L’art de connaître les hommes par la physionomie, tome 9, planche 530, Delafol, Parigi, 1835

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Inspired by the works of Petrus Camper, Jean-Gaspard Lavater published an addendum to his Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-1778), a drawing which showed the transformation of the head of a batrachian into a head of Apollo. “From brutish ugliness to ideal beauty, from the animalistic features of a frog to the loftiest peaks of humanity, from the first tentative flashes of intelligence to a genius transcending that of Kant and Newton”. Like most of his Eighteenth-Century contemporaries, he believed that all living beings could be classified into a ladder structure, running from the most to the least perfect – the so-called scala naturae. Lavater strove to prove that the art of Ancient Greece, with its idealisation of the human body, reached a level which did not exist in nature, and which therefore was greater than perfection itself.