may have

underlain Galton’s propensity to criminal tendencies in his photographs of criminals.

Galton extended his experiments with composite photography to other ‘types’. [Figure 4:4]

However, similar problems arose when Galton attempted to apply his technique of composite

photography to identify the physiognomy of patients suffering from phthisis, the wasting away

associated with tuberculosis. He undertook the production of composite photographs of women

with phthisis with the aim of discovering if the doctrine of diatheses, or the belief that certain

physiques, possibly linked to the idea of humours already discussed, indicated a predispositions to

certain diseases. On the basis of his photographs he admitted that ‘there is no foundation for the

belief that persons possessing certain physical characteristics are especially liable to tubercular

disease’.114 Ignoring this, however, he went on to claim:

it may hereafter be proved that some explanation of the doctrine may be found in the

course of the disease when it attacks such persons. In suggesting this we are going

beyond the facts recorded in our present inquiry, but the suggestion appears warranted

by daily observation. Thus, the delicately organised individuals called "tubercular," and

characterised by their " narrow ovoid " faces, have been compared with horses and

cattle who have been what is called "over bred"; such animals are described as having

too much nerve and too little bone and muscle; they have no " staying power" and

readily "knock-up.'' In like manner these more delicately formed individuals, with highly

susceptible nervous systems, well exemplified in the "precocious child," are little able to

stand the strain and racket of disease, of whatsoever sort it may be, and more readily

fall victims to its attacks than their more robustly built fellow-creatures.115

As with the criminal, he did not consider the obvious possibility that the frail faces of the women he photographed may have been the result of having the disease, rather than evidence of an inherent disposition. Once again, he assumed at the outset the type his composites were supposed to reveal.

113 Todorov, Face Value, pp. 160-3.

114 Francis Galton, ‘An inquiry into the physiognomy of phthisis by the method of "composite portraiture" [WithF. A. Mahomed]’, Guy's Hospital Reports 25 (February 1882), p. 475.

115 Ibid., 492-3.

Figure 4:4 Francis Galton’s Composite Photography

[Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36109358]

This is a problem I would suggest that is found in many statistical exercises, when people assume

that there must be an underlying thing (such as ‘intelligence’ or ‘criminality’) represented by the

central tendency of their distributions, when that central tendency is really an artefact of their

initial categorisations. ‘Data’, from the Latin dare, is understood as ‘that which is given’ but is

actually better understood as ‘that which is taken’, or even ‘that which is constructed’. It is possible

to select any number of discrete observations from a possible range to stand as a marker for an

attribute, and the particular set of observations chosen may affect the conclusions reached. Thus,

whether the standard of living rose in England during the early years of the Industrial Revolution

depends very much on whether you look at wage data or at heights of the population. The former

implies rising living standards but the decline in stature before 1850 points to the opposite

conclusion.116 Similarly, changes in how summary statistics, such as cause of death data, are

compiled may have significant impacts on apparent trends.117

If Galton had problems dealing with the negative side of kalokagathia – ugliness and the lack of

virtue – he also had a blind spot when he came to deal with its other side - beauty. This can be

116 Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the

United Kingdom, 1750-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

117 Edward Higgs, ‘The linguistic construction of social and medical categories in the work of the English General Register Office’, Simon Szreter, Arunachalam Dharmalingam and Hania Sholkamy (eds), The qualitative dimension of quantitative demography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 86-106.

seen in one of the odder initiatives recounted in his autobiography, Memories of My Life - his

attempt to create a ‘Beauty Map’ of the British Isles. This involved Galton walking the streets of

British towns with a piece of paper torn into the shape of a cross in his trouser pocket, which he

pricked with a needle on the different axes to indicate ‘attractive’, ‘indifferent’, or ‘repellent’

women. London women ranked the highest on this scale of beauty but alas for Aberdeen in

Scotland which had the highest proportion of ‘repellent’ females. He recognised that this was an

individual estimate ‘but it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the

same population’.118 This episode reveals his faith in quantification, his ingenuity in developing

research methodologies, and his complete inability to distinguish his own subjective opinions from

objective criteria, which can also be seen in his work on composite photography. In many ways this

methodological problem here was similar to the subjective identification of ‘beauty’ by the students

on which Hamermesh based his arguments. History does not record what the women of the British

Isles thought of a strange man scrutinising them closely in the street whilst fiddling in his trousers.

Bertillon and the Mugshot

Galton’s composite photography had some echoes in the early development of criminal photography

in France. The Photographic Service of the Prefecture of Paris was established in 1872, and it was

indeed suggested by Louis Mathurin Moreau-Christophe, Inspector general of Prisons, that its

photographs could be used to study degeneration. Similarly, Arnould Bonneville de Marsangy, the

inventor of the criminal record, suggested that criminal photography could help to identify the

physiognomy and characteristics of criminals in the same way as Galton had attempted.119 However,

this was in marked contrast to the development of the mugshot in the last decades of the nineteenth

century by another Frenchman, Alphonse Bertillon, who, as already noted, had invented

anthropometrics whilst working for the Paris police.

Bertillon’s aim was to create standardised, individual portraits of criminals to allow their unique

identification, rather than to discover a ‘type’. As we have already noted when discussing his

anthropometrics, the criminal body expressed nothing to Bertillon, it was merely the source of

indices of a strictly material nature which allowed one unique criminal to be differentiated from

another.120 However, the early photographs produced by the French criminal justice system did not

meet Bertillon’s requirements. Photographs taken in one prison might not find their way into the

central repository, whilst those from another did. Photographs were not in a common format, and

followed differing artistic conventions based on those used by commercial portraitists. The indexing

terms used in criminal records - ‘round face’, ‘medium height’, ‘brown eyes’ - were imprecise, and

names attached to the photographs could be misspelled. Moreover, if criminal records were merely

indexed by name, then the criminal only had to give a false name to avoid detection.121

118 Galton, Memories of My Life, pp. 315-6.

119 Marc Renneville, ‘Le bertillionage dans l’univers carceral’, in Pierre Piazza (ed.), Aux origines de la police scientifique: Alphonse Bertillon, precurseur de la science du crime (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2011), p. 173.

120 Sekula, ‘The body and the archive’, pp. 30-3.

121 Ibid., pp. 175-6.

For Bertillon most photographs never showed an individual exactly the same twice, and

observers always saw slightly different aspects of the human face on a day to day basis. This

was especially important given the fact that human faces tend to be asymmetrical, and so

different when viewed from different angles.122 So in his mugshots Bertillon controlled the pose,

lighting, expressions of the criminal photographed, to ensure as far as possible that the ‘same’

instance was reproduced.123 Such controls can still be seen today in the restrictions that are put

on the taking of passport photographs. These judicial portraits were to be in two parts, giving

the profile, with the eyes directed horizontally, and the full face. The subject was to be placed

on a chair at a fixed distance from the light source, which should be to the left and a little

forward of the face to be illuminated. [Figure 4:5] Judicial photographs were also to be

reproduced in the standard format of the carte de visite.124 Bertillon may have drawn here upon

the work of Heinrich Oidtmann, a lecturer at the Universite´ technique de Rhe´nanie-Westphalie in

Aix-la-Chapelle, who created a scientific standard for photographs (one full face and one profile)

via which he believed familial and racial ties could be determined. Bertillon, it has been argued,

appropriated Oidtmann’s dual- photograph method for use at the Paris Prefecture, but dispensed

with the latter’s attempts to show links between sitters.125 As well as live criminals in France,

Bertillon also tried to use his mugshots to identify corpses in the Paris morgue, although in practice

this proved a failure.126

Figure 4:5 Examples of Standardised Mugshots Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon

122 Vicki Bruce and Andy Young, Face Perception (Hove: Psychology Press, 2012), pp. 88, 131-2.

123 Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images, p. 40.

124 Alphonse Bertillon, La Photographie judiciaire, avec un appendice sur la classification et l'identification

anthropométriques (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1890). pp. 6-25.

125 Zachary R Hagins, ‘Fashioning the ‘born criminal’ on the beat: juridical photography and the Police Municipale in fin-de-siecle Paris’, Modern and Contemporary France, 20 (2013), pp. 286.

126 Bruno Bertherat, ‘L’identification sans Bertillon? Le cas de la Morgue de Paris’, in Pierre Piazza (ed.), Aux origines de la police scientifique: Alphonse Bertillon, precurseur de la science du crime (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2011), pp. 210-29.

[Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30128566]

However, despite the claims of objectivity made by Bertillon and others for his judicial photography,

his work here placed a stigma on those so portrayed. This was because, as Allan Sekula has argued,

the photographs were then placed in an archive, a bureaucratic system of ‘intelligence’, which

categorised the faces as those of criminals. As Sekula put it, ‘The central artefact of this system is not

the camera but the filing cabinet.’127 The introduction in the late nineteenth century of the system of

requiring the carrying of photographic IDs by ‘gypsies’ and other travellers in France, and by the

native populations of France’s North African colonies, shows the manner in which Bertillon’s

mugshots became a new form of branding.128 The British also used photographic passes to control

the movement of ‘native’ labour in South Africa and across the Indian Ocean.129 It is these archives,

with all their inherent biases of race, gender and class, which then form the basis of the inevitably

problematic attempts to identify the criminal face via computer. If members of ethnic minorities are

over-represented in such archives, because of their poverty, or because of police and judicial racism,

then AI systems trained using the images in such archives will be similarly biased.

Conclusion: the face and criminality

As was argued in the Introduction, artificial intelligence systems deployed to analyse the human face

are often decision systems. They decide things about people – their identity, their character, what

they are feeling, or their type. In the case of systems that identify criminals or criminality, the results

of such decisions-making plainly can be very serious for individuals. However, it could be argued

that AIs that decide that a person is a particular, known criminal, are less problematic than those

that identify individuals as being a criminal type based on their facial geometry. In the case of a

wrongful identification of an individual as a particular criminal, there are means of subsequently

showing this to be a false positive, although such mistaken identity can have long term, and very

unpleasant, consequences. However, when an AI system decides that an individual is a criminal

type, even though they have not actually committed a crime, someone so pigeon-holed has no way

to prove that they have been unfairly stigmatised, unless they can undermine faith in complex

computer algorithms the workings of which they do not understand. An individual can have a

blameless record but can still be stigmatise as a potential malefactor in the future. And their future

ends with their demise.

Also, what we regard as a ‘criminal act’ can depend on the historical or social context. People can

kill and maim others in wartime, and be seen as heroes, whilst such acts would be regarded as

crimes at other times. Similarly, as already noted, some of the greatest political figures of

127 Sekula, ‘The body and the archive’, p. 16

128 Emmanuel Filhol, ‘Le carnet anthropometricdes nomades’, in Pierre Piazza (ed.), Aux origines de la police scientifique: Alphonse Bertillon, precurseur de la science du crime (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2011), pp. 252-75;Ilsen About, ‘Identites indigenes et police colonial: l’introductionde l’anthropometrie judiciaire en Algeries, 1890-1910’, in Pierre Piazza (ed.), Aux origines de la police scientifique: Alphonse Bertillon, precurseur de la science du crime (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2011), pp. 280-301.

129 Andrew MacDonald, ‘The identity thieves of the Indian Ocean: forgery, fraud, and the origins of SouthAfrican immigration control, 1890s-1920s’, Keith Brekenridge and Simon Szreter (eds.), Registration andRecognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 253-76.

eighteenth-century European and American history were slave owners, a practice regarded as an

abhorrent crime today. What we have seen in this chapter, however, is that for much of Western

history, criminality could be seen as not contingent upon context but a quality inherent in the very

fabric of the nature of individuals. The physically ugly could be seen as being inevitably corrupt

morally. The criminal could be seen as biologically anti-social, the product of inheritance or

evolution. Even when capturing the image of the face was seen as an objective act carrying no

subjective ascription of character, the placing of such images in intelligence systems of criminal

control imparted a stigma to them. Digital systems which purport to identify the criminal face,

rather than the face of a known criminal, perpetuate this ascription of a criminal character in a

heightened, and even more problematic, manner. One wonders if at some point whether the

creation of such systems could come to be seen as a criminal act in itself?