Reviewed by: Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater's Impact on European Culture Rainer Godel Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater's Impact on European Culture. Edited by Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 264 pages + 31 illustrations. $49.50. Physiognomy, the art or 'science' of uncovering the hidden character by interpreting the surface signs of the human body or face, has been a fashionable topic in Western intellectual history since antiquity. In the late Enlightenment, Johann Caspar Lavater's attempt to not only cultivate physiognomy as a reliable science but also to integrate it into a theologically connoted theory of signs resulted in the most popular and [End Page 137] influential system of physiognomics. In recent years, the history and reception of this specific kind of physiognomy has been the subject of an impressive amount of research by, among others, Claudia Schmölders, Ellis Shookman, Richard T. Gray, and, last but not least, Graeme Tytler, who is also the co-editor of the book that is reviewed here. The aim of this collection of essays—based on a conference at the University of Exeter in 2001—is "to assess Lavater's contribution to European culture in the two hundred years since his death" (20). It explores through a variety of disciplinary lenses how Lavater's idea of physiognomy has been both affirmed and criticized in European culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is one of the strengths of this volume: the contributors report on the wide-spread impact of physiognomy in many areas, a main emphasis being its influence on art. Ross Woodrow differentiates in his article between inclusion and refusal of drawing principles of Lavater's "Fragmente" in drawing manuals. John House demonstrates that Degas's and Manet's positions on facial and bodily characterization explicitly differ concerning the question of why and how to depict ambivalence. Edward A. Aiken tries to show that the photographic approach of August Sander in the early 20th century "was grounded in physiognomy [ . . . ]" (206). In addition, John L. Plews detects an impact of Lavater's physiognomics on portraying the ideal artist in Eduard Mörike's novella Maler Nolten. The texts by Martina Lauster, Michael Gamper, and Chloe M. Paver also deal with the reception of physiognomics in German literature. Whereas Lauster succeeds in demonstrating that social sketches of the mid-19th century remove themselves from the idea of individual characterization by developing a (semi-satirical) mode of social classification, Michael Gamper argues in a short article that, emerging from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Man in the Crowd," physiognomics in Balzac became an "urban semiotics" (155), which in Weimar-Republic Berlin turns away from human faces by focusing on the surface of the city world. Chloe M. Paver shows that Jens Sparschuh's novel Lavaters Maske (1999) ironically plays with the issue of how to gain insight into the human character. Caroline Warman precisely shows the interplay between mechanist or vitalist anatomy and the concept of physiognomics during the early 19th century. She demonstrates the corollaries of Lavater's interest in rendering physiognomics a science. Graeme Tytler argues that certain specifics of character description in Walter Scott emerge from the knowledge of Lavater's theory. Clorinda Donato deals with Jeffrey Ford's fantasy novel The Physiognomy (1997). Christopher Rivers writes on two novels (Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses and Zola's Nana) that, on the narrative level, contradict Lavater's assertion that every individual can be seen through. In both cases, nature comes to the rescue in order to turn the immoral inner being of the female protagonists inside out. Three articles, however, do not seem to be in accord with the main purpose of this collection. Kevin Berland demonstrates that Lavater's contradictory handling of the problem of free will and inner self does not sufficiently consider the theological and physiognomical debates before Lavater; Maximilian Bergengruen tries to uncover Lavater's roots in early modern theology, but instead of bringing Lavater's theological teacher Johann Joachim Spalding into play (who is mentioned only in passing), he argues with the 'esoteric' tradition of Paracelsus; and Mary Lynn Johnson gives a precise reading of...