Paolo Marzolo and Cesare Lombroso: a semiotic-medical inheritance between word, sounds, and face

Abstract

Abstract Within the interdisciplinary context of the nineteenth century, the paper scrutinizes the relation between Paolo Marzolo’s theory of signs and Cesare Lombroso’s anthropological-criminal approach. Best known for his unfinished work Monumenti storici (1847–1866), Marzolo (of whom Lombroso calls himself a disciple) investigates, in his last Saggio sui segni (1866), the origin and development of languages by combining the positivist approach with an eighteenth-century encyclopedic Enlightenment perspective, as well as the earlier anatomist tradition. In his view, the human production, learning, and use of signs, resting upon sensory experiences and mnemonic activity, involves the process of imitation with a pivotal role of the speakers’ phonic, gestural, and facial expressions (i.e., physiognomy), related to geographical, linguistic, and anthropological differences among human individuals, as well as the cultural element of civilization. Conceived as case(s) of semiotic ideology rooted between linguistics and medicine, the Marzolo–Lombroso filiation shows an increasing correlation between race, language, and climate in the wake of social Darwinism and akin to other coeval physiognomic theories. In Lombroso’s perspective, a radical translation from a linguistic and phonic-semiotic field to an anthropological and somatic-semiotic plane seems inevitable, emphasizing the (para) scientific flavor and widening the gap between anthropometric and ethnoanthropological approaches.