ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Johann Caspar Lavater's physiognomy overlaps with the late eighteenth-century Bible debate, as well as its relation to anatomy books and lessons given at the Royal Academy, devised to teach artists to better represent the human form. It examines how the editing of texts and images leads to new, fascinating and provocative expressions. Lavater is a good example for how editing can turn into authorship. He begins with a text, the creation myths of Genesis, he uses different versions of the human form to analyse how the soul imprints itself on the face, and he studies anatomy, to substantiate what he is doing. The publication history of Essays on Physiognomy would have introduced William Blake to the idea of a self-reflective author who presents his work as a training exercise as well as an open text to which he expects his readers to contribute.
