Human Skulls and Photographs of Dead Bandits: the Problems of Presenting a Nineteenth-Century Museum to Twenty-First-Century Audiences

Turin’s Museo di Antropologia Criminale Cesare Lombroso is housed in a grand nineteenth-century building on the University of Turin premises, just across the hall from the skeletons and dissected bodies of the human anatomy museum. It contains an eclectic collection of objects gathered together by Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), a physician, voracious intellectual and primary representative of Italian positivism.1 Lombroso’s most famous theories, which found a supposed connection between physical traits and deviance (in criminals, in the mentally ill and in geniuses) were refuted during his lifetime, yet Lombroso is unanimously considered one of the founding fathers of the field of criminology.2 His analysis of the relationship between biological determinism and free will sparked debates and shaped social policy for the prevention and punishment of crimes across the world. To this day, the historical judgment of Lombroso’s work is inevitably linked to the inner workings of the field of criminology, which is constantly grappling with the tension between biological theory and sociological interpretation.