The study of facial expression and its musculature undertaken by
Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne in 1862, an attempt to secure
biological meaning in the natural language of the emotions, resulted in
the pioneering Méchanisme du physiognomie humaine. Duchenne, who used
photography to document his experiments, inspired Charles Darwin's
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) and had a
significant influence on artists (his teachings were incorporated into
the curriculum of the École Normale Supérieur des Beaux Arts). Through
Duchenne, François Delaporte provides a remarkable philosophical and
historical examination of expressive physiology during the
mid-nineteenth century and considers the science of emotion as a means
of revealing inner life upon the surface of the face. The central
concern of Anatomy of the Passions is how techniques of studying
facial musculature became a point of contact between existing and novel
understandings of the body's expressive anatomy. Delaporte shows that
Duchenne entirely reordered the knowledge and limits of expressive
physiology in science and art. The face became a site where the signs of
inner life are silently revealed, not yet betrayed by speech, but
brought forth by reflexive physiology or by technical manipulation.