“Anomalies of the Face and the Ear in Prostitutes”, from Pauline Tarnowsky, Étude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Paris: E. Lecrosnier et Bébé, 1889). Ithaca: Private collection.
Pauline Tarnowsky
After today lesson about Art, Imagine and Representation module, I decided to learn each day at least one artist from module. To be honest I am shocked because I am afraid Slide Test on 29 March and I think I will never remember so many dates and names....
I feel miserable.
Pauline Tarnowsky,
A 19th-century researcher, Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky, documented the facial anomalies of prostitutes with photographs, and studied what she called atavistic regression as a kind of fall down the evolutionary ladder. This link between beauty and proportion is also seen, in reverse, in nowadays obsession with supermodels. Prostitution supposedly correlates with a kind of asymmetry or pragmatism, a disproportion of the jawbones.
Pauline Tarnowsky was one of the first medical women in Russia and was well-known for her work in psychiatry and craniology. She had provided the photographs of Russian female criminals and prostitutes and a scale of the appearance of prostitutes in an analyses of the “physiognomy of the Russian prostitute”
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.
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.
