Lombroso’s criminal face across physiognomy and semeiotics

1 Two anecdotes and a “dimple”

On 4 January 1871, in his laboratory at the University of Pavia, Dr. Cesare Lombroso was working on the skull of the brigand Giuseppe Vilella, a renowned criminal who had died shortly beforehand in Vigevano prison. Dr. Lombroso sensed he was close to a scientific breakthrough. After taking standard measurements (as far as the instruments of the time allowed), Lombroso took a large chisel and set about opening the top of the skull of the unlucky test subject. What appeared before his eyes was the Grail he had had been seeking for so long. In fact, according to the scientist, the brigand Vilella showed what would become known as the “median occipital fossa.”

A few days later, Lombroso tried to explain the importance of the discovery in an article entitled “Existence of a median occipital fossa in the skull of a criminal”^[1] (Lombroso 1871). In these pages, the “median occipital fossa” was presented as an anomaly, a kind of third median lobe like the one found in embryos during the first months of life or in birds’ brains. Lombroso had no doubts: the dimple was the proof he was looking for to breathe new life into his theory on atavism. In particular, it was his belief that this “invisible” characteristic was the reason for particular facial features: protruding cheekbones, massive jaws, and all those analogies that are said to be found between the appearance of criminals and that of prehistoric humans. Hence, Lombroso believed he could prove his hypothesis according to which criminal individuals belong to the atavistic stage of the human race and their traits are preserved in specific facial and cranial features.

In truth, the “dimple” also has another wicked merit, namely that of bringing two pseudo-sciences closer together: physiognomy – the study of the analogy between an individual’s psychology and his physical features (in particular those of the face), of which Lombroso became the spokesman – and Franz Joseph Gall’s phrenology (Gall 1822, 1838). The latter is sort of an ancestor of Lombroso’s facial studies, since it asserts that individual psychological functions depended on particular areas or “regions” of the brain. On the basis of this hypothesis, it was – clumsily – believed that it was possible to analyze the morphological peculiarities of a person’s skull, such as lines, depressions, and lumps, in order to determine the psychological qualities of the individual as well as the individual’s personality. In other words, according to Gall, palpating the skull and face of an individual made it possible to determine the person’s inclinations and aptitudes on the basis of the protuberances detectable on the subject under analysis. In a now famous story, Gall was invited by Frederick the Great to give a sample of his theory by palpating the skulls of a dozen soldiers in full uniform. After touching the skulls of those present, Gall listed their moral qualities of courage, sense of duty, and loyalty. It was only at that point that Frederick the Great required those criminals disguised as generals to be returned to their cells (Guarnieri 2007).

These two historical anecdotes are intended to point out the premise and the “unfortunate” fate of the disciplines in question. And yet, neither Gall nor Lombroso are aware that they were playing on the edge of that field that delimits “physiognomy,” i.e., that field of study that Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the fathers of contemporary semiotics, defines as the whole of the physical sciences (Peirce 1958, vol. VII). The closeness between the two scholars and Pierce’s discipline should hardly come as a surprise. The two scientists behaved like semioticians ahead of their time, indeed. If considered from a general perspective, they did nothing more than study the signs that shape the face, which in fact becomes “their” text, i.e., their very personal object of investigation. However, deepening the analysis, it is possible to say that the two scholars went further. They quested for those facial and skull signs that they considered relevant to describe the personality of individuals. In Lombroso’s theory with an unambiguous symbolic correlation, those specific facial traits refer to just as many specific criminal characteristics. Naturally, from a semiotic point of view, these practices might be considered as petty symbolism (Hjelmslev 1961). Yet it is possible to raise a consideration that may not necessarily rehabilitate Lombroso’s work, but could bring his studies closer to the domain of a semiotics ancestor: “Semeiotics.” In fact, Semeiotics is the branch of medicine which studies symptoms as signs of disease, thus representing the basis of all clinical investigation (Danesi and Zukowski 2019). Since the end of the eighteenth century, Semeiotics has been teaching aspiring doctors to observe the signs of the body and interpret them as signs of a particular disease afflicting the patient or, as we now call them, as symptoms (Manetti 1987, chap. 3). This is precisely what Lombroso seems to have been doing when, as a doctor, he tried to interpret physical signs on the face of the patients as symptoms of something deeper. Something which is determined by biological reasons that therefore can be labeled as a true pathology: criminal behavior.

2 Heredity of the criminal face

1871 was an important year for Dr. Lombroso. His personal discovery of the median occipital fossa made his work shift definitively to the “surface” in search of facial signs that can determine the “differential criteria” between lunatics and criminals. Indeed, Italy required him to do so. Right after the Risorgimento, the country had to deal with a set of problems that nowadays could be described as “social issues” in the narrow sense, but which lay in the scope of the medical field at the time: brigandage, urban crime, lunacy, prostitution, alcoholism, famine, illiteracy, administration of justice, healthcare, and prison systems (Gibson and Rafter 2006: 13). As a doctor, Lombroso was always dealing with the abovementioned problems and he would continue to cover them until the end of his days.^[2] This “dedication” makes Lombroso a (medical) semeiotic of the face, and it is the direct consequence of a series of scientific beliefs and historical factors that greatly influenced his thinking. First of all, the historical context in which Lombroso lived must be taken into account. In fact, the intellectual scene of the time hybridizes and mixes the currents of Positivism, Materialism, and Evolutionism (and authors such as Comte, Taine, Lamarck, Darwin, and Spencer). Thus, the scientist was influenced by “social Darwinism” (Darwin 1859; Spencer 1850), combining the evolution of organisms and the evolution of society under a single law (Gibson and Rafter 2006: 7–8). From this perspective, even the most common social problems, such as the delinquency and the lunacy he treated, fell under the doctors’ magnifying glass. In other words, one of the fundamental steps in understanding Lombroso’s “symbolic” work lies in the fact that, at the time, theories of heredity and evolution did not distinguish between strictly biological and cultural factors. Therefore, moral behavior and attitudes were involved in the processes of evolution and transmission as much as biological variations were (as states Lombroso’s theory on criminality). In this context, it was almost considered as a commonplace that behavior, habits, and mental processes are strengthened through repetition until they “congeal” and establish into new neural structures therefore becoming instinctive and then hereditary. According to Dr. Lombroso, these structures manifested themselves in the distinctive signs of the “criminal face.”

3 Criminal face features

As mentioned before, 1871 was a historical year for Lombroso. A large part of his research focused on “differential criteria,” i.e., on those tools useful to identify the signs that show social scourges, especially crime and madness. Yet, the much hoped-for results that could separate madness and crime were slow in coming. Lombroso was almost on the verge of abandoning the quest when his last publication provided him with the cue for a new direction of research. Even though he expresses some questionable considerations about the physical features of different races in The white man and the black man ^[3] (Lombroso 1871b), during the period in which he worked on this book, Lombroso had the opportunity to compare criminals with alienated, “savage,” and prehistoric humans. In other words, a theory takes shape according to which a criminal is an atavistic lunatic who reproduces the instincts of his prehistoric ancestors, even manifesting some of their typical physical traits. A first hint for this new field of research was provided by the French psychiatrist Bénédict-Augustin Morel, who introduced the notion of “degeneration” in his famous essay Traité des dégénérescences (1857). Morel argued that the causes of madness are to be sought in heredity and childhood illnesses as determined by the action of agents such as alcohol, tobacco, metals, rotten food, malaria, and the geological constitution of the soil.

Further, in his Traité des maladies mentales Morel also applied the category of degeneration to psychological pathologies “in cases of evident brain damage, such as in retarded children, in idiots and imbeciles, in cretins” (1860: 312). Therefore, from Morel’s works emerges the idea that a series of pathogenic factors also linked to moral disorders may have been at the origin of a corrupt variety of the human species. Such a variety would show signs of decay becoming more and more serious from generation to generation, with aptitudes to evil or madness, and a tendency to sterility. It is at this point that Lombroso’s path can be definitively followed: it is only a matter of discovering and unequivocally defining the traits of the lunatic man who commits crime. Indeed, the quantitative revolution of positivist anthropology has already shown him the way. In fact, experiments with weights and measures seemed able to determine specific parameters (signs) to define the insane and criminal soul in a more or less objective way. It is at this point that his “criminal atlas” begins to take shape, leading to his most exemplary publication: Criminal man ^[4] (1876).

4 Traits of the criminal man

Criminal man (Lombroso 1876) is Lombroso’s most important work. In its pages, Lombroso formulates his criminal psychology through everything he believes constitutes crime. However, what really matters in this context is that the entire work stands on a semiology of the face, i.e., on all those anatomical signs that describe the physiognomy of the criminal’s face. In fact, the text is a monumental sampler including the complete somatic examination of 832 offenders, as well as that of 46 skulls. Furthermore, Lombroso adds a large collection of facts and anecdotes in which he ultimately defines the psychology of the criminal, his morals, his intelligence, his customs, and his slang. In other words, Lombroso’s work also includes a narrative facet aiming to corroborate the analysis of the strictly visual nature of the signs under analysis.

As has been ascertained, Lombroso’s work gravely neglects including the criteria of free will and the influence of social and cultural factors at all. In the next few pages, I intend to analyze the shift that leads from medical semeiology to contemporary semiotics on the basis of Lombroso’s failing.

Despite its unfounded premise, Criminal man was destined for unforeseen success, allowing Lombroso to raise the stakes with each new edition of the volume, which he gradually filled with new details, new studies, and new remarks that seemed to confirm his flawed theses. In fact, it is in the fifth edition of Criminal man (1896) that the famous Criminal atlas is published. Lombroso’s supreme achievement, the Criminal atlas is an immense collection of drawings detailing the characters of criminals, madmen, and masterminds (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Table XXVIII in Lombroso’s Criminal man.

As shown in Figure 2, Lombroso’s work consists in identifying the relevant features that refer to the criminal conduct of the subjects under investigation. In semeiotic terms, certain facial signs acquire the status of symbols of the criminal nature for those who display them. What it is important to underline is that Lombroso’s work is “layered.” The scientist not only detects the “visible” signs of the criminal face (“asymmetrical face,” “huge nose,” “helical rim ear,” etc.) but also identifies the “concealed” features that relate to the shape of the criminals’ skull (“highly developed jaw,” “sclerosis of the skull,” “facial asymmetry”).

Figure 2:

Table XXXVII in Lombroso’s Criminal man.

His “atlas” is a veritable exhibition (almost museum-like) that serves Lombroso to show off his research. Then illustrations are enriched with full pages of detailed explanations reporting the kind of features that distinguish the individual types, together with additional commentary that allows Lombroso to proofread Criminal man and make it more understandable even to the less experienced. Indeed, as mentioned before, Lombroso’s main text undergoes considerable changes with the succession of different editions. In any case, this Babel of signs, editions, re-editions, adjustments, and new contents structure Lombroso’s semeiology of the face, a semeiology that is well summarized by one of the most renowned passages concerning physiognomy and criminal “signs”:

Thus was explained the origin of the enormous jaws, strong canines, prominent zygomae, and strongly developed orbital arches which he had so frequently remarked in criminals, for these peculiarities are common to carnivores and savages, who tear and devour raw flesh. Thus also it was easy to understand why the span of the arms in criminals so often exceeds the height, for this is a characteristic of apes, whose fore-limbs are used in walking and climbing. The other anomalies exhibited by criminals — the scanty beard as opposed to the general hairiness of the body, prehensile foot, diminished number of lines in the palm of the hand, cheek pouches, enormous development of the middle incisors and frequent absence of the lateral ones, flattened nose and angular or sugar-loaf form of the skull, common to criminals and apes; the excessive size of the orbits, which, combined with the hooked nose, so often imparts to criminals the aspect of birds of prey, the projection of the lower part of the face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes and animals, and supernumerary teeth (amounting in some cases to a double row as in snakes) and cranial bones (epactal bone as in the Peruvian Indians): all these characteristics pointed to one conclusion, the atavistic origin of the criminal, who reproduces physical, psychic, and functional qualities of remote ancestors. (Lombroso 1911: 7–8).

What must be stressed is that the style in which Lombroso composed his descriptions allows him to hold together the premises and conclusions of his semeiotics without any possible denial. Thus, in his mind, there are typical features of criminal man that he can mention in a complete list. However, as in any respectable treatise, hypotheses must be supported by case studies so, as pointed out before, Lombroso’s main work together with his Criminal atlas take the shape of an immense archive of crime, a complete anthology of felony, an almost inexhaustible mine of descriptions on the stereotypical features of the criminal face supported by images, tables, measurements, statistics, and more. In addition to these contents, which are quantitatively relevant, Lombroso delights in the genre of narrative: “nameless passions,” bloody tales, gruesome mysteries. It is a vast collection of macabre tales, indeed, in which the reader ends up trapped in an enormous psychedelic journey through the meanders of doom and madness. As an example, I can mention a short Lombrosian “novella” from Criminal man. Even in this brief extract, the author’s main focus remains on the facial features typical of the criminal individual:

Subject: Giuliano Celestino, age 16. Yellow skin abundantly tattooed, absence of hair on face or body. Cranium: plagiocephaly on the left frontal and right parietal regions, obliquely-placed eyes, narrow forehead, prominent orbital arches, line of the mouth horizontal as in apes, lateral incisors of upper jaw resembling the canines with rugged margins, excessive zygomatic and maxillary development, tactile sensibility very obtuse, dolorific sensibility non-existent on the right, very obtuse on the left, rotular reflex action exaggerated on the right, very feeble on the left. Devoid of natural feeling. When asked if he was fond of his mother, he replied: “When she brings me cigars and money.” When questioned concerning his crimes he showed neither shame nor confusion. On the contrary, he confessed with a smile that when only ten he had tried to kill his youngest brother, who was then an infant in the cradle, and when hindered by his mother, had struck and bitten her. His father was a drunkard afflicted with syphilis, and Giuliano had suffered from epilepsy from the age of seven. At this age he began to indulge in alcohol and self-abuse, and stole from his parents in order to buy sweets. He appears to have been subject to an ambulatory mania, which, caused him to wander aimlessly about the country, and if kept within doors he would let himself down from the windows, climb up the chimney, or, failing in these attempts to escape, would break the furniture and attract the attention of the neighbours by his terrific yells. From the age of eight, despite his parents’ efforts to apprentice him, he was always immediately dismissed by his employers. He ran away with a strolling company of acrobats, and later apprenticed himself to a butcher in order to revel in the horrors of the slaughterhouse. At fifteen he was confined in a reformatory, where he twice attempted to escape and to set fire to the building, and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. For the space of a few days, he appears to have suffered from epileptic attacks, although in a masked form, accompanied by various attempts at suicide. (Lombroso 1911: 66–67)

Thanks to samples like the one above, Lombroso was able to build a stronger link between body signs and criminal behavior. Clearly, images, tables, and charts are not enough to confirm his hypothesis. The man bearing the alleged criminal traits must be set in macabre narrative contexts to allow the reader to access this “other” world of reprobate behavior, habits, and actions. In other words, the narrative perspective is crucial to link signifying features of the face with behavioral meanings. However, it is interesting to notice how Lombroso’s novellas are rich in details that actually describe the unhealthy social context in which criminals live. Unluckily, the scientist does not consider these details as relevant. To Lombroso, the contexts form the frills of his narratives, not the possible reasons for the criminal behavior.

5 Semeiotics or semiotics?

Lombroso’s house of cards and his hypotheses of a semeiotics of the criminal face fall ruinously in August 1889 during the second International Congress of Criminal Anthropology hosted in Paris. Thanks to the success of Criminal man, many of Lombroso’s supporters are present at the event. However, in a fringe of the French delegation, there is also someone who will mercilessly demolish Lombrosian theory: Dr. Léonce Manouvrier (1893), professor at the École d’Anthropologie. During his speech, Manouvrier focuses precisely on the traits of the offenders to point out that Lombroso’s evaluative parameters are absurd and that it is ridiculous to link crime or criminality, which are quintessential social matters, to purely anatomical matters such as the facial features are (Robert et al. 1986). Then he labels Lombroso’s fundamental theory about biological differences between criminal and normal individuals as nonsense, rubbish that only serves to reveal the ignorance of those who devised it.

Indeed, there is not much to be said in addition to Manouvrier’s indictment (Reneville 2013). A few years later Lombroso himself ended up sabotaging his work by making the same mistake Gall did before him. In fact, while working on Criminal woman ^[5] (1893), Lombroso approached the Chief of Law Enforcement of Paris to ask for some photographic documentation useful for his next book. So, the latter sent him a collection of photographs portraying female criminals. Proud of his work, when the book was published, Lombroso sent a copy to the kind contributor. Here the scientist conducted a psychological analysis of each of the photographs showing how each face bore the typical signs of female offender. However, when the Parisian police chief began to examine those faces, he made a distressing discovery. He realized he had sent the wrong photographs to the scientist. They were not of female criminals, but of merchant women who had applied for sales licenses (Guarnieri 2007; Rafter 2013)!

This kind of “mistake” shows how the facial features Lombroso considered relevant to define criminal man can be also found indiscriminately among ordinary citizens. In other words, Lombroso’s research cannot be considered scientific because his investigation does not include what in statistics is called a “control group,” the absence of which effectively invalidates the scientist’s ideas from the very beginning. This “check-mate” actually decrees the end of Lombroso’s semeiotics even though it did not affect medical semeiotics. While the Italian scientist ran into the error of stating without evidence the relevant signs that define criminal nature, semeiotics (as semiotics does in Human Science) establishes the relevance of signs through difference and stratification, i.e., by identifying which are the signs that distinguish ill from healthy subjects.

6 Conclusion: cultural interpretations of the face

The purpose of this paper is not to rehabilitate Lombroso’s work. Nevertheless, in order to show how his work is concretely an erroneous semeiotics of the face, I intended to highlight how Lombroso’s instance can be an interesting case study to nourish considerations proper to the semiotics of culture (Lotman 1990). After all, the report of Lombroso’s delusional perspective provided here shows how his research is influenced by a profound and erroneous “common sense” that leads to an equally erroneous “indexing” of facial features. In other words, Lombroso stays trapped in a “classic” practice of cultural signification: he ascribes a “criminal” meaning to those particular facial features on the basis of stereotypes. He senses a “feeling,” a “perception,” that he considers to be shared by the collectivity which as such he values as correct then.

Studying the conspiracy theories and the belief practices involved in the phenomenon of fakes news, today it is possible to consider Lombroso as an unwitting victim of what we now call “confirmation bias,” i.e., a cognitive shortcut that feeds his obsession (Hamilton and Gifford 1976; Newstead and Evans 2019). By this means, the scientist was led to incessantly collect case studies, images, and data, in other words, to accumulate only those “signs” confirming his theory to the detriment of anything that might disprove or undermine it. Therefore, along with other findings, the median occipital fossa is perhaps the result of a mere “illusory correlation.” However, from an anthropological point of view, Lombroso does nothing more than set up a personal mythology of the criminal face that allows him to rationalize an apparently irrational matter. Through that mythology, he tries to explain the nature of criminals and the reason why they have the signs that identify them as such (Barthes 1957; Lévi-Strauss 1983).

Lombroso’s methodology is not so different from many contemporary attitudes that lead us to infer precise meanings according to our perception of the facial features. Moreover, through the filter of our “episteme” (ἐπιστήμη), we also relate typical behaviors to specific individual identities. Hence, it is possible to argue that tradition, common sense, or, in a word, culture (as the whole of knowledge transmitted by the members of a community) is stronger than any purely sensory mechanism. Certainly, Lombroso’s case is the most extreme example to show how common to all human beings it is for signifying processes to rule our perceptions and interpretations of faces on the basis of collective and cultural competences. The latter are socially shared practices that result in the evaluation of certain facial features as distinctive of felony when applied in the context of crime, thus establishing an interpretative “norm” that settles deep within the collective “common sense” and culturally crystallizing stereotypical symbols (Lotman and Uspenskij 1984; Magli 1995: 398).

The example of Lombroso demonstrates how wrong it is to consider the face as a “neutral” or purely “biological” sign capable of conveying its identity meaning without filters (Leone 2021; Leone and Gramigna 2021; Marino 2021). His work is based on the misconception of the face as a sign of truth due to its genetic nature. In fact, as I have already shown, this approach results directly from the cultural heritage of the time. Hence, the Italian scientist’s endeavor is to “unmask” those signs that conceal and reveal the criminal identity at the same time.

To conclude our semiotic considerations regarding Lombroso’s work, to some extent it is possible to argue that his work is based on principles and concepts similar to those found in the semiology of Barthes (1964). In fact, the logic of the Italian scientist takes into account the “connotation” of facial signs which refer to the criminal identity of the individuals who have them. However, for Lombroso (as for Barthes), those connotation signs refer to a “deeper” meaning, a meaning that can be defined as social and ideological compared to the denotational and primary meaning of the signs. Indeed, Lombroso’s true obsession was precisely to succeed in going back to the level of denotation and try to explain how sign connotation and social connotation of criminal man derived from a biological denotation which therefore acquires scientific and objective value in transferring atavistic traits and behavior.