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Updated: May 29, 2025
The author of a physiognomical treatise, Bartolommeo Cocle, who styled himself a 'metoposcopist, and whose science, according to Giovio, seemed like one of the most respectable of the free arts, was not content with the prophecies which he made to the many people who daily consulted him, but wrote also a most serious 'catalogue of such whom great dangers to life were awaiting. Giovio, although grown old in the free thought of Rome 'in hac luce romana' is of opinion that the predictions contained therein had only too much truth in them We learn from the same source how the people aimed at in these and similar prophecies took vengeance on a seer.
It is singular what a home-feeling and sense of kindred I derived from this hereditary connection and fancied physiognomical resemblance between the old town and its well-grown daughter, and how reluctant I was, after chill years of banishment, to leave this hospitable place, on that account.
The conducteur announcing that the Diligence was ready and that we must speedily take our seats, abruptly interrupted all my physiognomical meditations, and we quickly repaired to the heavy lumbering vehicle in which we were destined to be dragged to the gay metropolis.
The absurdities of the physiognomical system of Lavater, and of the craniological system of MM. Gall and Spurzheim, were not likely to escape animadversion, in a work of general satire, fruitful as they have already been in such themes. The upshot of the story is, as might be anticipated, that the fortune-telling philosopher is caught, and exposed in his own toils.
Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes.
But any effort to interpret it according to Western notions of physiognomical expression would be just about as successful as an attempt to interpret Chinese ideographs by their real or fancied resemblance to shapes of familiar things.
In his travels he preferred the worst accommodation in a house where he approved of the countenance of the host, to the best where the traits or lines of the landlord's face were irregular, or did not coincide with his ideas of physiognomical propriety.
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