Moveable types: the de‐individuated portrait in the age of mechanical reproduction

Abstract

In sixteenth‐century Europe, the practice of recycling physiognomy woodcuts created duplicates of faces that appeared in multiple contexts, such that they were defined and redefined only by the textual inscriptions accompanying them. This article examines the reuse and repetition of the anonymous portrait illustrations in publications of physiognomy books, broadsides, pamphlets, and playbooks, paying particular attention to printers who copied stock images of faces from editions of Cocles's physiognomy texts. Developments in printing press technology and cost‐effective printing methods contribute to a new type of portrait that is subject to reuse and recycling. In England, John Waylande's publication of Thomas Hill's English physiognomy was one of the first works to employ reuse of physiognomic portraits, and this treatise influenced the textual productions of William Seres and Richard Jones as the printers shared woodcuts. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Jones reprints physiognomy woodcuts as the ‘mug shots’ of criminals, leading to the development of facial types in print. The flexible fungibility and mass‐social character typing of anonymous and recycled printed portraits demonstrates further complexities of identity and selfhood in the Renaissance, where character typing and other de‐individualized notions of personhood are actively at work.