From Frog to Apollo

Many people writing on medical history have found the Wellcome Library Iconographic Collections a very useful source of illustrations to make an argument more vivid, or even to inject a note of humour through use of an image from Rowlandson or Hogarth.

For me the collection has been quite a lot more: a source of ideas and a real stimulant. It played an important part in my recently completed book, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the idea of race, to be published in 2002 by Reaktion Books and Cornell University Press, which is concerned with the ‘invention’ of the idea of race in the 18th century, and the role played by aesthetic ideas. It was not uncommon for 18th-century naturalists and anthropologists to classify peoples according to their relative beauty or ugliness. The most influential scheme was the notorious hierarchy of skulls of different races put forward by the Dutch physiologist Pieter Camper, which categorised peoples according to their facial angle, with an ape and lowlier creatures at one end, and the ideal head of the Apollo Belvedere at the other.

Camper’s scheme is based on two earlier ideas of human beauty that were given a new lease of life in the 1770s. The first, put forward by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a German scholar who lived in Rome, was that the Greeks (or more specifically the Athenians) had, in a brief period in the fifth century BC, achieved a level of physical, moral and artistic perfection that had never been surpassed.

The second, the idea of the Swiss clergyman Johann Caspar Lavater, was that a person’s moral character could be read scientifically from his or her physiognomy. As he put it in his inimitable style: "The face’s beauty or ugliness have a true and exact relationship to the beauty and ugliness of a person’s moral condition. The better the morals, the more beautiful; the worse the morals, the uglier." Lavater produced a series of immense and very successful volumes, Physiognomische Fragmente in German, and An Essay on Physiognomy in English that came out over several years, and contained some 800 illustrations, depicting the method of relating character to facial structure.

Many contemporaries, such as the Göttingen physicist G C Lichtenberg, pointed out that the face could deceive as often as it told the truth, but more worrying to Lavater was the tendency of new systems of classification from Linnaeus onwards to suggest that a clear separation of humankind from the animals could no longer be taken for granted. In particular the classical idea that all living creatures could be placed on a scale from the lowliest creature to humans as the highest – the Great Chain of Being – could be perceived to deny humankind’s uniqueness.

Lavater’s highly ingenious response was to create his own chain of being that would make clear the separation of humans from the animal kingdom, by tracing the evolution of the head of a frog, the lowliest of creatures, into a fully fledged human head, showing the transition from animal to human actually taking place in a series of 24 prints. These were first published in the last volume only of the French edition, which did not appear until 1804, and he was disappointed in the prints, complaining that there was not much to choose between the last three human heads showing humans in their most elevated state, transcending the animal state.

It appears, however, that he made another attempt at the sequence, as I was able to discover from browsing in the Wellcome Iconographic collections, which contains very rare coloured impressions of a magnificent pair of prints entitled 'Vom Frosch zum Dichter-Apoll' (From Frog to Poet-Apollo), commissioned by Lavater from the noted Swiss engraver Christian von Mechel. The evolving frog becomes a witty satire on human ambition, and the ultimate aspiration of humanity is the Apollo Belvedere, for Winckelmann the purest expression of Greek beauty and divinity. The evolution of humanity is now elegantly reconciled with the Christian separation of humans from animals. This print will undoubtedly be an attractive adornment to my book, but its real contribution is to its central argument.

See also

• Iconographic Collections at the Wellcome Library

External links

• David Bindman at the UCL: Research interests
• Reaktion Books: Publisher of ‘Ape to Apollo’