100 Human Heads: Physiognomy, Astrological Medicine, and Censorship in Seventeenth-Century Italy

This talk centers on Cornelio Ghirardelli’s Cefalogia fisonomica divisa in dieci deche (1630), which was produced in the context of the Accademia dei Vespertini in Bologna. This academy was established in 1627 by university professors who met to discuss mathematics and astrology. In more than 600 pages, the Cefalogia offers a wide-ranging handbook of physiognomy by studying 100 different human heads. Written by two main authors and more than 60 additional contributors, the Cefalogia is an illuminating example of collective authorship, which was exceedingly rare in the first centuries of print, but relatively common within the context of learned academies. Physiognomy was rooted in ancient ideas about the mutual correspondence of body and soul and offered a codified system of bodily signs, primarily on the head and face, by which one could judge character and even predict future behavior. While the status of physiognomy as a science remained ambiguous throughout the early modern period, it was nevertheless closely related to the official body of medical knowledge taught at universities, based on ideas of celestial influence on the body and related analysis of visible bodily signs of health and disease. Webb's study of the collaborative process by which the Cefalogia was produced reveals the existence of a large, interconnected network of learned academies with strong ties to the university in seventeenth-century Bologna, and the role they played in facilitating encounters between official and popular or vernacular forms of knowledge. It situates the work, within a broader flourishing of interest in physiognomy in this period, precisely when the criteria of Catholic censorship for this and other prognosticatory arts was in flux. Webb analyzes the range of subtle and explicit strategies by which authors of physiognomical works across Italy sought to shield themselves from investigation and punishment, and the key role the collective and collaborative nature of learned academies played in this regard.

This talk is open to the public. No registration is required.