Title page of Phrenology Applied to Painting and Sculpture
Phrenology was a popular scientific subfield during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; phrenology promised to reveal the inner secrets of the character and the mind through recognition of the particular shape of an individual’s skull. Specific portions of the brain, often referred to as “organs,” were believed to connect to certain tendencies in character — acquisitiveness, jealousy, hysteria, sexual desire, and so forth — and to bring a particular shape and proportion to the skull itself.
In 1855, George Combe published his Phrenology Applied to Painting and Sculpture, a work based on letters he had originally written to the Phrenological Journal. Phrenology was not a widely respected field and Combe sought to protect something he saw as an important window into the human character. He wrote several other books on the subject and gained a reputation as a noted defender of phrenology and champion of its originators, Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim. Combe himself was one of the first to bring phrenology into the United Kingdom. Himself a Scotsman, he helped to popularize and bring attention to phrenology, acting as one of the cofounders of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820.
Phrenology Applied discusses the fine arts with particular reference to the “cerebral organs” thought to be responsible not only for the creation of the artwork in particular but for the appreciation of it in a viewer. For example, in his first chapter, Combe discusses color theory at length, developing his argument that the viewer need have certain well developed portions of the brain in order to appreciate the coloring of a work of art appropriately.
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