In 1671, the king’s favourite painter stood before the Royal Academy in Paris and argued that your face reveals whether you’re secretly a lion, a fox, or an ass. Charles Le Brun was Louis the Fourteenth’s chief painter, the man behind the grand halls of Versailles. He also believed in physiognomy, the idea that character could be read from facial features. His lecture notes are lost, but over 250 of his drawings survive, pairing human faces with animals: an ox-faced man, dependable and hardworking; a fox-faced one, unmistakably a thief; eyes and eyebrows angled just so, revealing a soul tilted toward the divine, or dragged down toward baser instincts. The drawings sat forgotten for over a century, until they were published in 1806 and suddenly fascinated an entire era obsessed with reading faces.
