Introduction to “The visage as text”

Abstract

Abstract This brief text introduces the main themes and topics of this collection of articles on “The visage as text: physiognomy, semiotics, and face reading from antiquity to artificial intelligence,” emphasizing the historical continuity of interest in the face as a surface to be scrutinized, investigated, and studied in order to know the individual’s intimacy or future. It points out the intertwining of semeiotic knowledge, which aims at capturing clues in the face to determine a patient’s state of health, and semiotics, which systematizes these inferences within the framework of the circumstantial paradigm. The introduction concludes by pointing out how the new digital technologies of the face are reviving and problematizing anew the semiotic interest in physiognomy understood not as a scientific discipline but as a field of sign attention directed at the face.