Leaving Their Mark: Lavater, Fuseli and Blake's Imprint on Aphorisms on Man

Abstract

347 Aphorisms on Man, like few other books of its size or content, has remained part of the scene of literary history owing to the combined efforts of three men, its Swiss author, Johann Caspar Lavater, its translator, Johann Heinrich Fussli, more commonly known in England as Henry Fuseli, and its illustrator and annotator William Blake. Johann Caspar Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man (1788) was published to prepare the British for his Essays on Physiognomy (1789–1798). As Marcia Allentuck has pointed out, it ‘contained, in encapsulated form, some of the underlying theories of his physiognomical approach’. Published in London by Joseph Johnson a few months after the fi rst fascicles of Essays on Physiognomy were issued to subscribers and a year ahead of the book, Aphorisms on Man was translated by Lavater’s childhood friend, the Swiss-born painter and future Royal Academy Professor Henry Fuseli, who in all likelihood added the crucial fi nal aphorism: ‘If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affected you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then shew your copy to whom you please’; it was Fuseli, too, who provided the preliminary drawing on which William Blake based his frontispiece. The main reason Aphorisms on Man is read today is that it was annotated by Blake.