Reading the face

From the New Yorker issue of July 6 & 3, 2026, under the heading “A critic at large” (on-line, 6/29/26, “What happened to your face: How the human countenance become something to study, edit, optimize, and scan”; in print, 7/6/26, “Regression to the mien: How mirrors, selfies, and surveillance have changed what we make of our faces”) by Cal Revely-Calder (with some subheads added by me): [A tarnished Swiss star] … One unexpected consequence of the return of realism [in portraiture] was a renewed attention to anatomy. Take dissection, which was mostly in abeyance through the medieval era, though by the thirteenth century in Europe it was beginning to appear in university curricula. During the Renaissance, it flourished again, and became a routine part of an artist’s studies, as Leonardo’s sketches attest. At the same time, another art returned, equally venerable and equally obsessed with the human form: physiognomy. The thinking, from the Greeks onward, was that you could, if…