Chapter 4

Criminal Anthropology: A Semiology of Indexicality

 

 

 

The First Exhibition of Criminal Anthropology

 

Visitors to the Palazzo delle Belle Arti in Rome in the autumn of 1885 became the witnesses of a most unusual spectacle. On display in one hall was a huge array of objects including well over three hundred skulls and anatomical casts, probably several thousand portrait photographs and drawings of epileptics and delinquents, insane and born criminals, and maps, graphs and publications summing up the results of research in the new scientific discipline of criminal anthropology. [1]   The exhibition was displayed for only one week next to the assembly hall in which some 130 European criminologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, jurists, and physicians had convened for the first international Congress of Criminal Anthropology between 16 and 20 November. The sight of the place must have been dizzying. Forty-three exhibitors, most of them Italian, some French, German, Hungarian and Russian, showed their personal collections which characterised their individual achievements in the field. Laid out on tables and shelves were series of skulls, demonstrating the typical features of epileptics, street robbers, or suicidels, and individual specimens of special cases: megalocephalics, prostitutes, murderers; brains conserved in alcohol or, after a special method invented by Giacomini, in gelatine, which allowed the fine slicing of the brain for microscopic examination; plaster casts of heads, skulls, faces, ears, and no less than five completely conserved heads, two of nihilists, two of delinquents, and that of the infamous bandit Giona La Gala, which was there in the exhibition of the Genoa penitentiary, complete with his brain, tattoos, and gall bladder stones found during the autopsy.

            Maps, diagrams and other graphic displays hung on the walls, illustrating the geographical distribution of various sorts of crimes, the rapport of growing suicide and insanity rates with the rise of crime, or the influence of variations in temperature and grain prices on Italian criminality. Clay and wax figures made by prisoners and mental patients, examples of their writings and drawings, an album with copies of two thousand tattoos, all illustrating aspects of criminal or insane creativity. And in many of the individual collections, second only to skulls, were portraits of criminals, drawings as well as photographs.

            In the exhibition catalogue published in the congress proceedings, some exhibits are meticulously counted, while others come in lump sums: body parts mostly come in rather precise numbers, while anything graphic, whether drawings, manuscripts, or maps, is referred to summarily. Portrait photographs, however, which appear to have been the only photographs on show, are mentioned in indistinct quantities more often than any other class of objects. This makes it impossible to assess the actual number of photographs exhibited in Rome that year, but it does indicate that the medium was widely accessible to criminal anthropologists, and that it had the status of a universal, yet rather imprecise investigative tool. [2]

            Let us pause for a moment and see what the main protagonists of the Italian and French schools of criminal anthropology, Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Alexandre Lacassagne, contributed to the displays.

            Lombroso (1836 - 1908), the acclaimed “father of criminal anthropology” and the central figure of many international debates throughout the final quarter of the nineteenth century, brought the largest single collection [ill.21]. There were seventy skulls of Italian delinquents, another thirty of epileptics, and the only complete skeleton in the whole exhibition, that of a thief. Further anatomical evidence of criminality was provided by two plaster casts of delinquents heads, and a set of specimens of conserved skin with tattoos. There were three hundred photographs of epileptics and, collected in an album, another three hundred photographs of German criminals [ill.22]. Of twenty-four Italian and foreign criminals, Lombroso showed life-size portrait drawings, complete with biographies. Among the results of criminal creativity in Lombroso’s collection were a jug with graphic scratchings made by Cavaglia, a suicidal murderer and thief. Furthermore, there were graphological samples from delinquents, and two hundred manuscripts and graphics by mental patients and, finally, some graphic tables and publications as proof of Lombroso’s own scientific endeavours. The display as a whole, however, offered evidence of Lombroso’s belief that criminality could primarily be identified in the criminals’ bodies (skulls, skeleton, physiognomy) [ill.23] and their products (drawings, graphological specimens, tattoos), and showed that the results of sociological research were regarded as important but secondary to the criminal anthropologist’s attention.

            Enrico Ferri (1856 - 1929), who started off as Lombroso’s assistant and was soon to make crucial amendments to his mentor’s criminological theories, put together an exhibition that was representative of his own work as a researcher, rather than of criminal anthropological phenomena. On display were copies of six of Ferri’s books on criminological and penological subjects, a single cast skull of an assassin who had committed suicide, and a collection of material on homicides, a topic on which Ferri would publish a large two-volume study accompanied by an atlas ten years later. [3]   That collection included: three hundred drawn portraits of Italian delinquents; the results of anthropometric research on 1700 normals, insane and delinquents compiled on 322 graphic tables; fifty statistical diagrams on criminality in France between 1826 and 1884; twenty-six maps indicating the distribution of violent crimes and their motives in Italy, France and in England; and numerous statistical observations on criminality in the major European states. We can see how Ferri’s presentation balances the material relating directly to the criminals (portraits, anthropometric data) with visualisations of statistical research (graphs, diagrams, maps), an observation which, as we will see later, correlates with Ferri’s intermediate position between the biological and the sociological criminological schools.

            The third major contestant in the criminological battles of the Congress in Rome was Alexandre Lacassagne, professor of legal medicine in Lyons, future editor of the French Archives de l’anthropologie criminelle (AAC), and most fervent opponent of Lombroso’s theory of the ‘born criminal’. Whereas Lombroso sought to prove the biological basis of criminality, Lacassagne insisted on the primacy of its social and environmental causes. In his part of the exhibition, he showed twenty-six large maps about criminal statistics in France, and a collection of tattoos, two thousand of which were brought together in a unique album that Lacassagne had prepared for a publication of 1881. Both sets of exhibits were designed to show how crimes and the behaviour of criminals were dependent on their social environment. This was demonstrated through the socio-geographical linking of crime rates and poverty, and the presentation of subcultural tattoo iconographies, which for Lacassagne were not signs of biological degeneracy, but part of the socio-cultural environment of many offenders.

            These displays provide us with a first impression of the contested visual field of criminal anthropology. Based on a comparison of the Italian and French schools’ conceptions of the semiotic and visual regimes of criminal anthropology, this chapter will explore the question of what constituted material evidence of criminality, and will seek to unravel the function of visual representations, and portrait photographs in particular, in criminal anthropological discourses. Despite the apparent scarcity of references to photography in these discourses, it is possible to characterise the status of photographs in the semiotic regime of criminal anthropology rather precisely. [4]   Compared with the previous chapters, however, we have to adjust the angle of investigation: in anthropology, the problem of photographic signification was primarily described as a question of producing accurate visual transcriptions of physiognomic and anthropometric data. In contrast, psychiatrists had focused on finding valid strategies of decoding portraits as symptomatological matrices. In the criminal anthropological context, there are no references to the production, and only few to the reception of photographs. Instead, they are treated as transparent media in which meaning always already inheres and merely has to be extracted as comprehensively as possible. This makes it necessary to ask the question of the semiotics of visual evidence in a more general way.

 

 

An Anthropology of Crime

 

The scientific and disciplinary background of criminal anthropology was largely made up of the triangle between anthropology, psychiatry, and ethnology which has already been drawn up in the preceding chapters. [5]   The Italian criminal anthropologists saw themselves most closely connected to Quatrefage and Broca’s classical anthropology:

 

If anthropology in general is, following the definition of Quatrefage, the natural history of Man, like zoology is the natural history of animals, then criminal anthropology is nothing else but the study of a human variety, a particular type: it is the natural history of the criminal Man, just as psychiatric anthropology is the natural history of the insane Man. [6]

 

Like anthropology itself, criminal anthropology was a hybrid of several disciplines, combining current scientific approaches in physical anthropology and medicine, psychiatry, sociology, penology, etc. [7]   The balance between these approaches that was struck by the different criminological schools hinged on the way in which the object of study was defined, i.e. where the key problem of criminality was located. If crime was a result of biological or psychic malfunctions in the individual, then the study of crime had to be a physiologically based psychiatry or an anthropology. Yet, if crime was seen as a social phenomenon and a result of societal and other environmental circumstances, then criminology had to be a sociology. Herein lay the key division between the Italian and the French schools of criminal anthropology which had wide-ranging ramifications especially regarding the assessment of individual responsibility and the social strategies necessary to control crime.

            The answers that individual scholars gave to these questions were partly due to the institutional environments from which they launched their criminological investigations, their original training, and the practical requirements of their specific endeavours. Thus Lombroso, who was an alienist concerned with the biological determinacy of criminal behaviour and for whom practical consequences of his research were secondary, pursued criminal anthropology as a pure science in search of the ‘born criminal’. Ferri, on the other hand, had a background in penal theory and was a lawyer. For him the question of the treatment of criminal offenders and of the response of society to criminal behaviour lay at the root of his interest in the discipline. Unlike Lombroso, Ferri was looking for practical answers to the question whether criminals could be held morally responsible for their deeds, or whether they were biologically determined to commit crimes, which would make them not responsible, but a permanent danger to society. The French, sociologically oriented school of criminal anthropology sought to affirm its scientific credibility by devising social policies that would fight what they saw as the environmental causes of crime.

            Criminal anthropological research thus sought to suggest social policies and to influence judicial practices, both in the court room and in the new penal codes that were being drawn up in most European countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. The decision between sociology and anthropology translated into the question of whether society’s reaction to crime should be seen as punishment which could change and improve the criminal, or as mere social defence against a natural danger. In practical terms, this could mean either complete and indefinite segregation of offenders, attempts at their moral and behavioral improvement in prisons and reformatories, or forced psychiatric treatment. Criminal anthropology sought to establish a positive scientific foundation for these decisions. Within the span of only three decades, from 1876 to 1906, we can observe the theoretical conception of the criminal type, the build-up of an analytical apparatus based on earlier anthropological structures of knowledge formation, the adaptation of a whole set of representational modes appropriate to the new object, and the decline of the hypothetical paradigm when its protagonists joined the French criminological mainstream.

            With the rise of notions of heredity, degeneracy and neuropathological automatism in the medical and human sciences after the mid-nineteenth century, a new disciplinary space was opened up between legal and medical practices. Criminal anthropology strove to fill that space, providing the theoretical and practical application of new medico-anthropological theories to what was seen as the growing problem of crime. For an assessment of that process it is important to keep in mind that criminal anthropology itself remained an interdiscipline pursued by dilettantes from other sciences who, for a while, rehearsed the position of experts in this new area.

            The notion of degeneracy, firmly introduced to European scientific debates through Auguste Morel’s seminal study of 1856, became one of the key, and blanket concepts of Lombrosian criminal anthropology. The ‘born criminal’ was seen as a degenerate human form, the result of biological malfunctions inherited from previous generations and, through the agency of atavism, from primitive life forms like animals and Man in a savage state. [8]   Furthermore, crime and insanity were seen as closely allied phenomena. The scientific broth in which it developed contained the writings of the psychologist and philosopher Théodule Ribot who, himself strongly influenced by Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology which he translated into French, published a series of monographs on psychological illnesses of consciousness. [9]   Rather than as metaphysical essentials, Ribot construed consciousness, memory, will and personality as neurophysiological effects which could be disturbed through any neuropathological irregularity. A healthy development allowed for their complete acquisition, making the individual a functioning member of society, while a disrupted development, whether by accident or through degeneration, would lead to diminished mental functions and the possibility of anti-social behaviour.

            Epilepsy was regarded as an important case in point: during an epileptic fit, the individual was uncontrolled by the psycho-social implements regulating normal behaviour, and it was this motif which was enthusiastically taken up by criminal anthropologists as a model for the biological basis of criminal behaviour. Lombroso went so far as to proclaim epilepsy as the universal cause of criminality. In a presentation to the first Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Rome in 1885, he argued for the basic identity of epilepsy and folie morale, a concept used by Henry Maudsley and others to describe a mental condition that disrupted the sense of moral responsibility in the individual. As an illustration, Lombroso juxtaposed his text in the congress proceedings with plates containing photographic portraits of 56 male and female epileptics, a juxtaposition which remains uncommented on. It exposes a characteristic trait of Lombroso’s discourse, i.e. the assumption of the transparency of any piece of ‘material’ evidence brought to bear on the argument. [10]

            Indications of inborn criminality were sought in every corner of the human body. Ophthalmological research of the mid-century had first suggested that the visual fields of individuals varied in terms of their sizes, shapes, and the precise areas of sharp vision. From this observation, criminal anthropologists developed the hypothesis that the visual fields of criminals were distinct from those of normal individuals. The first extensive study on the Anomalie del campo visivo nei psicopatici was published by Raffaele Ottolenghi in 1890. [11]  The results of this research were tentative and, in the end, did not help to strengthen the hypothesis of inborn criminality. The subject of the visual field vanished from the criminological tableau in the late 1890s. Ironically, the study of the assumed limitations of the visual field of criminals encapsulated many of the themes crucial to criminal anthropology and lends itself as a perfect metaphor for the structural limitations of the discipline - reason enough to take a brief side-glance.

            The case of a young offender presented by Lombroso shows the strategic use that he tried to make of the new field of study. [12]   The affirmation of criminal anthropological evidence essentially worked cumulatively, each newly found aspect of abnormality being added to the list of characteristics. A biographical sketch posited the criminal history of the individual and, in this case, of her father as well, making the fact that the individual has committed crimes the starting point of the investigation. Then Lombroso added a number of anthropometric and physiological data, including remarks on the physiognomy, directing the attention to the body of the individual identified as criminal. The visual field had been tested according to the “méthode Landolt” [13] and represented in a graph showing its outline on a pair of target-like circular charts. It was now characterised through a description of the charts and through a comparison of data of the visual sensibility to the degrees of refinement of the other senses.

            The evaluation of the test results was primarily based on the verbalisation of the graphic representations. The visualisation of the visual field in the form of a graph is thus the condition for its scientific rationalisation. In his assessment of the particular case, Lombroso identifies a whole series of features which traverse the entire criminal body and its representations, whether they are photographic, craniometric, histological, or, as in this case, graphic transcriptions of optical tests, and turns it into a homogeneous tableau of inherent criminality. As with other sections of this tableau, the visual field of criminals is characterised by asymmetry, irregularity, limitation, disorder, and ‘peripheric tendencies’.

            The variations of these characteristics in different individuals finally allow the classification of degrees of criminality of different types: the visual fields of male born criminals are less abnormal than those of female born criminals, while those of prostitutes are the most deformed; criminal children are less affected than epileptic children, which, according to Lombroso, “demonstrates at an early age the equivalence of epilepsy and criminality.” [14]  

            The study of visual fields represents on of the attempts by the Italian criminal anthropologists to extrapolate the whole complex of inborn criminality from the bodily details of individuals. It thus also lends itself as a useful metaphor for the self-imposed restrictions of the ‘visual field’ of the discipline. It was the self-set task of Lombroso’s Positive School to distinguish all the possible anatomical, physiological and psychological signs of criminality, and thus to make bodies legible with the ultimate aim of a preventive identification of born criminals, i.e. before they had a chance actually to commit a crime. Of the earlier methods of reading the body surface for signs of deviance and individual particularity, phrenology was seen as an exaggerated but basically correct attempt at positing a rapport between organic functions and psychological and behavioral phenomena. [15]   Physiognomics, on the other hand, represented a more flexible approach and could be used to formulate elements of the criminal semiology which formed the heart of Lombroso’s analytical apparatus. The idea was to surpass the traditional, Lavaterian physiognomic interpretation through a more scientific and analytic study of the outer appearance of the criminal. To achieve this, Lombroso drew up a list of twenty-two characteristic physiognomic anomalies for men, twenty for women, including “large jaw bone”, “fixed”, “disturbed”, and “asymmetrical eyes”, “large ears”, “thin lips”, “thick” and “black hair”, “feminine” and “virile physiognomies” in men and women respectively, and the unisex “facial asymmetry”. [16]   As Lombroso frequently demonstrated, these physiognomic signifiers of criminality could, supposedly, be read from any photographic representation and would, collected on a chart, give important evidence of the criminal potential of the sitters. By devising a structured semiotic tableau, Lombroso tried to turn physiognomic hermeneutics into an exact scientific method.

            The semiotic regime of criminal anthropology was based on the notion that signs of criminality had an immediate and material relation with their referent - whether skulls, anthropometric measurements, photographs or clay figures, they are natural signs, traces, indices. [17]   For a more precise characterisation of this semiotic conception, we can refer to the distinction, suggested by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, between the symbol that designates by convention, the icon that designates by (visual) resemblance between sign and referent, and the index which designates through material contiguity. [18]   Lombroso ignored this analytical distinction and treated both symbols and icons as though they were indices. He saw only natural signs, whether he was studying the anatomy and surfaces of bodies, the language, the gestures, the products of prisoners, or the portraits of convicted criminals. ‘Criminality’ became the complex anthropological phenomenon that all these indices signified as necessary symptoms. In a tautological loop, the semiological evidence of criminality penetrated everything that came into material contact with criminal individuals who, in turn, were identifiable on the basis of this catalogue of indicators of criminality.

            Although Lombroso’s semiotic appears extreme, it emerged at a time when the search for indices permeated a variety of human and medical sciences as part of what Carlo Ginzburg has described as the shift towards a “conjectural paradigm” (paradigma indiziario). [19]   The increasing epistemological importance of medicine from the late-eighteenth century onwards served widely to promote the use of the “model of medical semiotics or symptomatology - the discipline which permits diagnosis, though the disease cannot be directly observed, on the basis of superficial symptoms or signs, often irrelevant to the eye of the layman. […] Towards the end of the 19th century (more precisely, in the decade 1870-80), this ‘semiotic’ approach, a paradigm or model based on the interpretation of clues, had become increasingly influential in the field of human sciences.” [20]   The model was of particular importance in those disciplines which did not easily submit to the Galileian rules for exact sciences based on repeatable experiments. Like history, archaeology, or physical astronomy, criminal anthropology was “above all concerned with the qualitative, the individual case or situation or document in itself, which meant there was always an element of chance in [its] results.” [21]   The conjectural paradigm promised a valid way of affirming scientific results on the basis of an analysis of signs as indices. “When causes cannot be repeated, there is no alternative but to infer them from their effects.” [22]   Lombroso radicalised the conjectural paradigm in the sense that he assumed the indexical validity of all signs, suppressing the possiblity of chance and the existence of unrelated signs on the criminological tableau. That included visual representations: the Italian School tended to conflate iconic and indexical signs, reading images of criminals as signs that were materially connected to their referents and thus physically connected to the criminogeneous machine of the body.

            Photography lent itself as a perfect medium of such animistic mimeticism. [23]   In one powerful, ontologically oriented branch of photographic criticism that has persisted since the early days of the medium and has recently been spelled out in detail, photographs are assumed to be, essentially, indexical signs. [24]   At the heart of this phenomenologically oriented inquiry of the dispositif photographique is the notion of the trace mediated by light. The photograph is perceived as a luminous imprint that transcends time and reveals its essence to the perceiving consciousness. Through the process of phenomenological reduction, access is found to the substance, the primary level of meaning that, in photography, is immediately revealed in the brief moment when the light-sensitive surface is exposed to the rays emanating from the object. The moment when the referent reveals itself to the photograph immediately and in uncoded form is one of absolute presence which can be recalled in the moment of reception. As in all phenomenological experience, however, it is the presence of an absence, an instance in which time, space, and difference are transcended. This conception implies an elevation of the perceiving subject who, devoid of all contradictions of lived experience, is the prime engineer of the phenomenological presentation through the agency of his or her intention.

            Such a conception of indexicality is echoed in the preface to Lombroso’s publication of 1890, Palimsesti di carcere, and its German edition of 1899. In this volume, Lombroso collected inscriptions and drawings made by prison inmates on the walls, the furniture and other objects in their cells. These inscriptions are seen as “means which reveal the heart of the criminal with unquestionable authenticity” and “elucidate his psychological nature;” they are the speech and writing in which “the interior of the prison is expressed.” [25] Hans Kurella, Lombroso’s German acolyte and translator, adds that these sources serve to construct the main traits of the criminal’s personality, and that,

 

in this collection, the innermost part of the criminal soul steps before us spontaneously and without the virtuoso pose with which criminals prefer to present themselves during public hearings. [26]

 

In criminality as well as in photography the material sign is read as the index of a past presence and of the spatio-temporal contiguity that supposedly existed between sign and referent at some point as the nucleus that generates its meaning.

            These are some preliminary attempts at characterising the semiotic regime of Lombrosian criminal anthropology. Its convergences with the visual regime, especially with respect to photography, will be explored more fully in the course of the chapter. We will find that, for an understanding of Lombroso’s strategies, it is vital to see how he conflated the indexicalities of crime and photography. In a ground-breaking study about the scientific and historical background of Lombroso’s work, Renzo Villa describes how Lombroso’s semiotics of indexicality is based on convention and how it is subject to the social and historical change it denies its object of criminality. Villa circumscribes the ideological function of this semiotic formation:

 

We should define his entire work with the Foucaultian term of the ideological dispositif, precisely in the sense of a mechanism that is proposed and partly used within the more general process of social control, which is not necessarily manifested in the specific agency, for instance, of law courts. [27]

 

Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, the use of portrait photography frequently expanded the effects of the dispositif  beyond the mechanics of social control. The combination of the empathetic medium of the portrait with a semiotic structure in which the realisation of indexicality hinged on the experience of reception, meant that the objectifying, scientific thrust of discourses drawing on photographs was grounded in the perceiving individual’s visual experience as the origin of insight and truth.

 

 

The French and Italian Criminological Schools

 

Only Lombroso’s endeavours - and those of his closest followers - can probably be called criminal anthropology proper, while many especially of his French colleagues were pursuing criminal sociology, or criminology. They studied crime and criminals not primarily in an anthropological perspective, but looked at its social or environmental causes, only sometimes acknowledging biological factors as partly significant. [28]   An important source for this ‘French’ position was the social scientist and statistician Adolphe Quételet (1796-1874) who, in his Sur l’homme (1835), had dealt with the influence that various factors had on the occurrence of crime. Quételet discovered the causes for crime in sociological facts rather than in biological conformations and made no attempt at suggesting a determination to criminality in any one social group. Through extensive statistical research, he found the incidence of crime to be linked to: age, sex, the seasons, climate, profession, education, poverty, and alcohol. [29]   This legacy of French criminology rooted it, more firmly than the Italians, in the positivist camp of the modern human sciences.

            Without wanting to go into the debates between the French and Italian schools of criminology in too much detail, let us briefly examine the main lines of disagreement. [30]   We will then investigate the French exhibits at the 1885 Congress in Rome, analyse some of the reviews of the exhibition in French journals, and look at the discussion of photography during the Congress. This will help us to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the role of photography in criminal anthropology, and will serve as further evidence for characterising the visual regime advocated by Lombroso.

            The Congress of 1885 was designed to achieve three main goals. The first was to place the study of criminal anthropology firmly on the map of the nineteenth-century human sciences, providing a necessary contribution to the understanding of criminality. The meeting was therefore organised in direct competition with the International Penitentiary Society which held its congress in Rome that same year. The Society tended towards an interpretation of crime as an act of free will for which the offender was fully responsible, a position which the criminal anthropologists sought to challenge on positive scientific ground. [31]

            A second, more practical goal was the attempt to influence the discussion on the new Italian penal code from a criminal anthropological perspective. A whole session of the Congress was devoted to this question, and it resulted in a crucial discussion about the applicability of scientific research. The issue was deemed to be of great importance, and it once more became a point of disagreement between the two camps. While the Italians voted for independence and the disinterested purity of research, the French criminological discourse paid great attention to the immediate socio-political impact of criminal anthropological findings. Italian and French criminologists shared the concern for practical improvements of the legal and the penitentiary systems, yet they clearly disagreed about the results of their respective work. Lacassagne claimed that Lombroso’s doctrine would be counter-productive in that it would prevent positive social and legal reform, and increase the segregation of the supposedly ‘criminal’ section of the population. Only by suggesting to politicians and jurists scope for betterment of the individual could the situation of criminals be improved. [32]

            The third goal of the Congress, then, was the establishment of the Italian organisers’ approach to criminal anthropology as normative. Not only were most of the participants and speakers Italian, but the sessions had been carefully planned to highlight biological over sociological arguments. An important factor in this contest, and a site of contestation, was the exhibition set up next door to the assembly hall. The presentation of skulls and other anatomical specimens clearly dominated the show, and the Italian commentator Severi saw

 

this temporary scientific museum […] as a conspicuous proof that the researchers of the positive penal school are not satisfied by empty reasoning, but that the theories of its followers have for a solid base well demonstrated facts which result from long and numerous observations. [33]

 

 The aim of future congresses and exhibitions must, in Severi’s eyes, be the confirmation and further consolidation of the new science. In his summary account of the exhibits, the dominance of the Italian contingent was more than obvious.

            The parts of the exhibition provided by the French criminologists demonstrated their own theoretical preoccupations: Lacassagne’s statistical maps and the collection of tattoos have already been mentioned; the medico-legist Socquet exhibited four graphic tables showing different aspects of French crime statistics, and a number of corresponding maps; finally Léonce Manouvrier (1850 - 1927), a physician and collaborator of Topinard’s at the School of Anthropology in Paris, brought to Rome the representation of a new graphic process to determine the volume of skulls. [34]   His work precisely marks the departure of the French school from the Italian criminal anthropologists: researching the same type of material, Topinard and Manouvrier found no evidence of the anatomical and physiological indicators of criminality that were central to Lombroso’s hypotheses. And to affirm this contention visually, there were no bones, no brains, and no photographs in the French section of the exhibition.

            That same year, Topinard renewed his attack on the notion of the ‘born criminal’, a critique partly based on a critical evaluation of the photographic illustrations that Lombroso had published in his chef d’œuvre’s French edition of 1887, L’Homme criminel.  Topinard maintained that Lombroso presented nothing but impressions of clothes, hair, skin, and the redundant affirmation that ‘this is a criminal’. The abyss that separates the photograph of a ragged prisoner and of a well-dressed studio visitor is a result of those different locations, not an essential difference between the two sitters:

 

At the Préfecture de Police, in the bureau for anthropometric description, I have seen photographs of the same subject taken at different times which make you doubt whether it is the same person. […] Without the filth, the disorderliness, the fatigue and often the misery imprinted on the figure, the head of a rogue generally resembles the head of an honest man, or one reputed as such by the law. [35]

 

Topinard’s positivist materialism could discover nothing in either the skulls or the portraits of criminals that suggested their biological specificity and determination to commit crimes. For Lombroso, that determination was, as we saw earlier, primary, and its realisation tainted all considerations of the material evidence related to crime.

            It is important to note, however, that the difference between the French and the Italian schools was one of degree rather than of absolute positions. While the Italians increasingly acknowledged the social causes of crime - in the 1890s, even Lombroso insisted on a mere 40% of all offenders being ‘born criminals’ -, the French accepted some degree of physiological determinism, even if on a mainly anecdotal level. [36]   The French emphasis on the theory of degeneration enabled the criminologists to consider the stigmata of the individual criminal in a way similar to the Italians, yet as phenomena that were rooted in a certain social milieu, rather than in the individual bodies.

            The basic conflict between French and Italian criminologists focused on a series of issues. As was suggested earlier, the strategies of visual representation used to articulate the evidentiality of criminal anthropological research were key to their disagreement. The codification of the visual as a positive source of knowledge was, in exemplary form, rehearsed by the Parisian psychiatrist Auguste Motet who presented a report about the exhibition during the closing session of the Congress. Motet was careful to pay tribute to every section as impartially as possible, emphasising the show’s general importance for and instructiveness to the study of crime. Moreover, Motet made no dogmatic distinction between biological and sociological explanations, describing the Italian exhibits on the first four and a half pages of the printed version in a tone which is as full of praise as that used to describe the mainly French section.

            His bias, however, does shine through on a rhetorical level. In both parts of the report, Motet uses the formula rien n’est plus intéressant que, in the first case to describe the skulls in Lombroso’s presentation, and in the second referring to Bodio’s tinted geographical maps of crime distribution in Italy. The first passage shows how Lombroso’s crime indicators present themselves as pure evidence to the engaged observer:

 

I do not know anything more interesting than these hundred skulls, 70 of which are from non-insane criminals who have died in prisons, while 30 are of epileptic criminals. You will find all the cranial malformations, all the exaggerations, all the diminutions of volume. Carefully consider these enormous scaphocephalies, these oxycephalies; look at this skeleton of a criminal, solid structure for a vigorous muscular system, and compare to this forceful animality this miniscule head, container of a brain that had no command over acts other than those guided by instincts. [37]  

 

The affirmation of a materially based, pure visibility of criminality which can be found through consideration, observation, and comparison, is traceable throughout Motet’s rather breathless account of the Italian exhibits. The evidence they convey reveals itself unhindered to the committed observer.

            Motet marks the end of his discussion of the Italian section with a distinct rhetorical break:

 

Gentlemen, we now stand in front of works of a different order, no less important and, for those to whom they are due, testifying to that analytic spirit which bit by bit leads up to rigorous syntheses. [38]

 

The scientific register of visibility is now replaced by that of analysis and synthesis. The graphic material presented by the French criminologists, especially the maps, has an internal narrative structure which lends it much more easily to a scientific discursivisation than the factual objects mentioned earlier, for which enumeration appears the most appropriate rhetorical form:

 

Twenty maps establish the frequency of criminality by regions; these maps which are not limited merely to indicating by different colours the proportion of offences and crimes, show you the different forms in which evolution has retarded or advanced; everywhere the main idea of the works of Lacassagne, i.e. the influence of the social environment, emerges with a striking clarity. [39]

 

While Motet introduced Lombroso as the initiator of criminal anthropology, he maintains that Lacassagne’s work will lead “to the urgently desired solution to the great social problems whose difficult study you have here undertaken.” [40] It is clear from his wording that it is Lacassagne’s approach which points to the future of criminological research.

            The material described by Motet in the French section of his report is much more homogeneous, lending further strength to his subtle argument in favour of the sociological approach. Bodio, he writes, has done for Italy, what Lacassagne has done for France:

 

The coloured maps represent, by regions, crimes against persons, against property, and obstructions of public order. Nothing is more interesting than these maps which allows us to understand at first glance the general and local conditions of the evolution of criminality. They confirm Lacassagne’s findings by also showing the influence of the social environment. [41]

 

Again, while the material presented by Lombroso was said to provide knowledge about criminality in the form of visible facts (the exaggeration of features in the portraits “revealing at first glance the anatomical dispositions which are so characteristic of a skeleton with abnormal features and which correspond to definitely classified types” [42] ), the analytically derived exhibits of the sociological school give insight and help to understand. Despite the necessary acknowledgement of the quantitative superiority of the Italian contingent, Motet thus manages rhetorically to affirm what he saw as the scientific superiority of French criminological research.

 

 

Roukavichnikoff’s Photographs of Young Offenders

 

With respect to the exhibited photographs it is important to point out that neither of the reviews makes any significant reference to them beyond noticing their presence and, occasionally, making a token remark about their significance. [43] An exception to this formed the photographs of young offenders presented to the Congress by the Russian Roukavichnikoff. [44]   These photographs and Roukavichnikoff’s observations triggered a short discussion about an experimental application of photography for physiognomic analyses, and were featured in two of the exhibition reviews. The discussion, in which the photographs were treated as sources for an objective study of physiognomies, exposes, above all, the lack of critical reflection on photographic representation in criminal anthropology.

            The exhibition catalogue mentions an “album of portraits of young delinquents photographed at their entrance into the Roukavichnikoff asylum and at their departure from the same asylum; - illustrated by the exhibitor during the Congress (cf p. 209) and examined by an ad hoc commission (cf p.303).” [45]   Roukavichnikoff was the director of an urban reformatory asylum which had been founded in Moscow in 1864 by his late brother. The asylum accepted young offenders up to the age of sixteen, and released them when they were eighteen, after which they were kept under discrete observation and some guidance from the asylum directorate. The sets of around 61 photographs which Roukavichnikoff put before the Congress were described by him in a brief address. [46]   He had noticed, from the first to the second images, “an amelioration of the physiognomy that is, if not constant, at least frequent.” This improvement was not only due to the fact that, in the second set, the youngsters were washed and combed: “No, their features have, in most cases, lost their menace, haggardness, and timidity, and have taken on an expression that appears to us more gentle, calmer, more normal, more honest.” And the improved physiognomy was “often, if not always” accompanied by an “improvement of conduct”. The inner and outer changes, Roukavichnikoff claimed, are symmetrical. Blending the approaches of Lavaterian physiognomics and the Darwinian study of the expression of emotions, Roukavichnikoff considered the photographed faces as indicators both of the current psycho-physical states of the sitters, and as matrices within a more general social semiotics of facial features.

            He was, however, careful not to draw any conclusions from such simple observations, but submitted the album to the scrutiny of the Congress: “You have them under your eyes and you can, almost as well as on the living persons, control our observations.” In this little passage we find the only reference which Roukavichnikoff made to the representational status of photographs: in them, the young detainees can be seen ‘almost as well as in life’.

            The Congress took up Roukavichnikoff’s suggestion and nominated a small commission to investigate the album and to report back later. The discussion that immediately followed his address, the only one in which photographs were mentioned during the first Congress, mainly brought up suggestions for complementing the portraits with certain data, and for a more systematic approach to taking the photographs. [47]  Roukavichnikoff thanked the assembly for their attention and the advice given. It is unclear, however, whether he pursued his photographic project, as there are no references to it in the later literature. His intervention was nonetheless noted with interest. Severi, in his account of the exhibition, calls the photographs importantissima and wrote that, in the portraits, “one can see the change that has also affected the physiognomy, alongside the education and modification of the character.” [48]   While Severi, embracing another source of material evidence, suggested that the photographs formed an unquestionably useful observational device for determining the character improvements of the young detainees, Mayor’s more extensive review closely followed the congress proceedings and stressed the suggestions for perfecting the process. [49]

            The wider implications of Roukavichnikoff’s portraits remained unclear, however, and the assumed usefulness of such physiognomic comparisons based on photography was not mined in a more systematic way. Some years after the Congress, the German criminologist Adolf Bär mentioned the photographs in the context of his discussion of the “physiognomy of the criminal”. Bär had written an extensive study, Der Verbrecher in anthropologischer Beziehung (1893), in which he presented and critically evaluated the criminal anthropological research of the past two decades. His aim was a strong and well-argued refutation of the Italian school in favour of a sociological approach to crime. The chapter on physiognomy therefore presented the received opinions on the legibility of faces, warned of the habit of reading certain characteristics into them, and concluded that there was no evidence of a specific “physiognomy of criminals”. Their imperfect, ugly or repulsive features could be found in members of all social classes:

 

Not infrequently, one finds the same physiognomies in persons of the higher or the highest strata, in persons whose honour and morality is beyond any doubt but who, if they were put into prisoners’ clothes and placed among the inmates of a prison, would not differ one iota from the most vicious crooks and the most common criminals in their vicinity. [50]

 

Bär used the example of Roukavichnikoff’s photographs to argue that the physiognomy changed during an individual’s stay in prison. He quoted from Roukavichnikoff’s address to the Congress and affirmed the latter’s observations through reference to his own experiences. The improvement and regularity of nutrition and hygiene, Bär maintained, often had a positive impact on the facial expression. [51]

            Bär claimed that the physiognomic changes recorded in the photographs were proof of physical, not necessarily moral improvement, and that they undermined the hypothesis of particular ‘criminal’ features. As in two other cases in which Bär made reference to photographs, he consciously used them as evidence against Lombroso’s theory. In this case, it was the merely mechanical change of facial features under altered living conditions, while in another instance it was the immense variability of the faces of criminals, that served to undermine the notion of a criminal physiognomy. [52]

            Bär did, however, advocate the notion of a ‘class physiognomy’ which could be assessed from composite photographs and which revealed the particularly low social status of criminals. [53]   In a variant of the racio-cultural paradigm, criminals were not singled out as a group apart, but ascribed a very low position on the social ladder. The formation of this hierarchy was, according to Bär, inscribed both in the professions of individuals, and in their facial features. Their physiognomies were seen as features analogous to social stratification.

            It is rather ironic that neither of the contemporary commentators seems to have taken notice of the fact that, as is reported in an appendix to the congress proceedings, the appointed commission found no regular relation between physiognomic and moral development in Roukavichnikoff’s collection. Comparing the photographs with each other, determining whether they showed an improvement or aggravation of the physiognomy, and contrasting them with Roukavichnikoff’s information about the conduct and moral development of the youngsters, the commission ascertained that some were both morally and physiognomically improved, while in others improvement of one aspect went with an aggravation or stagnation of the other. “In conclusion, the relationship between physiognomic amelioration and moral amelioration is not constant.” [54]

            The report thus undermined not only Severi’s assumption that photographic portraiture could support the study of criminality, but also Bär’s critique that the photographs attested to the physiognomic malleability and therefore to the non-existence of an inborn criminal physiognomy. The crucial question of how the portraits could be read, what the code of physiognomic evidence might be, was not addressed by any of the authors. Instead, even the final report treated the photographs as unquestionable and accurate representations of the individuals portrayed. It is unclear yet likely that the commission used a physiognomic semiology similar to the one quoted earlier from Lombroso’s L’Uomo delinquente. Despite such semiological uncertainties, the photographs functioned as transparent mediators which supposedly presented the ‘individual itself’ to the scrutiny of the investigators. 

 

 

The Second Exhibition, Paris 1889: Contest and Visualisation

 

At the second Congress of Criminal Anthropology, held in Paris in 1889, the balance of the debate was tilted towards French criminological paradigms, a trend that would continue when the third Congress in Brussels (1892) was boycotted by the Italian scholars and there was no accompanying exhibition. [55]   The conflict between the French and Italian schools had, during the four years since the Rome Congress, become more marked, its contours had been clarified, and their representatives met in Paris, well equipped with statements and research results. The main disagreement was pinpointed by what has been described as the ‘duel’ between Lombroso and Manouvrier. It shows the two men at the centre of an ideologically charged rhetorical battle in which they occupied positions which are rather close to each other, yet decidedly distinct. Manouvrier led the French attack on the Lombrosian doctrines, acknowledging the need for anthropological investigations, but forcefully rejecting the notion of the born criminal. He emphasised the predominance of the environmental causes of crime which he compared to a musician playing the ‘instrument’ of the human individual:

 

That does not prevent the anatomical features, like the features of an instrument, from having their consequences. The preceding therefore does not prevent the study of anatomical features in all humans, whether criminal or not, from being of the highest importance. [56]  

 

            In his powerfully argued response, Lombroso was equally conciliatory, in his case about the need to consider the social causes of crime, and equally firm about his fundamental belief in the rootedness of criminality in the biological make-up of the individual. Certainly, he says, there is a social aetiology of crime:

 

But it is not necessary to write in order to illustrate known facts. One doesn’t produce books to prove that the sun shines on us. I am a psychiatrist, and it is by accident that I have studied criminal anthropology. The anatomical factor appeared to me to be less well known, and that is why I have devoted so much time to it. [57]

 

However, what here sounds like a heuristic and idiosyncratic choice has its basis in a well-grounded criminological conviction. Lombroso adds: “It is not the opportunity that makes the thief, it is the opportunity which makes the individual predisposed to steal commit a theft.” [58]   This statement was followed by a long defence speech of Lombroso’s notion of atavism, of his methods and of the scientific validity of the results of the criminal anthropological research done by his followers.

            In the rhetorical tit-for-tat of the debate, the next intervention came from Gabriel Tarde (1834 - 1904), a social philosopher who was one of the most important allies of the French criminologists. Like the two speakers before him, Tarde was careful to negotiate the two opposing paradigms without leaving any doubt about the side he was on. Thus, he flatly rejected the idea that anatomical features might incontestibly reveal the criminal:

 

But that cannot prevent us from affirming that there exist organic and physiological predispositions for crime. With criminal anthropology it is a bit - excuse the comparison - like with graphology. None of the characters supposedly discovered by the graphologists as significant of this or that inclination of the soul has the content which they attribute to it, and nevertheless each style of handwriting has its physiognomy which rarely fools an experienced graphologist. Now, the physiognomy, whether of handwriting or of a face, is nothing but the result of traits. No feature has an absolute value, but their ensemble can have its particular meaning. For the rest, I insist on the preponderance of the social actions which impinge on crime. [59]

 

Beside the remarkable fact that Tarde affirmed the existence of “organic and physiological predispositions for crime”, demonstrating once more that the sociological and biological paradigms were not mutually exclusive in the conceptions of many theorists, we should note that he uses the example of graphology to illustrate his understanding of the semiotics of criminology. For Tarde, individual signs had no fixed meaning if regarded on their own, but an ensemble of signs could have common significance when seen in the physiognomic context of writing and faces.

            This conception was markedly different from Lombroso’s semiotics which was based on the assumption of a direct, indexical relation between sign and referent, and an absolute value of each signifier. For Lombroso, whose collection of indices of criminality also included graphological specimens, each of the classified indicators of criminality could act as evidence, and the accumulation of such indicators revealed the degree of criminality in the individual exhibiting them. [60]   For Tarde, the physiognomic analysis necessarily had to be followed by a synthesis in which face and image were reconstituted as a structured whole in order to become meaningful. Lombroso construed the face as a semiotic tableau in which each individual trait signified independently. This implied that he assumed neither a special nor a minor status for visual representations, or for photographs in particular. Instead, he considered visually mediated signs as part of a continuous semiotic matrix of criminality.

            Unlike in Rome, where the extensive exhibition adjoining the Congress was set up next door to the assembly hall and thus had a great presence during the proceedings, the exhibition in Paris was considerably smaller and geographically removed from the congress venue, and it seems to have had a much less prominent status in the context of the event. It was presented in the Palais des Arts libéraux under the title Anthropologie judiciaire et criminelle as part 9 of the section Sciences anthropologiques et éthnographiques in the Exposition universelle that was held in Paris that year. [61]

            While the Rome exhibition had been a contingent assemblage of individual collections, the exhibition in Paris seems to have been put together with the aim of presenting the general public with a concise yet eloquent record of the new discipline of criminal anthropology. [62]  The smaller size was most striking with regard to the number of skulls: in Rome, there had been over three hundred, a figure that was down to little more than a tenth in Paris. There were no conserved heads, less than twenty-five plaster-casts of heads, brains and skulls, only one album with drawings by an epileptic, three sets of photographs, and four instead of some fifty publications.

            The greater degree of systematisation achieved by the Italian school over the previous years was hardly demonstrated by Lombroso himself, who had brought a collection of skulls, the drawing of a tattooed criminal, and a copy of the second French edition of his L’Uomo delinquente. Rather, it was Lorenzo Tenchini (1852 - 1906), Professor at the University of Parma and an expert on the brains and skulls of criminals, who had the most striking exhibit: this was twelve groups of objects, showing the heads of criminals in three pieces, the skull, the brain conserved in gelatine, and the face meticulously reproduced in wax [ill.24]. The objects were further divided into three sub-groups, representing thieves, crooks, and murderers. The aim of this collection was, as the catalogue maintains, to show the main types and principal anomalies of the skull in criminals, and to demonstrate Tenchini’s extremely exact procedure of facial representation in wax which could show hair and beard as well as surface conformation. Craniological, brain-physiological and physiognomic evidence were considered as equally significant for ascertaining the biological basis of criminality. [63]

            As in Rome, the photographs in the exhibition seem to have been only portraits. They appeared in the collections of Fiordispini (“photographs showing the prognatism among insane murderers and assassins”) [64] , alongside composite portraits by Galton, [65]   and mug-shots by Bertillon. His work had, by 1889, achieved a high reputation and was constantly referred to by criminal anthropologists as a superior example of accurate and useful visual representations. The criminological sub-section of the anthropology section of the Exposition was called Anthropologie judiciaire et criminelle, which, on the one hand, indicates that Bertillon’s work was regarded as anthropologically relevant. On the other hand, it must be seen as a strategic decision on the part of the French organisers to include examples of a distinctly practical application of photography in the exhibition in order to suggets the social usefulness of criminal anthropology. This would pose a challenge to the Italian approach to criminal anthropology as a pure science, and raise the stakes in the criminologists’ appeal for public acknowledgement in France.

 

 

Lombroso and Composite Photography

 

Turning from the exhibition to the 1889 Congress itself, we find that Galton’s composite photography had a particularly prominent place in Lombroso’s discourses that year. The composite portraits were invented, as was shown earlier, to demonstrate the existence of certain human types, whether familial, racial, professional, or criminal. They lent themselves ideally to the Lombrosian project and were a welcome addition to the semiotic arsenal at his disposal. [66]  

            In his short opening address to the Congress, designed to summarise recent criminal anthropological research, Lombroso mentioned a series of research areas explored by his colleagues over the past years, and discussed two themes in greater detail: the relationship between criminality and epilepsy, and the cranial specificity of criminal types. With regard to the latter, he pointed to a series of recent experiments he had undertaken with skulls from his collection [ill.25]:

 

Utilising Galtonian photographic studies, I have found among the skulls of eighteen convicts two types which resemble each other marvellously and which present, with an evident exaggeration, the characteristics of the criminal and, one might well say, of the savage: very pronounced frontal sinuses, rather voluminous cheek bones and jaws, very large and elongated eye-sockets, asymmetry of the face, round nostrils, lemurian appendage of the jaws. The other skulls of crooks and of thieves have given me a less precise type; the asymmetry, the size of the eye-sockets, the projection of the cheek bones, however, are on the whole quite clear, though less marked. The anomalies are even less evident in the photograph made of the eighteen skulls. [67]

 

Composite photography of skulls provided Lombroso with what he saw as an inductive method for determining the cranial specificities of two types of criminals. These types were directly derived from the degrees of clarity with which the indicators of criminality appeared in the images. In the case of murderers and other full-blown criminals, the precision of the composite was proof of a concentration in their skulls of criminal characteristics, while the lesser degree of accuracy in the images of crooks and thieves points to a lower degree of criminality. Lombroso asserted that there was a direct relationship between cranial features and criminality, articulated by the distinctness of visual definition in the composite photographs.

            Like Galton, Lombroso adopted the notion that these “visual statistics” were an equally objective means as numerical statistics. He went beyond the example set by Galton in that he scanned the composites, on the basis of his list of physiognomic anomalies, for indicators of criminality, where Galton’s reading of the images was limited to the tautological assertion of generic typicality. Galton remained strongly dependent on physiognomic intuition and subjective experience, while Lombroso could rediscover the objectified markers of criminality which he had earlier found in craniological research.

            Two days into the Paris Congress, in the exchange with Manouvrier and Tarde quoted earlier, Lombroso went to some lengths to defend the validity of his statistical research, referring to the great number of skulls he had measured, the numerical data of which were all published in L’Uomo delinquente. He affirmed that “it is, indeed, to these figures that I have given the greatest importance.” [68]   To add further proof, Lombroso again referred to his Galtonian experiments:

 

Furthermore, in order to be safe from all reproaches, I have, in recent years, applied Galtonian photography to the study of the criminal type, and the irrepoachable testimony of the sun has responded to me much better than that of men; one can, then, see here that there really are criminal types which are divided into sub-groups: CROOKS, THIEVES, AND MURDERERS, in the latter of which all the features accumulate, while in the others they are less developed. [69]

 

The positivist conviction that statistical results become more objective through an extension of serialised samples was, in the Lombrosian semiotic, reformulated to suggest that the accumulation of visual indicators in a portrait was directly proportional to the degree of criminality in the sitter.

            The validity of these visual statistics was further enhanced by the fact that they were photographically fixed by the ‘unquestionable mediation of the sun’. As in the ontological conception of photography quoted earlier, the notion of indexicality was articulated by light which functioned as an irreducible agent of presence. Here, the photographed faces are evidence of a future and present, individual and collective criminality. For the criminological construct of the type, the artificiality of the composite portraits was apt in that they were immediately indexical not of any one individual, but of the ideal uomo delinquente. [70]  For Galton, the photographically represented type was a theoretical construct that had a merely virtual existence and functioned as an ideal to which a eugenically conscious society should aspire. In contrast, Lombroso saw the composite portraits as proof of the actual existence of the criminal type of which individual ‘born criminals’ were the living manifestations.

 

 

Cuylits’ and Dalifol’s Critique of Photography and Lombrosian Semiotics

 

The front-line of the struggle around representation in nineteenth-century criminal anthropology ran between biologico-anatomical and sociologico-statistical representations of crime, between a truth about criminality spoken by the individual body, and a truth spoken by social formations. Immediately related to this struggle was the controversy over the treatment of criminal offenders, as to whether they should be dealt with as biologically determined and incorrectible, and therefore best isolated indefinitely from society, or whether crime was a social problem that had to be tackled partly through an improvement of the social environments generating crimes, and partly through a moral betterment of those victims of that situation who had become delinquent.

            Photography played no more than a minor role in these debates, providing neither valid evidence for the sociological, nor independently useful data for the biological school. Two interventions at the Congresses in Paris (1889) and Brussels (1892), however, formulated the critique of the sociological school both against Lombroso’s conception of the criminal semiotic, and of his use of photography as a means of exact science. [71]

            At the Congress in Brussels of 1892, the delegate from the Belgian Société de médecine mentale and chief physician at the Maison de Santé at Evere, Cuylits, insisted that crime was either caused socially or related to social causes, like famine. In his paper, entitled L’Origine morbide des caractères connus chez les criminels-nés, Cuylits rejected the notion of the ‘born criminal’ and questioned the existence of physical characteristics indicating criminality. [72]   As an ironic comment aimed against Lombroso, Cuylits circulated a photograph among his audience, “produced in support of his thesis”:

 

I put a photograph at the disposition of the members of the Congress (the irreproachable testimony of the sun, M. Lombroso said, has responded to me much better than that of men), the photograph of a man in whom we find combined, as well as one could hope for, all the so-called criminal stigmata; moreover, like many people of his profession, he gets drunk: his moral balance sheet is intact, he has never commited the smallest offence. [73]  

 

Cuylits insists that even if there were grounds for an ontology of crime, it would not be deducible from external or material signs:

 

It thus seems proven to me that the born criminal does not exist and that, if one concedes its existence, it is indisputable that it is even less revealed by a material or tangible sign. [74]

 

The photographic portraits serve to affirm his claim for the necessity of decoupling physical appearance and criminal behaviour in a dual way:

 

I wanted to prove that there are many criminals who don’t have any physical stigmata, while others, who are riddled with those stigmata, have never committed either crime or offence. [75]

 

            Thus striking at the heart of the Lombrosian semiotic regime, Cuylits left the representational status of the photograph unchallenged. This status came under scrutiny by another critic of Lombroso’s, Dalifol, at the Congress in Paris. Dalifol was the director of a penitentiary colony in Loze (Cher) where portrait photographs were shown to the personnel when certain children were reinterned in order to find out whether they had been there before, possibly under another name. However, what Dalifol discovered was that the identificational device revealed striking physiognomic similarities between the portraits and various inmates of the colony. [76]  These similarities were si positives that Dalifol tried to investigate whether there was any regular basis to the observation he had made - not knowing that he was entering the scientific field of anthropology, or that the method he was going to use had been deployed by others as well:

 

For a start, I made use of photography. The comparison of children’s photographs seemed to give me some results. I then tried to combine on one plate the traits of children with resemblances. [77]

 

Yet, Dalifol’s Galtonian experiments turned out to have rather disappointing results.

 

Beside the difficulty of taking all the heads in an identically resembling position, I knew that photography gives nothing exact, that it does not respect lines, and that when it resembles reality, it is not through the value of the planes. [78]

 

This was a radical critique of the representational mode of composite photography which failed to produce sufficiently accurate images, and of photographic portraiture in general, as its relation with reality was one of incomplete resemblance. The spatial depth of the physiognomic matrix of the face was, in the photograph, reduced to an insufficient, two-dimensional plane.

            In another critical thrust, Dalifol picked up on the line of argument pursued by Cuylits and now challenged Lombroso’s conflation of exterior signs and a predetermination for criminality. Reiterating his critique at the Congress in Brussels in 1892, Dalifol showed two portraits of the same girl to the assembly, representing a young thief, once in rags, and once in orderly clothes, affirming that in the second image, “she is not really the same any more.” The conclusions Dalifol drew from this observation were far-reaching:

 

One can conclude from all the preceding [arguments] that it is impossible to distinguish vicious children from physical signs. If one could, there would effectively be born criminals, which there aren’t; all these children are therefore modifiable, corrigible. [79]

This argument was the inverse of Lombroso’s conclusion of the existence of criminal types from the legibility of the body: Dalifol claimed that the illegibility of physical signs is a proof for the general correctibility of juvenile delinquents. As a means of evidence, the photographs here gained a similarly pivotal, yet negatively defined position in the criminological discourse, a move which was possible only by twisting the logic of Dalifol’s own critique of photographic representation which he had earlier put forward.

            Dalifol was another example of a phenomenon we have already observed in the earlier chapters: scientists who took up photography themselves were much more aware of the problems posed by the technical process, and more critical of the representational value of the medium. Considering the sources relating to Lombroso’s work, and the degree of collaborative and delegated work in his laboratory, it is unlikely that he actually went into the darkroom himself to expose the photographs of skulls he was using, which may explain why, unlike Dalifol, he was fully convinced of the truthfulness of his Galtonian experiments.

            Despite his disappointments, Dalifol did not abandon photography completely, but sought to complement it by a more exact, controlling device which he was going to call a capacimètre and to which we will turn presently. His critique of the notion of the ‘born criminal’ and his remarks about the discipline of criminal anthropology arose from his investigation of the paradigms of the Italian as well as the French schools. He also recounts that

 

My general director, the State Councillor Herbette, said that he would not want one of his directors to believe that there were men born as criminals. He wanted, at any price, that the children we are talking about should be improved. [80]

 

This remark throws an interesting light on the general homogeneity with which French criminologists rejected the notion of the ‘born criminal’: the reference to Herbette indicates that the French doctrine was backed by an institutional power and political interests which called dependent practitioners to order.

            Dalifol seemed to touch on the same sensitive area when he programmatically declared his rejection of the Lombrosian criminal semiology on institutional and scientific grounds:

 

As a director of young convicts, I therefore do not believe in children born as criminals; as an anthropologist, I do not believe it either, and allow me to quote here an example which proves to us how much one must defy the indices and signs through which one believes one recognises criminals. [81]

 

He then extended the critique of visualisation in criminal anthropology, pointing to the unreliability of reception, very much in the vein that led other nineteenth-century scientists to turn to photography as a means of objectifying their observation:

 

If, as I have tried to demonstrate throughout, photography gives us nothing but uncertain results, our eye cannot do anything but provide us with ones that are even more coarse and more imperfect. We do not all see in the same way, and moreover, it must be noted that we are inclined to see how we want to see and that often, even if in good faith, we end up deceiving ourselves. [82]

 

This critique brings us full circle as regards the role of photography in the human sciences: the problems posed by unaided human vision supposedly having been overcome by the introduction of photography, scientists like Lombroso rather innocently thought to be able to use it as a transparent medium of their observations. The critique formulated by Cuylits and Dalifol went to challenge both the validity of those observations, and the utility of the medium. In the final section of this chapter, we will explore some of the repercussions of these competing positions on the notions about (criminal) individuals, and how they were articulated in the visual economy of the modern individual.

 

 

The Modern Individual in Criminal Anthropology

 

Like many of his positivist contemporaries, Dalifol reverted to methods of anthropometric computation in order to prevent the inaccuracies of human or mechanical vision. He suggested the use of an apparatus he had invented, the capacimètre, a device which could measure the capacities manifest in the shape of the skull. [83]  The advantages of the capacimètre were its supposed objective and positive anthropometric certainty, and the possibility of taking measurements from the living body, rather than from the skulls of deceased convicts, turning it into a prognostic instrument. The difference between Dalifol’s own approach and that of the Italian school was as tentative as that between Lombroso’s belief in physically manifest signs of inborn criminality and Manouvrier’s significant “caractères anatomiques”, or Tarde’s “prédispositions organiques et physiologiques au crime”. Dalifol did not explain the concept of capacity in sufficient detail, but it seems that his assumption of craniological evidence of the capacity for committing criminal acts occupied an intermediate position between, on the one hand, the phrenologists who believed in the precise localisation of certain brain functions and their replication on the surface of the skull, and on the other hand, Broca’s concept of craniometry which extrapolated racial lineages and mental predispositions from a more strongly quantitative examination of cranial size and shape.

            What is crucial about such anthropometrically based conceptions of the criminal is that criminal acts are seen as virtual products of anatomical facts: the physically defined individual has a potential to commit crimes, but there is no necessity, and he or she will only be called a criminal as a result of a conviction. French criminologists thus insisted on a clear separation of the anatomical and social criminogeneous formation from the individual: the machine that produces crime is defined both by physical and by environmental parameters, and the individual is merely a further function in the mechanical apparatus. Lombroso, by contrast, saw the criminal individual itself as the criminogeneous machine, whose body and activities had to be manipulated through social and penal policies in order to prevent them from fulfilling their destination.

            These conceptions translated, as was argued earlier, into distinctly different regimes of visualisation, epitomised by anthropometric tables and maps showing the regional distribution of crime on the one side, and by skulls and portraits and tattoos on the other. The first Congress of Criminal Anthropology in 1885 had taken place at the height of the Lombrosian school’s success. In the ten years since the first publication of L’Uomo delinquente it had established a strong institutional and theoretical position in international debates which, with the formation of French resistance, went into decline. The growing dominance in the 1890s of the French paradigm meant that there were no exhibitions at the Congresses in Brussels (1892), Geneva (1896), or Amsterdam (1901), demonstrating the sociological reliance on statistical material and the new emphasis on juridical and penological arguments. In 1896, Lombroso published the 5th edition of his chef d’œuvre,  L’Uomo delinquente, in three large volumes, accompanied by a massive Atlante in which he put the whole visual arsenal of criminal anthropology on display. And in 1898 Lombroso’s own anthropological collection was made accessible in Turin as the newly opened Museo di psichiatria e criminologia.  The two latter compilations illustrate both the Herculean task which Lombroso had set for himself and the displaced nature of this pursuit in relation to the contemporaneously dominant debate in criminology.

            L’Uomo delinquente was probably the most important single publication by a nineteenth-century criminologist. It was also the founding text of the Italian school of criminal anthropology and, in its subsequent editions, an indicator of the state of the disciplinary debate. We can thus observe how, while the body of material and research reports grew exponentially over the years, the chapters devoted to the refutation of critique also got longer, just as the sections in which Lombroso retreated from earlier, more extreme biologistic positions became more numerous.

            The visual material presented in text illustrations and on lithographic and heliographic plates became richer and more varied from one edition to the next. In the fifth Italian edition of 1896, the illustrative and statistical material that had, until then, been included in the text volume, was now collected in a separate atlas which was to “offer the reader a means of grasping and controlling by himself the truth of our assertions.” [84] As in some of the cases we examined at the end of the previous chapter, the delegation of interpretative authority to the reader was an attempt to enhance the validity of the argument and to generate a conviction in the reader which a straightforwardly authorial argument might not be able to elicit. Yet, as Lombroso added, the material was authorially anchored by explications which he provided in order to make the correct reading inadvertible.

            Beside the clutter of material we have already seen at the Congress exhibitions, Lombroso added analyses of photographic portraits which illustrate his method. The second part of the first volume of L’Uomo delinquente is dedicated to the “pathological anatomy and anthropology of crime”, in which the first five chapters deal with specificities of skull, brain, skeleton and muscles, followed by a chapter on the “anthropometry and physiognomy of 6608 delinquents”. Fifty pages of discussion of anthropometric data are followed, as an introduction to the physiognomics section, by a series of brief descriptions in which Lombroso points out characteristic facial features of different types of criminals. Beside pointing to some engraved illustrations in the text, Lombroso makes reference to the material in the atlas when individuals he describes feature in the portraits there. Yet, from a scientific point of view such a phenomenological approach is not sufficient:

 

But anthroplogy requires figures instead of isolated and vague descriptions, and it will therefore be helpful to present those which I, Ferri, B. Ribando, Ottolenghi, Bär, Hansen, have obtained from more than 2500 criminals, and from more than 1200 honest individuals. [85]

 

The arsenal of evidence on which Lombroso could draw was inexhaustably rich by now. He presented endless series of figures on eyes, ears, noses and teeth, on cretinism and ‘mongolism’, pigmentation and a list of 53 other anomalies and the percentage of their appearance. [86]

            The next section of the book, which is devoted to “photographs and types of criminals”, again starts with the admission of points of critique that might be raised against the preceding statistical argument, especially with regard to the problem of indicators of criminality in honest individuals, and the frequency of the criminal type proper in different criminal populations:

 

In order to fill this lacuna, and in order to prevent accusations of partiality with regard to the types, I put before the eyes of the reader the results of examinations of 300 photographs of students, of 200 Piemontese, of 100 Lombards, and of 302 criminals almost entirely taken from the German criminal album […]. [87]

 

Lombroso does not really explain how the presentation of photographic material might counter the points of critique, but throughout the following discussion he does exhibit an unwavering certainty about the evidentiality of the portraits under examination. [88]

            What follows in Lombroso’s book are extensive typological comparisons of the atlas illustrations which are hard to read and almost impossible to follow. As an example, consider the passage on thieves, taken at random out of the pages-long elaborations:

 

Among the thieves, the [criminal] type is present in No.XVIII, in XXVI and XXVII, of Pl.XL, Americans; in 5, 10, 17, 7, 14 of the same plate, German thieves using force, and in 46 and 44, pickpockets; in No.s 21, 22, 19, 20, 13, 17, 9, 29 and 47 of Pl.X; in No.s 36, 42, 41, 35, 33, 49, of Pl.XII, in XIV of Plate XVIII; all in all, in 27 of 108, i.e. a proportion of 25%. [89]

 

Even if all these references (to 26 examples, not to 27) were correct, it would seem unlikely that a reader would be able either to affirm or disprove Lombroso’s claims on the basis of this ‘positive’ matrix. His deductive analyses are based on a pre-given semiology of criminality which allows for the quantification of the visual representations. They blend in with the anthropometric and anecdotal evidence from antique and folklore sources, and from descriptions given by adversaries of the notion of the ‘born criminal’ which complete Lombroso’s criminological tableau.

            According to Lombroso, the reader can only be convinced by this presentation:

 

The reader himself could thus control our assertions, and should have found that the criminal type can generally be found in 31% […etc.]. One can immediately see (and the reader could control it with the photographs at hand) that among male criminals the dominant characteristics are a voluminous jaw, a thin beard, ferocious eyes, thick hair, and, of secondary importance, large ears, receding forehead, squinting eyes, and a deformed nose. [90]

 

Physiognomy is thus posited as a proof of criminality which is as evidential as the craniological, anthropometric or psychological aspects which Lombroso discusses in the course of L’Uomo delinquente. Having been made accessible through statistical quantification, photography is placed beside the other indexical, material signs of criminality, the skulls and preserved brains and the graphological specimens. The criminal is a molar formation, a homogeneous machine that manifests criminality in each of its parts. The individual, so aptly representable by photographic portraiture, is fully saturated with indicators of its biologically given criminal nature.

 

 

Ferri and the Physiognomy of Criminality

 

Another perspective on the criminal anthropological visual economy of individuals was provided by Lombroso’s assistant and successor as the most prominent Italian criminologist, Enrico Ferri, who produced some of his major works simultaneously with Lombroso’s material examined above, i.e. in particular the atlas published by Ferri alongside his L’Omicidio of 1895. His roots in theories of penal law ensured that, unlike Lombroso, he was driven to develop measures for reforming the prison system and the penal code on the basis of his anthropological beliefs. [91]   The related discussions about free will and responsibility elucidate some of the notions of subjectivity and social identity that were contained within nineteenth-century criminology and will be outlined presently.

            As early as 1885, at the first Congress in Rome, Ferri had exhibited research material related to L’Omicidio nell’antropologia criminale (omicida nato e omicida pazzo) which he would publish in full only ten years later. The subtitle indicates that Ferri distinguished between born and insane murderers. He drew up an extensive phenomenological system for determining the nature of individual criminals from their anatomy, psychological make-up, and behaviour. Alongside the text volume, Ferri published an atlante in which he presented the statistical material and results of analyses on which his argument was based. Almost two thirds of that atlas was taken up by tables giving the anthropometric, biological and psychological data of some 1700 delinquents, insane, and soldiers, providing detailed and individualised anthropological profiles. A series of plates with 36 portrait photographs of criminals completed the first part [ill.26]. The second part of the atlas, Geografia dell’omicidio, presented maps indicating the frequency and distribution of homicides in different European countries.

            L’Omicidio complemented Ferri’s earlier Sociologia criminale (1881) which, in its consecutive editions, had established the author’s position. In the third edition of 1892, the first part on criminal anthropology occupied less than a quarter of the volume. This design exposed the primacy of biological determinism and, at the same time, showed its insufficiency in answering the practical penological problems which occupied the rest of the book in chapters on criminal statistics, questions of responsibility, and suggestions for penal reform.

            In comparison with Lombroso’s L’Uomo delinquente, Ferri’s L’Omicidio was constructed more systematically and critically. He gave four reasons for the publication of the atlas, only two of which had been suggested by Lombroso: demonstrating the seriousness and scientificity of the positive study of crime, and the opportunity for readers to check the results, had also been on Lombroso’s list, but Ferri added the possibility for other scholars to correct these results and to use the material for further studies.

            In a chapter on physiognomy, placed in the part on the organic constitution of murderers, Ferri rejected the exaggerations of Gall’s phrenology and Lavater’s physiognomics and stayed with the claim that an experienced observer could draw conclusions about the permanent and temporary mental states of individuals from reading facial features. Like Lombroso in his Galtonian experiments, Ferri found “from my observations” that two types of criminals, murderers and thieves, “have, especially in the expression of the face and, most of all, of the eyes, opposite characteristics.” [92]   It was therefore possible to reveal a rapport between the tendencies of the homicidal delinquent and his physiognomy through a comparative analysis of the facial expressions of different groups of criminals. [93]  

            The types of material that Ferri’s critical investigation of criminal physiognomics drew upon were very varied, embodying different modes of scientific representation. Unlike Lombroso, Ferri seems to have been aware of the differentiation of epistemological registers to which these materials pertained, and in relation to which they constituted their positivity. Thus, he used the biological statistics from the atlas to ascertain preliminarily that “among delinquents the physiognomy shows certain particularities which are related to those of the inferior races, and which are less frequent among normal individuals.” [94]   In a discussion of physiognomical descriptions by previous authors, he questioned the reliability of some of these, denouncing, for example, an account by Mantegazza “which abounds in poetic phrases rather than in scientific and precise details.” [95]   Other materials Ferri referred to for the examination of physiognomies included clinical reports on murderers written by his students on their regular visits to the prisons, accounts in judicial journals, remarks by an adversary of criminal anthropology which unwillingly seemed to indicate the existence of a typical criminal physiognomy, and photographic portraits printed by other authors, including Nicolson, Ellis and Bertillon. The characteristic features were, he claimed, visible for any informed and discriminating observer. When taken together, the combination of such pieces of evidence formed “eloquent documents of criminal anthropology.” [96]

            The most important tool for distinguishing a homicidal face, then, was Ferri’s own connoisseurial gaze. He recounted several instances when, on seeing an individual, he immediately spotted the homicidal tendency and managed to confirm his observation by bringing the individual to confess an undiscovered murder he had committed in the past. The powerful psychological current that the criminologist’s gaze triggered in the observed individual and that forced him to admit to his true nature as it materialised in the criminal deed, reminds us of the therapeutic use of portrait photographs suggested by some nineteenth-century psychiatrists. In both cases, it was the face that spoke the truth about the individual, yet while the psychiatrists of the 1850s assumed the evidentiality of the self being revealed in the photograph, Ferri posited the semiotic legibility of the face by the intuitive and experienced physiognomist, and the need for the individual to reveal the truth about its nature in response to the truthfulness of the physiognomic observation. [97]

            In order to demonstrate the principal types of murderers through a “positive document”, Ferri collected six “physiognomic plates” with a total of 36 portrait photographs in the atlas. Originally, he had had en face and profile drawings made of 200 of the criminals who had been measured: “But the less certain accuracy of drawings made me prefer the publication of photographs of homicidal delinquents which I could borrow from the Interior Ministry […].” [98] However, on his first request in 1888, Ferri was not granted permission to publish these photographs, not even if they were presented without names. Only later did he receive the right to publish some anonymous portraits:

 

However, gaining the guarantee of physiognomic fidelity, I have lost the advantage of showing photographs of delinquents of whom there are also anthropometric, biological and psychological data, as with the ones I examined. These are partly replaced by the official information added to the photographs, on the verdict of each individual. [99]

 

The photographs were intended as part of the matrix of criminological analysis, here represented by the make-up of the Atlante, across which individuals were examined statistically according to anthropometrics, physiology and psychology, and then mapped onto the graphs of geographical distribution.

            However, the portraits in the atlas still constituted a valuable source for Ferri, not least because the written commentaries by the prison directors accompanying the photographs could be drawn on for generalising characterisations of the criminal types. Thus, Ferri used the anonymity of the portraits for his own ends:

 

Nevertheless, the evidence of these portraits, optimally reproduced by the workshop of V. Turati of Milan, constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of the criminal type which, once the ethical scruples of the bureaucracy are overcome, we hope to further in Italy as well by the publication of criminal albums, of which examples exist in many other European and American countries. [100]

 

The typical examples in the plates were designed to show the evident unity of the homicidal physiognomy across the range of age, origin and social circumstances. The photographs thus became a means of analysis and of classification, allowing any individual found in a prison convicted for murder to be subsumed under one of the groups typified in the plates.

            Ferri’s analysis was based on the comparison of the plates in the atlas among each other, and with photographs in other publications. He also made scant reference to signs of degeneration evident from the craniometrical data, but on the whole the generation of the evidentiality of the argument is delegated to the comparative reception of the reader. In the only remark that suggests an awareness of the impact of representational modes on the reception, Ferri admits that the typicality of some portraits would have been even clearer “if it had been possible to provide myself with profile portraits of these individuals.” [101]

            The evidence for Ferri’s criminal anthropological claims was here realised visually. While in Lombroso’s analysis, criminality seemed to constitute an all-pervasive surface across bodies, populations, objects and representations, which also fully permeated the photographic representation and was manifest in each of its facets, Ferri appeared more discriminating between the different ontological levels of the criminological terrain. His confidence in the truthfulness of the photographic evidence was, however, similar to Lombroso’s:

 

In these photographs we have seen an evident relation of types between individuals of the same criminal category despite the most diverse ethnic origins (as in numbers 16-17-18 and 20-21, etc.), and vice versa an enormous difference of types with regard to the various criminal tendencies, despite the shared origin, like the numbers 19-13-17 from Palermo, 21 and 23 from Verona, etc. [102]

 

            Ferri relied on the portraits presented in L’Omicidio as representations of types rather than as individual specimens pertaining to certain typical schemata. His notion of type was closer to Galton’s, who had construed it as an ideal construction in relation to which individuals could be evaluated. While Lombroso held that criminal individuals were invested with a complete, biologically determined criminal identity, Ferri regarded the different criminal types as comparative and classificatory devices which could aid individual analysis. Although his criminological convictions were close to Lombroso’s, Ferri did not subscribe to the latter’s semiotic regime. Analoguously, Ferri’s conception of photography regarded it as a means of classification which depended on its actualisation by the criminal anthropologist. Where Lombroso’s semiology of natural signs implied a quasi-natural, central position of the anthropologist, Ferri suggested that the truth of the photograph needed to be spelled out, so that the position of the scientist ultimately hinged on the process of reception and analysis.

            This attitude was closer to that of the anthropologists and psychiatrists, while it is worth noting that in all of these conceptualisations, the criminals themselves had even less of a role than the ‘natives’, and certainly than the psychiatric patients. In the penological discussion of responsibility which Ferri developed in the earlier Sociologia criminale, he had rejected other authors’ suggestion to distinguish between criminal acts for which the individual was responsible, and others for which it was not. [103]   Ferri claimed that the notion of responsibility rested on the assumption that the individual committing a crime could be normal and thus liable to punishment, an assumption which he rejected, claiming that crime always constituted abnormal behaviour. The delinquent individual was irresponsible and had to be treated like a hospital patient who was given a treatment appropriate to his illness.

            Gabriel Tarde, the French sociologist and philosopher who defended the French criminological school at the Paris Congress in 1889, had suggested a model for assessing an individual’s responsibility for an act without having to refer to the dubious category of free will. The two criteria, identité personnelle and ressemblance sociale, required the offender to know who he was and that he was the author of the crime, and to be socially adapted to the environment in which the crime was punished. [104]   This programme for a normal responsibility based on personal and social identity was rejected by Ferri for what he saw as its internal flaws and contradictions. Referring to Ribot’s notion of the Ego as a fleeting and composite effect of neurophysiological and psychological processes, and to his own thesis of the fundamental abnormalty of criminal behaviour, Ferri insisted that the criminal could not be considered under such criteria of identity.

            The rationale for the treatment of criminals must therefore be sought not in their particular constitution, but in the requirements of society to defend itself against anti-social acts. After what Ferri saw as the establishment of positive criteria for the classification of criminals, the universal response of social defence marked a decisive closure of the criminal anthropological project. Both the nature of crime and its relation to the social body had been fixed in this conception, and the problems that remained lay with the praxis of the judicial and penal apparatuses, and to a lesser extent with the intervention into the social breeding grounds of criminality.

            With Ferri, the discovery of the ‘born criminal’ thus led to the disappearance of the criminal individual as a socially relevant and representable entity. Whereas Lombroso had considered criminality as it was manifested in the individual, Ferri looked at it as a problem of social organisation. Even if Ferri, possibly out of loyalty to his Italian peers, held on to a notion of criminality which was partly grounded in biology, he primarily considered the criminal individual as a factor in social and penal policies. Similar to some of the sociologists we discussed in the introduction, Ferri held a non-essentialist conception of the modern individual which was a function of the social formation that could not be captured by an isolated sign. The ability of the portrait photograph to subjectify was, in this set-up, irrelevant with regard to the criminal’s self-perception, and had an affirmative rather than critical function in relation to the criminal anthropologist.

 

 

Lombroso and the Indexicality of Crime

 

The trend in Italian criminology of the 1890s represented by Ferri towards an understanding of crime caused by both biological and social factors, left Lombroso more or less unaffected. At the end of the decade, he brought out an edited version of the last part of L’Uomo delinquente in France, entitled Crime: causes et remèdes (1899), in which he stressed the importance of the environmental influences on, and social causes of, crime. In this volume, there were no more than twelve text illustrations and ten plates, the latter including maps on the geographical distribution of crime, graphs of the average alcohol consumption, histological drawings, line drawings of brains and of the palms of hands of criminals and apes, portrait photographs of three African men of the Dinka tribe, and graphs indicating the latters’ “extraordinary” visual fields. Lombroso was obviously paying tribute to the discursive environment in France where he placed this publication. The insistence on the material evidence of criminality that Lombroso demonstrated in the collection of his Museo in Turin until well past the turn of the century suggests that Crime was intended as a friendly gesture towards the French school, rather than a decisive shift in his beliefs.

            At the Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Turin in 1906, an event chiefly designed to celebrate the life-work of Lombroso in his home town, the Museo di Psichiatria e Antropologia Criminale was presented as the congress exhibition, enriched by loans from other criminologists’ collections. [105]   The Museo had first been inaugurated during the Congress of Legal Medicine in 1898. As early as 1885, the Rome Congress had unanimously adopted a motion suggested by Ferri, expressing the demand for a Musée central d’anthropologie criminelle to be located in Italy. [106]   But a project proposal for a museum was drawn up only in 1892, followed by a planning process which, in 1896, led to the transfer of Lombroso’s collection to the Institute of Legal Medicine in Turin’s Via Michelangelo. There it was arranged according to the order of L’Uomo delinquente by Mario Carrara who, from 1904, was to become the director of the Museo.

            The bulk of the Exposition d’anthropologie criminelle et de police scientifique in the salon and the halls VIII to XII of the Museo was dominated by objects from Italian collections as they had already been shown at the Congress exhibitions of 1885 and 1889. The material was partly ordered after: anatomical preparations, including cases full of skulls and other anatomical specimens; Tenchini’s collection of skulls, brains and wax masks of rapists, murderers and thieves; examples of the creative work of criminals, including jugs, clay figures and a set of playing cards drawn with blood; weapons and other corpus delicti; chains and other “instruments and documents of the judiciary”; and finally drawings, graphics, portraits of famous criminals and series of portrait photographs of criminal types. New was the section on police scientifique in which exhibitors from Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and France showed anthropometric instruments, albums of signaletic photographs for identification of criminals, and photographs of sites, victims, traces or instruments of crime. [107]

            The graphic and photographic section included only a few maps and graphs indicating the geographical distribution of anthropometric particularities, and some sociological data. Otherwise, there were several albums with portrait photographs of criminals, epileptics, retarded children, etc., anatomical drawings and radiographic prints, all pertaining to the achieved theories of the Italian school of criminal anthropology as they had been laid down by Lombroso thirty years earlier [ill.27].

            The crucial link of the chain of indexicality constructed by Lombroso to affirm the essentiality of criminality was added to the collection only after the maestro’s death in 1908, however. In his ultimate indexical act, Lombroso demanded in his will that his skeleton, brain, and the skin from his head should be placed in the collection of the Museo, where they still bear witness to the Lombrosian anthropological will to know Man through the anatomy, the brain, and the face [ill.28]. Even posthumously, it seems, Lombroso wanted to validate his life’s work by remaining virtually present as an index of criminological genius. The material evidence of his having-been-there echoes the phenomenological conception of the ontology of photography in which the perceiving subject affirms its own actuality in the moment of perception.

            The photograph, then, is an appropriate metaphor for the Lombrosian semiotic regime, rather than a crucial means of his scientific practice. Construed in a dual way, both as an index, and as an icon that resembles or mimics what it designates, it quasi-animistically tends towards a semiotic re-creation of the referent. Within Lombroso’s anthropological practice, the criminal individual is analytically dissected, and recomposed according to the molarising semiotic regime as a fully ‘criminalised’ apparatus. Its identity as a criminogeneous machine is articulated by the diagrammatic tool of portrait photography.

            Comparing the results of the three chapters on anthropology, psychiatry and criminal anthropology, we can attempt to draw some systematic conclusions with respect to the semiotic regimes of photography. These are, as we saw, not representative of the respective disciplines, but represent dominant positions in the tableau of human scientific practices under review:

            1. For Gustav Fritsch, the portrait photograph ideally constituted a measurable matrix from which meaning could be derived through computation. If we understand meaning as a process of translation, [108]   it was, in Fritsch’s conception, produced at the intersection of the (technical) production and the representation of the photograph. The key problem of producing meaningful portrait photographs was the accurate translation of material facts into visual data.

            2. For John Conolly, the portrait photograph was a legible matrix from which meaning could be derived through empathetic reception. Meaning was thus generated at the intersection of the representation and the reception of the portrait. The key problem of this application of photography was to elicit valid ways of reading or decoding the image.

            3. For Cesare Lombroso, the portrait photograph formed an essential matrix in which meaning was always already materially present. Rather than a process, meaning must here be conceived as an object of revelation. The key problem of Lombroso’s analysis of the portrait photograph was quantitative and concerned its comprehensive decoding.

            As with the anthropological and the psychiatric practices we studied, the criminal anthropological regime of representation was closely connected to a certain type of subjectification. Talking about his physiognomic experiments, Ferri had been rather outspoken about the degree to which the criminal anthropologist was the expert, author and guarantor of evidence of criminality. More generally we can say that the regime so closely wedded to phenomenological conceptions posited the individual’s visual experience as the origin of objective insights and truths, and thus placed the criminal anthropologist at the nub of the epistemological formation. The dominance of the notion of indexicality in Lombroso’s work meant that his was ultimately a molarising semiotics of identity which affirmed both the subject identity of the criminologist, and the criminal identity of the delinquent.

[1] The nature of many exhibits made the show, which was not aimed at the general public, inappropriate for women and children, who were therefore prevented from entering, while “les gens studieux ou même les simples observateurs y fussent admis avec plus de libéralité” (Mayor (1885), p.810). My description is based on the catalogue in Actes (1886), p.501-12, put together from notes of the Italian criminal anthropologists Sergi, Lombroso, and Mayor, and on Severi (1885). In many cases, the catalogue makes reference to the publications in which specific exhibits are dealt with, and to the relevant sections in the Actes. The referential network thus built up formed an important constitutive factor of the young science.

[2] Severi (1885), p.661, in his account of the exhibition, gives the following figures: ca. 300 skulls, more than 60 brains, ca. 500 photographs, 2300 tattoos. His assessment of the number of photographs appears too low in the light of the official catalogue; especially the figure given for Lombroso’s collection (ca. 300) is much lower than that given in the catalogue in the Actes (ca. 600).

[3] Ferri (1895); cf also below.

[4] Cf Sekula (1986), p.40,  for a brief and rather exaggerated evaluation of the role of photography in criminal anthropology.

[5] Cf Taladriz in Actes (1890), on “Criminality in its relation to Ethnography”, who uses examples from Spain “where crime differs greatly in different parts of the peninsula” (Ellis (1890), p.315); similarly Steinmetz in Actes (1901).  On the relation between anthropology and criminal anthropology, cf Topinard (1886) and (1889). The studies by Smith (1981) and Harris (1989) deal with the corollary between psychiatry and criminal justice.

[6] Ferri (1881/1905), p.48 [L’anthropologie générale étant, selon la définition de Quatrefage, l’histoire naturelle de l’homme, comme la zoologie est l’histoire naturelle des animaux, l’anthropologie criminelle n’est pas autre chose que l’étude d’une variété humaine, d’un type particulier: elle est donc l’histoire naturelle de l’homme criminel, de même que l’anthropologie psychiatrique est l’histoire naturelle de l’homme aliéné].

[7] cf for the following Harris (1989).

[8] cf Pick (1989), p.109-52.

[9] Ribot (1881), (1884), (1885); cf Harris (1989), p.39-42.

[10] Lombroso in Actes (1886), p.231-77;  cf also Villa (1985), p.180-4.

[11] Aubert (Archiv für Ophth., 1857, pt.III, p.40) had done the groundbreaking research on the limitations of the visual field, and devised the first “périmètre” to mesure them (cf Galezowski (1883), p.10-1). The subject was quickly taken up by other criminal anthropologists like Parisotti (1891) in the examination of neuropaths and psychopaths, and de Sanctis (1892), who studied the visual field of degenerates. Pauline Tarnowsky (1893) applied it to female criminals and prostitutes, and Cesare Lombroso (1876/1896) summarised the criminal anthropological research on the visual field. There is also evidence of a distribution of the topic beyond criminal anthropology; cf Pinney in E. Edwards (1992), p.80, for an 1894 disclaimer that the Andamanese who were regarded as a particularly vicious and ‘criminal’ tribe had visual faculties superior to those of Europeans. The secondary literature on criminal anthropology has, as far as I can see, so far ignored the topic.

[12] Lombroso/Ferrero (1896), p.325-7.

         [13] Hans Landolt (1831-1910) did chemical research, as well as devising methods of scientific visualisation.

[14] Lombroso (1876/1896), vol.II, p.86; Lombroso insisted that there was a negative relation between criminality and hysteria (cf Lombroso/Ferrero (1896), p.327).

[15] cf Ferri (1895), p.212.

[16] Lombroso (1876/1887), pl.XXXI. For an example of the crucial importance of facial asymmetry, cf Tarnowsky (1889) (cit Lomas (1993), p.433, who discusses it in the context of Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon).

[17] The following discussion takes its departure from remarks in Villa (1985), p.270-82, who also traces the background of Lombroso’s semiotic in Paolo Marzolo’s (1811-1868) historical linguistics (cf p.91-104). For an introduction to Peirce’s notion of indexical signs, cf Sebeok (1991), p.129-43.

[18] For example, the word “tree” is a symbol of the material object ‘tree’, the painting of a tree is an icon of that tree, and  smoke is an index of fire.

[19] cf Ginzburg (1979/1980); for applications of the paradigm by Galton and Bertillon, cf chapter II.4, below. Ginzburg emphasises the similarity of the methods of Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes, with those of the prehistoric hunters; at the very moment of crystallisation of the conjectural paradigm, Alphonse Bertillon (1893), p.VII, wrote: “L’anthropologie n’est pas autre chose, par définition, que l’histoire naturelle de l’homme. Est-ce que de tous les temps les chasseurs ne se sont pas piqués de connaissances en histoire naturelle et inversement, les naturalistes ne sont-ils pas d’instinct un peu chasseurs?”

[20] Ginzburg (1979/1980), p.12.

[21] Ibid., p.15.

[22] Ibid., p.23.

[23] For the corollary between mimesis and animism, cf Taussig (1993); cf esp. p.99, where the relation between animism and fetishism under capitalism is spelled out.

[24] cf Dubois (1990) for the most extensive elaboration of this assumption which is also advocated in Roland Barthes’ influential texts on photography; cf Snyder (1984), and Pinney (1992) for critical, ‘constructivist’ evaluations. The parentage of Husserlian phenomenology to this notion of photography is rarely acknowledged and has so far not been explored in any depth.

[25] Lombroso (1890), cit after German ed. (1899), p.III-IV.

[26] Kurella in Lombroso (1890/1899), p.VII [In dieser Sammlung aber tritt uns das Innerste der Verbrecherseele spontan und ohne jede Pose des Viruosen entgegen, in der sich Verbrecher in öffentlicher Verhandlung so gern gefallen].

[27] Villa (1985), p.270 [l’opera complessiva si potrebbe definire con il termine foucaultiano di dispositivo di tipo ideologico, nel senso appunto di un meccanismo che viene proposto e in parte usato all’interno di processi più generali di controllo sociale, i quali non passano necessariamente attraverso le agenzie specifiche, quali la magistratura].

[28] The distinction I make between the Italian and French schools is heuristic in the sense that it neglects many of the heterogeneities within, and the overlaps between the two schools. The paradigmatic differences described refer to the dominant positions in the respective traditions.

[29] cf Quételet (1835; repr. 1991), p.421-90, cf esp the conclusions on p.484-90.

[30] cf Nye (1976), Darmon (1989), for full accounts of differences and debates.

[31] Cf Nye (1976), p.338; the relatively weaker political position of the criminal anthropologists in 1885 was indicated by the fact that they had to accommodate the date of their own meeting to the International Penitentiary Congress in order not to lose participants (cf Severi (1885), p.663).

[32] Actes (1886), p.165-6.

[33] Severi (1885), p.662 [Questo museo scientifico provvisorio [...]  fu una prova luminosa di più che i  seguaci della scuola penale positiva non si accontentano di vuoti ragionamenti, ma che le teorie da loro professate hanno per solida base fatti ben dimostrati e che emersero da lunghe e numerose osservazioni].

[34] The mechanism was described to the Congress by Magitot; cf Actes (1886), p.115, 146-7.

[35] Topinard (1887), cit Darmon (1989), p.94-5 [J’ai vu à la préfecture de police, au bureau des signalements anthropométriques, des photographies du même sujet obtenues à différentes époques, laissant douter que ce soit la même personne. […] Sauf la saleté, le débraillé, la fatigue et souvent la misère empreinte sur la figure, la tête d’un coquin ressemble en général à la tête d’un honnête homme, ou réputé tel par la loi]. In an attempt to reverse the established terminology, Topinard also criticised the designation of Lombroso’s research as criminal anthropology, disclaiming that this pursuit had anything to do with anthropology proper, and that it would more appropriately be termed “criminology” (cf ibid.).

[36] Lacassagne, for instance, expressed the view that, in vicious children, the development of the ears was often extraordinarily quick and ended suddenly and prematurely (cf Actes (1886), p.211).

[37] Motet (1886), p.89 [Je ne sais rien de plus intéressant que cette centaine de crânes, dont 70 appartiennent à des criminels non aliénés, morts dans les prisons, et 30 à des épileptiques criminels. Vous y trouverez toutes les malformations crâniennes, toutes les exagérations, toutes les diminutions de volume. Considérez bien ces énormes scaphocéphalies, ces oxycéphalies; regardez ce squelette de criminel, attache solide d’un système musculaire vigoureux, et comparez à cette animalité puissante cette tête minuscule, enveloppe d’un cerveau qui n’a dû commander que des actes en rapport avec les instincts].

[38] Ibid., p.94 [Nous voici maintenant, Messieurs, en présence de travaux d’un autre ordre, non moins importants et témoignant, de la part de ceux à qui vous les devez, cet esprit d’analyse conduisant peu à peu à des synthèses rigoureuses].

[39] Ibid. [Vingt cartes établissent la fréquence de la criminalité par régions; ces tableaux qui ne se bornent pas seulement à indiquer par des teintes la proportion des délits et des crimes, vous montrent les différentes formes sous lesquelles l’évolution est retardée ou avancée; partout se dégage avec une netteté saisissante l’idée maîtresse des travaux de Lacassagne, l’influence du milieu social].

[40] Ibid. [à la solution ardemment désirée des grands problèmes sociaux dont vous avez ici entrepris la difficile étude].

[41] Ibid., p.94-5 [Les cartes teintées représentent, par régions, les crimes contre les personnes, contre les propriétés, les délits compromettant l’ordre public. Rien n’est plus intéressant que ces cartes qui permettent de saisir à première vue les conditions générales et locales de l’évolution de la criminalité. Elles confirment les données de Lacassagne en montrant, elles aussi, l’influence du milieu social].

[42] Ibid., p.89 [révélant, au premier coup d’œil les dispositions anatomiques si caractéristiques d’un squelette aux saillies anormales, répondant à des types définitivement classés].

[43] Motet (1886) calls Fiordispini’s photographs “plus intéressantes” (p.90), the collections of Angelucci, Tamburini and Scarenzio are also mentioned, while two of the photographs of insane criminals in Virgilio’s presentation are briefly described (p.93). Severi mentions the photographs in the collections of Laschi, Tamburini, Fiordispini, Buonomo and Bianchi, Angelucci and Virgilio, and remarks “si ammirava pure una collezione di fotografie” in the section on Lombroso (cf Severi (1885)).

[44] The spelling of the name varies; I use the version of the Actes (1886).

[45] Actes (1886), p.508.

[46] The following quotations are all from ibid., p.210 [une amélioration sinon constante, du moins fréquente, de la physionomie … Non: leurs traits ont, chez la plupart, perdu ce qu’ils avaient de menaçant, de hagard, de farouche, pour prendre une expression qui nous paraît plus douce, plus reposée, plus normale, plus honnête. … Vous l’avez sous vos yeux et vous pouvez, presque aussi bien que sur le vif, contrôler nos observations]. Plate 1 in Ellis (1901), facing p.20, (cf explanation app. A, p.377), shows four photographs of young criminals which Ellis obtained when visiting the Roukavichnikoff asylum in 1897, “this admirable reformatory (conducted on industrial lines, somewhat resembling those of the Elmira Reformatory)”. For a parallel example, cf the photographs taken at Dr. Barnardos orphanages in Britain around the same time (cf exh. cat. Dr. Barnardo (1974)).

[47] Tamburini and Lacassagne asked for the documentation of the nutrition, the modifications of body stature, weight, height, etc. Moleschott suggested a periodical publication of such physiologically and anthropologically interesting figures, preferably not only in Russian, but also in French. Ferri requested that each portrait should be accompanied by notes on the moral and intellectual conditions of the youngsters. He also remarked that photographs should be taken in uniform, profile and en face positions, as was practised by Bertillon in the Paris Prefécture. Lacassagne added that the images should be of the same size, and that the carton might have a corresponding measuring device.

[48] Severi (1885), p.658 [… si vede così il cangiamento che ha subito anche la fisonomia  (sic) coll’educazione e modificazione del carattere].

[49] Mayor (1885), p.807-8; Mayor was also the editor of the proceedings.

[50] Bär (1893), p.211 [Man findet dieselben Physiognomien nicht selten bei Personen der besseren und besten Stände, bei Personen, deren Ehrenhaftigkeit und Gesittung über allem Zweifel erhaben ist, die aber in Sträflingskleider und mitten unterdie Insassen einer Strafanstalt gesteckt, sich in nichts von den abgefeimtesten Schurken und gemeinsten Verbrechern unterscheiden würden].

[51] Ibid., p.208; Bär refers to Henry Joly: Le Crime. Étude sociale. Paris, 1888, p.302, for further examples.

[52] Bär concludes that some criminals show a particular physiognomy when mental illness is involved. While the physiognomic analysis can thus have a “diagnostic and prognostic significance” in psychiatry, it has none “for the diagnosis of delinquency in the sane criminal” (ibid., p.212).

[53] Cf ibid., p.334. Bär refers to a lecture given by a Prof. Bowditch from Boston who claimed that the demonstrable variety between composite portraits of different social classes represented variations within a single, socially stratified race (cf also Bowditch (1894)).

[54] Actes (1886), p.304 [En conclusion, le rapport entre l’amélioration physionomique et l’amélioration morale n’est pas constant].

[55] cf Rivista Sperimentale (vol.XVIII, 1892, p.466) for a note on the reasons for the Italian abstention.

[56] Actes (1890), p.194 [Cela n’empêche pas les caractères anatomiques d’avoir, comme les caractères d’un instrument, leurs conséquences. La critique précédente n’empêche donc pas l’étude des caractères anatomiques chez tous les hommes, criminels ou non, d’avoir la plus haute importance].

[57] Ibid., p.195 [Mais pour illustrer des faites connus il n’est pas besoin d’écrire. On ne fait pas des livres pour démontrer que le soleil nous illumine. Je suis un psychologue aliéniste, et c’est accidentellement que j’ai étudié l’anthropologie criminelle. Le facteur anatomique m’a paru moins connu, et c’est pour cela que je lui ai consacré plus de temps].

[58] Ibid. [Ce n’est pas l’occasion qui fait le larron, c’est l’occasion qui fait que l’individu prédisposé à voler commet un vol]. At the Brussels Congress, Dalifol added another simile for describing the social determination of crime. He related the example of a child who helped him in the house and who stole things from him out of habit, not out of need, and gave them back later: “Ce sont de véritables machines qu’a produites l’habitude; tel un phonographe d’Edison répète la même phrase, alors que la feuille d’étain sur laquelle elle est gravée se déroule à nouveau” (Actes (1893), p.415).

[59] Actes (1890), p.199-200 [Mais cela ne peut nous empêcher d’affirmer qu’il existe des prédispositions organiques et physiologiques au crime. Il en est un peu - pardon la comparaison - de l’anthropologie criminelle comme de la graphologie. Aucun des caractères soi-disant découverts par les graphologues comme significatifs de tel ou tel penchant de l’âme n’a la portée qu’ils lui attribuent, et cependant chaque écriture à sa physionomie, qui trompe rarement un graphologue exercé. Or, la physionomie, soit d’une écriture, soit d’un visage, n’est qu’une résultante des traits. Aucun trait n’a une valeur absolue, mais leur ensemble peut avoir sa signification. Du reste, je tiens pour la prépondérance des actions sociales qui poussent au crime].

[60] In another instance, Lombroso  insisted on the existence of physical, especially physiognomical, anomalies in criminal types; if the latter were missing, there would be other, equally important, physical markers,“la gynécomastie, le mancinisme, l’inégalité de la pression des deux côtés, l’orteil plus court” (cf Garofalo in Actes (1901), p.218).

[61] The Congress was originally supposed to be complemented by an exhibition comparable to that in Rome. The organisers of the Exposition, however, did not allocate a separate exhibition space to the criminal anthropologists so that they had to beg for a niche in the general anthropology exhibition, which forced the reduced size of the show (cf Actes (1890), p.XII-XIII). The response of the audience seems to have been disappointing. In an introduction to the brief catalogue printed in the congress proceedings, Manouvrier apologetically explains that, at an event like the Exposition universelle, visitors did not normally take more than a very short time to look at individual exhibits, but that the large number of people who would at least have received a vague idea of the criminal anthropological research made up for the lack of depth and careful attention. Moreover, many professionals, judges and jurists would have learned about the existence of the new discipline, encountering what they may have seen as a desideratum until then: “Que chacun des anthropologistes exposants considère ce résultat, et il ne regrettera ni son temps ni sa peine” (ibid., p.446). The minor status of the exhibition is also confirmed by the fact that Havelock Ellis, in a ten-page report on the Congress, does not mention it with a single word (cf Ellis (1890), Appendix B, p.307-16). The Exposition universelle was an important reason for the initial decision to hold the Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Paris that year (cf AAC , vol.I, 1886, p.87; cf also AAC, vol.II, 1887, p.594 for further remarks on the preparations). The distractions offered by the “capital of the nineteenth century” - “centre de perdition pour les travailleurs et les congrès” -, however, became a reason for the rejection of Paris as host of the fifth Congress (1901), in favour of Amsterdam (AAC, vol.IV, 1896, p.546; cf Kaluszynski (1989), p.62-3, n.1). For a general account of the 1889 Exposition, cf the summary and references by Joy H. Hall in Findling (1990), p.108-16.

[62] The exhibits were, however, shown in the context of their original collections. Only the exhibition of 1906, in the Museo di Psichiatria e Criminologia in Turin, which was based on the museum’s collection itself and which otherwise drew strongly on institutional rather than on private collections, presented the material thematically ordered. The official catalogue of the Exposition  claimed that the criminal anthropological exhibition was “exclusivement italienne” (cf Exposition Universelle, Paris, Catalogue génerale officiel, ...(1889), p.66). The published proceedings of the Congress, however, also list contributions from Alphonse Bertillon, Th. Chudzinski, Francis Galton, L. Manouvrier, Paul Topinard, and Auguste Voisin. The reason for this incongruence is unclear.

[63] cf Actes   (1890), p.447.

[64] Ibid., p.446 [photographies montrant le prognathisme chez des aliénés meurtriers et des assassins].

[65] Galton did not, however, attend the Congress; there were no British participants in Rome or Paris.

[66] cf the discussion of Galton in the introduction, above; Lombroso (1876/1889), p.180,  also referred to Arthur Batut’s adaptation of composite photography (1887), which popularised the process in France.

[67] Actes (1890), p.26 [Avec les études de photographies galtoniennes, j’ai trouvé dans dix-huit crânes de condamnés deux types qui se ressemblent merveilleusement et qui présentent, avec une exagération évidente, les caractères du criminel et, on pourrait bien dire, de l’homme sauvage: sinus frontaux très apparents, zygomes et mâchoires très volumineuses, orbites très grands et très éloignés, asymétrie du visage, type phéléiforme de l’ouverture nasale, appendice lémurien des mâchoires. Les autres crânes d’escrocs et de voleurs m’ont donné un type moins précis; mais l’asymétrie, la largeur des orbites, la saillie de zygomes y sont toutefois très nettes, quoique moins marquées. Les anomalies sont encore moins évidentes dans la photographie obtenue avec ces dix-huit crânes].

[68] Ibid., p.198 [c’est bien à ces chiffres que je donnais le plus d’importance].

[69] Ibid. [Pour me mettre, d’ailleurs, à l’abri de tous les reproches, dans ces dernières années, j’ai appliqué la photographie galtonienne à l’étude du type criminel, et le témoignage irréprochable du soleil m’a répondu bien mieux que celui des hommes; on y voit alors que vraiment il y a des types criminels se subdivisant en sous-genres: ESCROCS, VOLEURS ET MEURTRIERS, dans le dernier desquels tous les caractères s’accumulent, tandis que dans les autres ils sont moins développés]; cf Lombroso (1876/1889), vol.1, p.180 for similar formulations.

[70] In his discussion of Galton’s composite photographs, Phéline has pointed out that it is the fact that these images are synthetic, representing an impersonal figure, that makes them fit to be visualisations of typological postulations: “Ici, la photographie est, avec une subtilité remarquable, conviée à illustrer la plus improbable mais aussi la plus fondamentale des thèses lombrosiennes: non plus le crime mais la prédestination même de l’homme délinquant” (cf Phéline (1985), p.66).

[71] Another instance is passed over during the 1889 Congress: at the end of a discussion of political crimes, Magitot put an album of photographs of female Communards before the assembly and requested to be allowed to publish biographical notes on some of these women in the appendix of the congress proceedings: “Ces photographies représentent la plupart des types de dégénérescence physique et morale: tantôt ce sont les caractères de la virilité, tantôt ceux de l’infériorité physique, de la bestialité. D’autres montrent manifestement les signes de l’hystérie, de l’exaltation, du fanatisme” (Actes (1890), p.239). Although the request was granted, an apologetic note was printed in the appendix: “La loi d’amnistie promulguée en 1879, oppose en effet une interdiction absolue à la reproduction des portraits ou notices biographiques des individus qui ont pris part à l’insurrection de 1871” (p.450). Most probably, the reasons for this interdiction lay not so much in the wish to defend the personality rights of Communards, but in the desire to suppress the worshipping of popular heroes and heroines (cf Rouillé (1989), p.485).

[72] cf Actes (1893), p.240-4.

[73] Ibid., p.242 [produit à l’appui de sa thèse … Je tiens à la disposition des membres du Congrès une photographie (le témoignage irréprochable du Soleil, disait M. Lombroso, m’a répondu bien mieux que celui des hommes), la photographie d’un homme chez qui se trouvent réunis, comme à plaisir, tous les stigmates dits criminels; de plus, comme beaucoup de gens de son métier, il s’alcoolise: son bilan moral est intact, il n’a jamais commis le moindre délit]; for the quotation from Lombroso, cf Actes (1890), p.198 (also cited above).

[74] Ibid. [Il me semble donc acquis qu’il n’existe pas de criminel-né et que, si l’on concède son existence, il est indiscutable que tout au moins pas un signe matériel ou tangible ne le révèle].

[75] Ibid., p.252 [J’ai voulu prouver qu’il y a beaucoup de criminels qui n’ont aucun stigmate physique, tandis que d’autres, criblés de ces stigmates, n’ont jamais commis ni crime ni délit].  Another member of the congress, Léo Warnots, assistant surgeon of the Hôpital Saint-Jean in Brussels, publically claimed he recognised the sitter in the portrait circulated by Cuylits as a professional criminal whom he had treated (cf Actes (1893), p.252, and p. 331 for Cuylits response a few days later). The abstaining Italians considered the incident with glee; cf Gurrieri, reporting on the results of the Brussels Congress, in Rivista Sperimentale, Vol. XVIII,1892, p.775-80, esp. p.777.

[76] Actes (1890), p.308.

[77] Ibid., p.309 [Je me servis d’abord de la photographie. La comparaison de photographies d’enfants parut me donner quelques résultats. Je cherchai ensuite à réunir sur un même cliché le traits d’enfants se ressemblant].

[78] Ibid. [Outre la difficulté de prendre dans une position identiquement semblable toutes les têtes, je savais que la photographie ne donne rien d’exact, ne respecte pas des lignes, et que, si elle semble la réalité, ce n’est pas par la valeur des plans].

[79] Actes (1893), p.415 [De tout ce qui précède, il résulte qu’il est impossible de distinguer à des signes physiques les enfants vicieux. Si on le pouvait, en effet, il y aurait des criminels-nés, ce qui n’est pas; tous ces enfants sont donc amendables, corrigibles].

[80] Actes (1890), p.310 [Mon directeur général, M. le Conseiller d’Etat Herbette, dit qu’il ne voudrait pas qu’un de ses directeurs pût croire qu’il y ait des hommes nés criminels. Il veut qu’à tout prix, ces enfants dont nous parlons, soient régénérés].

[81] Ibid. [Comme directeur de jeunes détenus, je ne crois donc pas aux enfants nés criminels; comme anthropologiste, je n’y crois pas non plus, et permettez-moi de citer ici un example qui nous prouve combien il faut se défier des indices et des signes auxquels on croit reconnaître les criminels].

[82] Ibid., p.311 [Si la photographie, comme j’ai essayé de le démontrer tout à l’heure, ne nous donne que des résultats incertains, notre œil ne peut encore que nous en fournir de plus grossiers et de plus imparfaits. Nous ne voyons pas tous de la même façon, de plus, il est à remarquer que nous sommes portés à voir comme nous le désirons et que souvent, tout en étant de bonne foi, nous arrivons à nous tromper nous-mêmes].

[83] Cf ibid., p.312.

[84] Lombroso (1876/1887), p.5 [offrir au lecteur le moyen de saisir et de contrôler, par lui-même, la vérité de nos assertions]; the French edition of 1887 already had such an atlas.

[85] Lombroso (1876/1896), vol.1, p.282 [Ma l’antropologia vuol cifre e non descrizione isolate e generiche e quindi gioverà dare quello che io, Ferri, B. Ribando, Ottolenghi, Baer, Hansen, otterremmo in più di 2500 criminali, e in più di 1200 onesti].

[86] Ibid., p.294; an investigation of the gender specificity of the physiognomic traits of criminality, as it is expressed in the differences between the lists of anomalies for men and women, lies beyond the scope of the present analysis (cf Regener (1990) for an interesting gloss on this point).

[87] Ibid., p.295 [Per colmare questa lacuna e per colmarla in modo da non potere essere accusato di parzialità nella scelta dei tipi, porgo qui sotto gli occhi del lettore il riassunto di esami di 300 fotografie di studenti, 200 Piemontesi, 100 Lombardi e 302 criminali quasi tutti dell’Album criminale germanico […]].

[88]  In this context, Lombroso talks about two different types of illustrations: tipi di criminali are lithographs after photographs of named individuals, while the ritratti are photographs and line engravings after photographs of anonymous criminals. The named individuals, mostly famous criminals and brigands of the time, are presented as epitomising certain criminal types, while the portraits are of individuals who are dealt with statistically and subsumed under these types. The notion of the outstanding individual and that of the type are conflated and presented as a mould into which any specimen from the sample under investigation can be fitted.

[89] Ibid., p.299 [Nei ladri il tipo si presenta nel N. XVIII, nel XXVI e XXVII, Tav. XI, Americani; nei 5, 10, 17, 7, 14 della Tavola stessa, ladri con scasso Tedeschi, e nel 46 e 44, borsaiuoli; nei N. 21, 22, 19, 20, 13, 17, 9, 29 e 47 della Tav. X; nei N. 36, 42, 41, 35, 33, 49, della Tav. XII, nel XIV della Tavola VXIII; in complesso in 27 su 108, nella proportione cioè del 25 %].

[90] Ibid., p.300 [Il lettore così ha potuto da sè controllare le nostre asserzioni - e avrà trovato che il tipo criminale in genere si ha nel 31 %  [...]. Si vede subito (ed il lettore lo può controllare colle fotografie alla mano) che nei criminali maschi il carattere prevalente è la mandibola voluminosa, la scarsa barba, l’occhio feroce, il capello folto, venendo in seconda linea le orecchie ad ansa, la fronte sfuggente, lo strabismo, il naso deforme].

[91] There is ample evidence of the crucial position that Ferri took up as an intermediate between the French and Italian schools in reports of the first and second Congresses; for an example of his negotiating skills, cf Ellis (1890), p.309-11.

[92] Ferri (1895), p.222 [hanno, specialmente nell’espressione della facia e soprattutto degli occhi, i carattetri opposti].

[93] cf ibid., p.215.

[94] Ibid., p.219 [nei delinquenti la fisonomia presenta certe particolarità, che li avvicinano spesso alle razze inferiori, e che sono meno frequenti negli uomini normali].

[95] Ibid., p.220 [che se abbonda più di frasi poetiche che di elementi scientifici e precisi].

[96] cf ibid., p.226-35; references to Nicolson (1873-75), Ellis (1890), Bertillon (1893).

[97] We will encounter a similar mechanism in Bertillon’s conceptions of police photography when he suggests that the criminal will confess his deed when seeing his own portrait. Again, the authorial truth uttered by the institutionally framed photograph forces the individual to admit to further truths (cf chapter II.4, below).

[98] Ferri (1895), Atlante, p.227 [Ma la minore sicurezza di fedeltà del disegno a mano, mi fece preferire la publicazione di fotografie di delinquenti omicidi, che potei avere in prestito dal Ministero dell’Interno […]].

[99] Ibid. [Guadagnando però in garanzia di fedeltà fisionomica, ho perduto il vantaggio di dare le fotografie dei delinquenti, di cui avessi anche i dati antropometrici, biologici e psicologici, come dei miei esaminati. A questo suppliscono in parte le informazioni ufficiali sulla condanna di ciascun individuo, allegate alla fotografia].

[100] Ibid. [L’evidenza però di questi ritratti, ottimamente riprodotti dallo stabilimento V. Turati di Milano, costituisce un contributo prezioso a quello studio del tipo criminale, che in avvenire, vinti gli scrupoli misoneistici della burocrazia, ci auguriamo di vedere favorito, anche in Italia, colla pubblicazione degli albums criminali, di cui tanti altri paesi d’Europa e d’America ci dànno l’esempio]; cf also Ferri (1895), p.227.

[101] Ferri (1895), p.227 [se degli stessi individui avessi potuto procurarmi la fotografia di profilo].

[102] Ibid., p.236 [Abbiamo veduto, in queste fotografie, una evidente comunanza di tipi in individui della stessa categoria criminale malgrado la più diversa origine etnica (come nei numeri 16-17-18 e 20-21, ecc.), e viceversa una differenza enorme di tipo rispondente alle diverse tendenze criminose, malgrado la origine comune, come nei numeri 19-13-17 di Palermo, 21 e 23 di Verona, ecc.].

[103] cf Ferri (1881).

[104] Cf Tarde (1890); on Tarde, cf also Milet (1970).

[105] For the history of the Museo, cf Colombo (1975), p.37-9.

[106] cf Actes (1886), p.294-5.

[107] Such criminalistic exhibits would dominate the exhibition at the last Congress, held in Cologne in 1911, which took place after Lombroso’s death in 1908 and indicated that criminal anthropology as a paradigm had lost its purchase - there were no more than five skulls in the whole show, while there had been several hundreds in Rome in 1885.

[108] following Massumi (1992), p.14, in his analysis of Deleuze and Guattari (cf also ibid., p.147, n.12).