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Statues and Normalization

Author(s): Marian Hobson


Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 102, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp. xxix-xliv
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Statues and Normalization


MARIAN

HOBSON

The PresidentialAddress of the


Modern Humanities Research Association
read at i Carlton House Terrace,London, on iI May 2007
Languages andNormalization
This paper is part of an enquiry into the cultural background
to the normal
in France at the end of the eighteenth century. But since it
ization ofmeasures
is being given at ameeting of theModern Humanities Research Association,
it
seems appropriate to speak first a little about a different kind of normalization.
This may well have begun, or at least gathered strength, in the France of the
same epoch. Like metrification, this second type of normalization
takes one
measure and aligns everything to it. But this time, the measure
is linguistic,
and nowadays it is usually, however mistakenly, taken to be English. Now, this
may be dangerous, in our case, for our particular profession and our separate
jobs. But I am going to argue that it is even more dangerous: dangerous for our
mental agility, for the way we think, for our very capacity to take on new ideas.
I refer to assumptions about the normalization of languages.
has been at all valued, and probably
It is only recently thatmonolingualism
at all common. In the France of the eighteenth century, many people will have
been bilingual between local dialect and a more regulated French. In present
true language, I remind
day Scotland, many are bilingual between Scots-a
and English, and the same is true inGer
you, with a centuries-old literature

many, betweenHochdeutsch and Schwabisch, for instance.My friendsfrom


the south of India move between
English. Now, these friends tend
son for linguistic normalization:
an army and a navy; it explains,
Rayfield assures me is essentially

four languages, Kanaada,


Tulu, Telugu, and
to avoid Hindi, and that can provide one rea
as the joke says, a language is a dialect with
too, why what a friend and colleague Donald
the same language with different slants to its

vocabulary,
with different
scripts-Serbo-Croat-is known as Bosnian, Slove

nian, Serbian, or Croat in what yet different friends, though no doubt with a
different political persuasion, persist in calling ex-Yugoslavia. We humans find
ithard tomanage this pull towards homogenization
and our urge to particular
ity. Itmay be that these move in cycles; it seems likely that a particular historical
era, one of unification, of loss of singularity in speech or dress, is coming to a
close inWestern Europe. We know that radio and television inBritain are much
more tolerant of linguistic variation than even twenty years ago. For theUnited
anyway, the relation between this tolerance and the dissolution, or
Kingdom,
rather, perhaps, the rebalancing, of class or race or geographical distinctions
would be worth exploring-I
haven't been able to find that it has been inves
tigated. But it could perhaps be the case that this pull to homogenization
is
cyclical: after the creation of nation states, perhaps the new Europe will allow>,
space formuch smaller cultures-Welsh,
Breton, Lombard, Basque, Catalan,
Modern Language Review, 102 (2007), xxix-xliv
( Modern Humanities Research Association 2007

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xxx
and

Statues andNormalization
I know not what. There

is perhaps

a subterranean

political

argument

at

thepresent time for the tolerationof lessmainstream languages,which then


provides for theiradmission to the tableof subsidies,acknowledgement,and
support (they are put up and shut up). Yet when, under the impact of the explo
sion of ex-Yugoslavia,
I discussed with officials in one of the grants departments

inBrussels thepossibilityofobtainingmoney to investigatelinguisticdiversity

and its relation to nationalism, their unease was palpable.


There
is, however, a kind of biological
argument for linguistic diversity.
There is some evidence that speaking several languages is good for the brain,

making thecircuitsmore complex,encouragingthem to rebalance themselves


constantly-and

indeed, research in Israel about a quarter of a century ago pro

brain physiology

of a polylingual

duced physiologicalargumentsforsuch a statement,in that thepost-mortem


speaker

is apparently different from a mono

lingual,richerinconnectionsbetweenpathways.'More must be known about

this, now that the living brain can be scanned. I have to admit here, however,
that I cannot find that the subject is being examined nowadays-I
merely know
a neuro-radiologist,
towhom I personally have cause to be extremely grateful,
who mutters 'That's a bit difficult for us at present' when I enquire.
But there is a cultural argument, which intermeshes with this possible phy
siological one, and makes it tomy mind farmore pressing than one of personal
intellectual advantage. This argument is that of linguistic relativity: thatwe are
shaped by the natural language we relate tomost closely in amost intimate and
'Users of markedly different grammars are pointed
complex way. To quote:
by their grammars towards different types of observations and different eva
luations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent
as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.'2 Thus
whose name is one part of the duo of linguist
Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941),
and scholar fromwhose work was developed what is known as the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis. This hypothesis is a specification of linguistic relativity: itholds that
particular languages mould our experience in particular and each time different
ways. This hypothesis is not to everyone's taste, though to anyone who has lived
inmultilingual
it seems almost evident. Contrary to what many
backgrounds
claim, to my mind itwould be entirely possible to construct a philosophically
ideas3 which would not exclude the great
rigorous account of Sapir and Whorf's
hypotheses of Chomsky on the relation between linguistic structure and the

natureofhuman
intellectualprocessingof experience,and the 'species-specific'

language through its postulated shared deep structure. Indeed, some of the dif
ficulty that some nowadays have with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems tome
to derive from the frequently sloppy claims which have been developed out of
the pair's writings, and then from the conditions of transmission ofWhorf's
own ideas: he died relatively young, and it seems that only one article had been
1
Martin

L. Albert and Loraine K. Obler, The Bilingual Brain: Neuro-Physiological


and Neuro
Academic
(New York and London:
Press, 1978).
Linguistic Aspects ofBilingualism
2
to "Think
in 'From "Thought
and Language"
Lee Whorf,
Benjamin
quoted by Dan Slobin
in Rethinking Linguistic Relativity,
and Stephen C.
ed. by John J.Gumperz
ing to Speaking"',
Levinson
Press, 1996), pp. 70?96
University
(Cambridge:
Cambridge
(p. 75).
3
for instance, has attempted
this.
One can argue that Dan Slobin,

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MARIAN

HOBSON

Xxxi

prepared for an audience of professionals-he


himself was an insurance agent
until the very end of his life.
The quotation fromWhorf given above is also useful as a kind of warning
about what we lose ifwe are monolingual:
the particular 'takes' on our experi
ence our language gives us, the peculiar intermeshing it sets up between what is
not us and us, only begin to be experienceable when we learn other languages.
We can go ex-directory but we can't go ex-language. Other languages give us
that slight otherness which enables us to appreciate what we are in fact taking on
when we think or speak in our own language, an appreciation that is unavailable
in any other way.

Whorf worked inparticularon languagesradically,indeedspectacularly,


dif

ferent from English, American


Indian languages. He was able to show not
merely this difference, but how deeply it runs: it is farmore than the old idea
that Eskimos have a large vocabulary about snow because they need to be able
tomake fine distinctions about snow to stay alive (that is, by the way, said not
to be particularly true of Inuit). The already quoted passage is, you note, a
claim not about words, but about the articulation of words: about grammar.
For he claimed, and I believe him to be right, thatmodern English 'and similar
tongues lead us to think of the universe as a collection of rather distinct objects
towords'.4 English, and the cultures associated with
and events corresponding
that international language, may be ones whose salient way of dealing with our
experience is through the item, 'distinct objects and events', rather than, for
example, forces of indeterminate extent and shape, such as winds or rainbows. It
isnouns that are particularly important in our language. What interested Whorf,
as it had interested his mentor Sapir (I884-I939),
was how very different is
what other languages choose to pick out: not so much items, for instance, as
in Korean, where it is so much more important than
direction of movement
in English that it can barely be neglected even by the tiny child. As a result it
is what the infant seems to learn first.5 So that the information conveyed by
even banal accounts of the same everyday event can be surprisingly diverse.
This, for instance, was something thatWhorf noted about Hopi, where certain
information has to be given which is not considered, not even mentioned,
in
the normal English equivalent.6 Even a language like French, closely related to

English historically,has a styleof reportingspeech, theconditional,which is


inmodern English except by a whole phrase; and of course
almost unavailable
other languages have particularly subtle methods of explaining the degree of
certainty there is about the phrase which are not matters of vocabulary, or
4
in Language,
and Logic'
Selected Writings of
Whorf,
(i941),
'Languages
Thought and Reality:
Lee Whorf,
ed. and with an introduction by John B. Carroll,
foreword by Stuart Chase
Benjamin
& Hall,
Press; London:
(Cambridge, MA: MIT
Chapman
1956), pp. 233-45
(p. 240).
5
to Express Motion
and Melissa
Events
in English
and
Soonja Choi
Bowerman,
'Learning
The
Korean:
Influence of Language-Specific
Lexicalization
in Lexical
and Conceptual
Patterns',
ed. by Beth Levin and Steven Pinker (Cambridge, MA,
and Oxford: Blackwell,
Semantics,
1992),
pp. 83-121.
6
See Franz

2 vols (Washington:
Indian Languages,
Government
Boas, Handbook
of American
See also An Encyclopedia
Indians, ed. by Frederick
Printing Office, 1911-22).
ofNorth American
E. Hoxie
(Boston, MA:
Mifflin,
Houghton
1996). I owe this latter reference to the kindness of
at Ann
Studies Program, University
of Michigan
Tiya Miles, Acting Director, Native American
Arbor.

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xxxii

Statues and Normalization

vocal emphasis, as theywould have to be in English, but fully grammaticalized.


To relate this back to what is perhaps the ultimate empirical proof: children
phrase, to
as young as three show that 'selective attention', to use Slobin's
those certain aspects of reality which are favoured by their particular native
language. In other words, different languages are urging us into a slightly dif

ferentexperience.

So that the death of a language is the death of a way of processing the world:
the cultural loss of such an event is enormous. And we know that languages
are dying at the rate of about one a week. Even if it is hard to imagine how
that is known, or exactly what that means, grosso modo it seems to be true.
Ten years ago, with Michel
Jeanneret, I spent a while in a New Mexican
pueblo with a poet who was trying towrite a grammar of his language, Tiwa.
It was spoken only by about 3000 people. He found that the grammar varied
from family group to family group, and was proving impossible to write. To
myself, I concluded that he was in difficulty because he wasn't trained. But the

thenProfessorofComparativePhilology inCambridge, the lateSidneyAllen,

explained tome that the problem was real, and different: a language with so few
speakers is never stable, the peer pressure functions too erratically. There is an
inventiveness inherent in every individual and small group's use of language

which needs a discipliningcounterweightfromwider social consensus and


common custom. It was interesting that the Tiwa poet did not wish to teach me
any, although the Navajo market traders I hung out with had no such qualms
and they
but then there are about a quarter of a million speakers of Navajo,
have a radio station. And in a sense the poet was right-the
deviations, the
speaker brings to a language might be too
innovations that the non-native-born
much for such a fragile cultural formation to bear. Yet ifothers do not learn it,
itwill die.
When we returned to Phoenix, and to the university, we visited amagnificent
university bookshop. But its very bounty created fury in us: a whole wall was
dedicated toNative American culture (I will comment on that term in a while).
there were many descriptive books about Native American
Though
languages,
there was not one which helped you learn a precise language (you have towrite
In other words, these amazing languages,
to a specialized firm in Connecticut).
so different, so strange when approached
from an Indo-European
base, are all

aligned toEnglish. English is theexperientialgrid throughwhich everything

must be sieved; it is the normalizing factor.


can teach us something about this. The Navajo
The term 'Native American'
Imet, anyway, did not use it: they referred to themselves as American
Indians,
the major national newspaper
they read was Indian Country Today, and in
New Mexico we read The Indian Times. Those who invented this term-and
I haven't yet managed
to trace its origin-no
doubt meant well.7 No doubt
to express guilt for one of the two tragedies of whole peoples in
they wished
It is noteworthy that though the other
of North America.
the development
tragedy, that of the use of slave labour, is still live and thought about, that of
is not, or not much, at any rate in ordinary
the Indians in the subcontinent
7 I owe a
Professor of History
great deal to Professor Greg Dowd,
ofMichigan,
for help with the facts of this situation.
University

and American

Culture

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in the

MARIAN

HOBSON

xxXiii

It is only now, with the economic power some tribes have


public discourse.
acquired through the casinos built on their lands, that their peoples begin to
take up some room in the general nation's mental landscape. And yet money
is the ultimate homogenizer:
it will be interesting to see whether the tribes
continue their separate but unequal existence now some of them are so rich.
So the term 'Native American', while meant to express respect, to my mind
comes close to expressing a kind of opposite: a lack of interest in, an erasing
of, a people's view of themselves. Instead of finding out how a people refers to
themselves, and then using the term, if allowed to, a spurious, breast-beating
formula was developed, designed to emphasize thatAmerica was taken over by
largely European
immigrants, and taken away from those who were there first.
But let us leave thematter at that.
In Europe, we have not so far turned English into a latter-day pan-European
Latin. But in the United Kingdom,
anyway, we may have erred inwhat were
our priorities in language-learning:
we allowed ourselves to take over what
might be called the 'spymodel', where the aim is to pass for a native speaker.
But that is given to very few-I
speak as someone who regularly teaches in
French-speaking
universities, but who knows herself not to be bilingual, not
truly bilingual. What perhaps we should have done is to have used the in
the person who moves between languages, not perfectly, but
terpreter model:
who understands
the cultural differences between the two speakers, and can

explain them.

the pressures of normalization may be good for some


So, to summarize:
things: this is the argumentum pro turismo, as I heard one Jesuit once justify
in Latin. We like, or at least I do, not having to carry endless purses
theMass
round Europe to separate our lire from our deutschmarks and so on. But these
pressures are not good for other things. In particular, they send into the back

ground thedifferences
betweencultures,theyallow us to think
we understand.

But understanding starts by 'seeing where the other person is coming from', to
use the interesting current piece of slang to express meeting a person halfway
in ideas, or at least claiming to-in my experience, it is usually a concessive
which is about to be withdrawn. The topological metaphor
is not accidental,

surely.It impliesnot completeunderstanding,not bilingualismand a passing

in enemy territory, but a kind of developing realization which de


unperceived
rives from a cartography of the other's experience, a kind of mental redoing
of their journey. To be able to do this is inconceivable without understanding
something of the language. Less dramatic than the spy, or indeed the actor (a
surprising number of English actors have been ex-modern linguists),8 it pro

vides, Iwould argue,a not negligibledescriptionof thejob ofmodern linguists,

as long as they can proceed to explain this to another culture.


I now want to turn from the dangers of linguistic homogenization
to a poli
tical and social one that actually occurred, one that was part of the French
Revolution, one which was extremely successful not just on a national but on
a European
scale. I want to suggest some perhaps slightly surprising factors

drivingthatdevelopment.
8

Eleanor

Bron

and Michael

Redgrave,

for instance.

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xxxiv

Statues and Normalization

Statues andNormalization
STATUES

AS

STILL

LIFE

The subtitle to the heading above invites rebuttal: statues aren't still life, in the
normal sense of that term. No indeed. They are 'stilled life'. But the eighteenth
as if they were part of architecture,
century treated statues as if they were
in particular (of course, they often were just that). Statues have indeed trans
formed real life into amotionless universe, even when, as in some of the greatest,
they show effort and movement. But this transformation isn't one-way: for the
processes of that transformation are turned back onto real life,with important
intellectual effects, and it is that that I wish to sketch this evening.
Such a dialectic isn't surprising. As you know, one of themotors that drives

theprodigious engineof thoughtthat isHegel's Phenomenology


ofMind, pub

lished in I807, is a tension between the singular and the universal. Hegel has
picked on a constant thread in human thought, but one which is yet particularly
evident in intellectual activity at the end of the eighteenth century. For between
the 'particular' or the 'species' as
these extremes lies an articulating middle,
itwas also called in logical terminology. Now the end of the eighteenth cen
intellectual effort to clarify what that middle
tury sees a much-increased
is,
interpreted in straight biological terms. I want to suggest that
* the practice ofmeasuring Greek sculpture does not just influence ideas of
perfect proportion, of ideal human form, but also develops
ideas of the
mean in itsmain senses, of average and of common, or even banal;
* through statues, the represented human body is brought into a kind of grid
of possible variation and possible idealization where the species is thought
in terms of the particular; this happens much more clearly and effectively
in sculpture than in other art forms.
My argument runs: first, the normalization associated with proportion in sta
tues inflects comparative anatomy in a particular way; this is not very new,
though itmay have been studied a bit superficially. But more, an ideal sculpture
can come to represent man as a species, and is taken as more neutral and less
particular, more universal and less singular, than a representation of man in
other arts. And the last stage of this paper: in the I830S, with the great Belgian
themethods of generalization usual in sculpture are quite
statistician Quetelet,
explicitly adapted to the beginnings of statistics as a science. So I shall argue
that at the end of the eighteenth century within the golden mean of proportion
there is a tension between the mean as ideal and the mean as average and
common, which becomes a crucial point of articulation inQuetelet's work and,
incidentally, can be seen in the great artist Goya and the mad architectural

draughtsmanLequeu.

The great numbers of classical statues that had been discovered in Italy from
the early sixteenth century on had made of Rome a tourist dragnet, a source of
honest or not so honest pennies for a whole swarm of fakers, copiers, restorers,
makers of casts, and of course guides to what the visitors came to see. One of
the expressions of the cultural value of these statues is the publication of their
measurements.
This is a practice well established by the end of the seventeenth

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MARIAN

XXXV

HOBSON

in that way is perhaps less


century. Exactly why the fashion was expressed
clear. It looks at first straightforward: part of artistic practice, a search for
ideal proportion going back to Leonardo
(who in fact did not think much of
sculpture) and to theGerman artist Duirer (and of course back toVitruvius and
many others). But the search to understand these perfect proportions seems to
become a kind of investigative tool. These statues are believed to present the
ideal: but what is the ideal? Is it equivalent to the universal? Can these ideal
proportions be those of actual people? Could there be a collection of portraits
brought together in one of these perfect statues? (We know the story of Zeuxis
and the women of Crotona:
the great painter takes the best bit of each model
and by putting them together makes the perfect woman.) Or has the individual
been effaced in the urge towards the ideal? Perhaps banalized?
The habit, as one might almost call it by the end of the eighteenth century,
of measuring
classical statues is part of a complex cultural movement. But it
is also part of a push towards normalization.
In a movement
spearheaded by
the French at the end of the eighteenth century, the layerings and idiosyn
crasies of culture are simplified and universalized:
the obvious example is the

rationalizationofweights andmeasures in theearlyRevolution.

Once one starts looking at drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen
of classical statues are to be found.
turies, many depictions of measurements
was part of the training of artists, and a great
This may not be surprising-that
deal of care has been expended on showing this.9Most drawings are clearly
modular, arguing that thewhole statue is based on one particular measurement
of one particular part of the body, which is then to be found again as multiples
in the other body parts.
The earliest record of a measuring of a statue I have found in French culture
dates from i640 and has remained inmanuscript.'0 This manuscript
seems to
have been well known though not published. Its drawings are believed to be by
becomes famous because they appear
Poussin. Another set of measurements
on theMost Beautiful Figures
in a best-selling book: Girard Audran's Measures
ofAntiquity, of I683, a work reproduced many times during the next century,
and translated into several languages." Even more powerful dissemination oc
curred forAudran's
plates when they were used in Diderot and d'Alembert's
Encyclopedie for the article 'Dessein', in the volumes of plates published in I763

(Figure i).
Audran

was

still published

into the nineteenth

century, and

this type of

illustration
ofmeasurement,thoughof sculpture,seems toappearmost notably
in books on how to learn drawing-as
the Encyclopedie had produced
them
in its article on drawing. Audran's
book is in fact a series of engravings of
The reason for doing
classical sculptures with very detailed measurements.
this isworth considering: the preface to the book maintains
that different sets
9
Reed Benhamou,
inFrance
Public and Private Art Education
Studies on Voltaire
1648-1793,
and the Eighteenth
1993).
Century, 308 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
10
sur les originaux
avec Mons.
Erard
Fr?art de Chambray,
que j'ai mesur?es
'Proportions
mesmes
? Rome
l'ann?e 1640', MS Pc 6415 dated '30 mars
1678', at the ?cole Nationale
Sup?rieure
des Beaux-Arts,
Paris.
11
Girard Audran, Graveur
du Roy, Les Proportions
du corps humain, mesur?s sur les plus belles
figures de l'antiquit? (Paris, 1683).

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xxxvi

Statues andNormalization

..

1:~~~~~~~~~~
0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

V~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~C

.:

4~~~~D

<,j oi,*4-1

'J-..

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MARIAN

HOBSON

xxXvii

of measurements
are in circulation, varying on the one hand form country to
country and on the other according to temperament, and that these different
sets of measurements
belie the universality of ancient sculpture. Yet Audran
admits a tension: because personal temperament and individual singularities
are not allowed to appear, ancient art appears cold. Indeed, Audran says, there
has never been an individual man as perfect in all his parts as are some of the

ancients' figures.'2

However, one of the statues most admired, and most discussed,


the Lao
and itwas discovered, to general
coon, excavated in I 506, had been measured,
consternation, that its left leg was longer than its right. No reason for this dis
crepancy was advanced which was generally accepted. In Audran, this leads to
a discussion of whether sculpture can take into account the angle at which the
statue is intended to be seen, in other words, whether foreshortening can be
employed in sculpture, as itwould in any painting designed to be seen from a
specific viewpoint. However, this discussion of angle of vision in relation to size
and shape of statues is not common. It is found in certain eighteenth-century

architects:Briseux and, especially,Cochin when discussing architectureexa

mine how the dimension

of statues needs

to be varied to respond to the angle of

vision.'3 Indeed, I now believe thatCanova's work,with his fabuloustechnique

of surface preparation, can be seen as a way of controlling perception of size


and shape without resorting to perspectival variation of shape (Apsley House,
as Mars
and the statue of Napoleon
the pacifier, where it can be most clearly
seen because of its location in the stairwell).
One can also wonder whether Audran's
report of the different sets of mea
surements in existence explains the personal tone of some of the claims made
on some drawings of statues: the eighteenth-century
English artist Joseph
for instance, on the back of his measured
Nollekens,
drawings vouches for
their accuracy:
That no doubt of the authenticity of accuracy of thesemeasurements may be hereafter
entertained, I now certify that theywere with themost scrupulous attention taken by
me on the real statue of theVenus dei Medici at Florence in June I770, and signed
Joseph Nollekens.'4
12

et
'C'est dans ce sens qu'on peut dire qu'un Peintre se peint soy-m?me dans ses Ouvrages,
que le sentiment secret n? avec nous, et dont souvent on ne connoit pas la cause, est ordinairement
ce qui nous d?termine
dans nostre choix. Pour ce qui est du temperament,
il agit encore plus
en nous. Comme
c'est luy qui fait la distinction
la plus essentielle
?
d'un homme
puissamment
un autre, il a part ? tout ce que nous faisons. C'est dans ce sens qu'on peut dire qu'un Peintre se
& que le sentiment secret n? avec nous, & dont souvent on ne
peint soy-mesme dans ses Ouvrages
ce qui nous d?termine notre choix, & nous fait conformer
connoit pas la cause, est ordinairement
ses figures ? l'air des personnes
le plus de penchant'
pour qui nous aurions
(Audran, Pr?face
(unpaginated)).
13
Charles
Etienne
Briseux, Architecture
moderne, ou l'art de bien b?tir pour toutes sortes de
personnes, tant pour lesmaisons des particuliers que pour les palais
(Paris: Jombert, 1728). The great
Cuthbert Girdlestone,
that Briseux would
repay investigation'
specialist on Rameau,
'suspect[s]
sa vie, son uvre (Paris: Descl?e
Rameau:
de Brouwer,
and one
(Jean-Philippe
1962), p. ii2n.),
can only agree. Charles-Nicolas
concernant
Recueil
de
les arts, extraites de
Cochin,
quelques pieces
2 vols (Paris: Jombert, 1757-71).
See the bibliography
de France,
of Marian
plusieurs Mercure
The Object ofArt (Cambridge:
Hobson,
Press, 1982), for an account of the
Cambridge
University
publication
history of this last publication.
14
no. 1459 in the Ashmolean
Museum.
Drawing

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xxxviii

Statues and Normalization

Artists, indeed apprentice sculptors,measured, then,as can be seen from


a manual
for sculptors of the same period.'5 But it seems that amateurs also
in 1770 or 177I, a Lady Miller
did this. In the very same years as Nollekens,
at the Tribuna,
and published her results in
measured
the Venus de' Medici

her LettersfromItalyDescribing the


Manners, Customs,Antiquities,Paintings,

has some kindly cutting remarks about


&c. of that Country. Horace Walpole
theMiller couple, and of course not everyone can be the descendant of 'Old
as his father was known to his opponents. They seem to be more
Corruption',
interesting than he will allow. Having built, rather extravagantly, a house near
Bath, they retired to livemore cheaply on the Continent a while and it is then
that they visited Florence. Now itmay be that, in general, measuring of statues
was undertaken to help in the detection of restoration. But that can't be the case
in the measuring of the Venus, performed, I've just said, in the same year by
it had been done too many times before. Lady
Lady Miller and by Nollekens:
is quite aware of the restorations of the statue: 'her arms and hands are
Miller
modern
[. . .] the rest is antique, and she is composed of forty-two pieces'.'6
in
the statue, she gives the measurements
But not merely has she measured
different standards, Roman and Neapolitan
'palmi', for instance. In this she
is following the brochure she had been handed by the Abbate, but it is highly
is given apropos a statue contemplated and
interesting that this list ofmeasures
admired by an international set of visitors. The statue is the international base
local.
measure, the actual measurements
So what exactly was the point? Is the attempt to understand the proportions of
an admired sculpture in fact a recognition of the social value of symmetry of form
as much as agreement about the universal value of the great classical statues?
An example from Jane Austen: of Darcy, when he first becomes conscious of
his attraction to Elizabeth Bennett, it is said:
Though he had detected with a critical eyemore than one failure of perfect symmetry
in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in
spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was
caught by their easy playfulness.'7
Lady Miller begins her account of the Venus de' Medici with her height
of Florence, Rome,
and she bothers to repeat this in the different measures
England, and France. About twenty years later, as I have reminded you already,
France will adopt unified decimal measures, on the advice of an enormously
scientific committee. And it is striking that slightly later, after
distinguished
husband will be very active in the British
their return from Italy, Lady Miller's
Parliament, in a vain attempt to tidy English weights and measures.
it is noteworthy that the great collection of engravings reproducing
Now
the finds at Herculaneum
gives under the images on several, though not all,
15

n. pub.,
elementare per gli studiosi della scultura (Florence:
Istruzione
See Franceses
Carradori,
1802).
16
theManners,
Customs, Antiquities, Paintings,
Lady Anne Miller, Letters from Italy Describing
to a Friend Residing
inFrance,
and MDCCLXXI,
&c.
of that Country, in the Years MDCCLXX
2 vols (London:
Edward
and Charles Dilly,
1777), 1, 386.
by an English Woman,
17
in The Novels
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice,
3rd
ofJane Austen, ed. by R. W Chapman,
Press, 1932), 11, 23.
edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon

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MARIAN

FIG.

2. Head

(Naples:

Nella

thought
Regia

to be

that of Augustus

stamperia,

1757-92),

HOBSON

from Le

Xxxix

antichitdi

V, PI. XLV, P.

i6i,

fi rmataApollonio A teniense

di Ercolano
entitled

Erma

esposte, 8 vols
di Doriforo

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xl

Statues and Normalization

occasions themeasures of the statue being reproduced to scale, and in terms of


'palmi' (Figure 2). This is to give the reader some
both Roman and Neapolitan
placed
idea of actual size, obviously, but the awareness of different measures
directly in relation to a piece of ancient sculpture is interesting. One wonders
in
of measures may not have developed
whether the urge to standardization
relation to the universal norm that is classical sculpture at this period? Trade
in taste may be more powerful than commerce.

Measuring andNormalization
PETRUS

CAMPER

The measurement
of statues is applied to human beings by the great Dutch
doctor Petrus Camper, as you surely know. His work was not published during
his lifetime, though itwas well known, if only because he had toured giving
but in
lectures in which he discussed his ideas, not just in his native Holland
England, France, and Germany as well.
Camper was an artist, and a theoretician of art, but he was also an important
doctor. His work brought together ideas about the right angle from which to
draw faces in order to give a correct notion of their shape with an interest
in transformation of form, ideas that seem, for instance, connected with the
He
work nearly two hundred years later of the Scotsman D'Arcy Thompson.'8

collected skulls,and his writingsmention giving public dissections.Before I

say any more, I want to dispose of one idea: inwhatever way the posthumous
publication of his writings and engravings was interpreted, he himself was not
what we would now call a 'racist'. Again and again he says in his writings that
education, not race, is the key to class, that is, status in society, and he violently
attacks the slave trade. He is in fact a relativist: he was famous for not believing
that there was any stable beauty in any form at all.
My Figure 3 is an illustration of what Camper called the 'facial angle'. It
moves from amonkey to an orang-utan to a young black to a Calmuk, by which
is probably meant someone who could stand in for the whole of eastern Asia,
group of
although strictly speaking Calmuk at the time refers to a Turcoman
is showing is the different angle made by the line
Central Asia. What Camper
between the lower part of the nose and the ear-hole and the line passing through
the forehead, nose, and lips. This enabled him, he insists, to draw the relative
shape of different human heads accurately. He describes how he set up his
skulls to preserve, he says, 'the true form and relative situations of the parts'.
Now the perspective he uses is not the normal one used in drawing from a fixed

viewpoint,but theperspectivedeveloped bymasons and architects.

is this plate designed to show? And in particular, is it an illustration of


What
how to draw different kinds of faces, as Stephen Gould has argued,'9 or does
the line-up that Camper gives mean something else? I think the answer must
18
to Professor Chris Johnson.
I owe this reference, and thus the discovery of D'Arcy Thompson,
On Growth and Form, abridged and ed. by John Tyler Bonner
See D'Arcy Thompson,
(Cambridge:
Press, 2000; this edn first 1961, original full edn Cambridge:
Cambridge
University
Cambridge
1992).
Press, 1917, rev. 1942; repr. of the 1942 edn New York: Dover,
University
19
to On Growth and Form, ed. by Bonner, pp. ix-xiii (p. xiii).
introduction
Stephen
Jay Gould,

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MARIAN

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xlii

Statues andNormalization

says, that Camper produced what are


be that it is both. It seems, as Diderot
skull shape through a series of transformations,
trick drawings which mapped
fromman down to bird. Thus Diderot on Camper:
He knew national physiognomies. He said of a gentleman who had brought me from
Russia toHolland 'That one isGreek', and itwas perfectly true.He accused all artists
of having been mistaken on this point. He has written a treatise on drawing inwhich he
indicates the principles whereby without interruption one can go from the face of a god
to the face ofwhatever nation one pleases; from the national face of aman, from a black,
to the face of a monkey, and from that of amonkey to the head of a bird, of a heron or a
stork.20
Camper develops all the animals, from theman to the stork, from one single model,
only by changing their facial line.
One shouldn't believe that the animals have always been what we see now, nor that
theywill always stay the same.2"
But Camper's
actual text that was published with the drawings does seem also
to be thinking about how 'transitions can reflect a changing set of external
forces acting on unaltered biological material'.22
In other words, if the head is set slightly differently on the body, there will
be concomitant changes finally in the features of the face. Camper gives his
results as a line which was interpreted tomean that there was a smooth ascent
frommonkey, ape, through the human races from the black to the white to the
ideal human as symbolized by a Greek god. In fact, Camper was illustrating
the angular degrees
of the facial angle. While
the results of his measurements
did produce an ascending scale, Camper never in his writings referred to the
existence of a racial hierarchy at all. He holds tomonogenesis.
came to the conclusion
that 'impressive
Near the end of his life Camper
such as subterranean fire, earthquakes, and floods had occurred.
catastrophes'
This explained fossilized tropical animals found in the north, and allowed for
the development of human variety. The major fault-line is between man and
animals, and the big difference between them is the way the head is joined on
to the body through the vertebrae at the top of the back. Camper was in contact
was doing on com
with Buffon, and must have known the work Daubenton
parative anatomy, and in particular on precisely the point of the implications
of the difference of posture between men and animals. Camper was using the
head of theApollo (Figure 4, fifthsketch) as the extreme limit, the unreal limit,
of the human body. The idealized form of a Greek sculpture is in Camper's
towards an ideal, has stripped off
text one where normalization, approximation
character and individuality, and in the case of Camper's Apollo pushed it out
to the very end of the possible relation of the nose to the chin (he looks like
Horace Simpson, as a clever friend noticed).

20
uvres compl?tes, ed. by Roger Lewinter,
inDiderot,
15 vols (Paris: Club
Voyage enHollande,
du Livre,
xi, 331-451
Fran?ais
1969-73),
(p. 424) (my translation).
21
uvres compl?tes, xin, 635-819
in Diderot,
?l?ments de physiologie,
(p. 670) (my translation).
22
to On Growth and Form, ed. by Bonner, p. xiii.
introduction
Gould,

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MARIAN

HOBSON

xliii

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xliv

Statues and Normalization

Normalization and Statistics


QUETELET

The founderofmodern statistics,


Adolphe Quetelet (1796-I874), had been
trained in the beaux arts before becoming a mathematician.
He quite explicitly
compared his development of the concept of the average man, forwhich he was
famous, to the idealization of sculpture. He noticed that his observations-for
example, about height in a nation-were
symmetrically distributed about the
mean, in the curve known as the 'normal' curve of distribution, or the bell curve
(from its shape). The middle of this bell accounts formost of themembers of

theclass surveyed,taperingoffat eitherside to themore infrequent


occurrences
of extremeheightor extremeshortness.Quetelet compares this tomeasuring

the chest of a statue: you can do this ten times over, and the result will be slightly
different each time (even ifyou are not trying to cheat- he worked on evasion
of the draft). If you did this a thousand times, supposing you had the courage,
then the average would certainly be very close to the real value. And moreover,
you would be able to evaluate the probable error of your measurements.
And
he concludes: all this shows us that things are as if all the chests that have been
measured had been modelled on the same individual, an ideal one, ifyou want,
but whose proportions can be found ifwe take the experiment far enough.
is an irony here: when seen as an average, the form behind every
There
form, the ideal of Greek sculpture, produces Quetelet's
homme commun. And
for some, this homme commun is indeed the stripped down, the average, the
banal. Some contemporaries called this idea 'the height of vulgarity'.
This is a kind of fable forour times if it is translated into the realm of language.
We need to protect particularity, and learning different languages can do this.
Cultures need to navigate between the extremes of extreme particularity that
is one kind of nationalism, and the universalizing
forces which seek to impose
one language, one nation, or indeed one God. Modern
Linguists can help.

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