The Reading Hand
The Man and the Beast
The face read as a scale between human and animal.
- Work
- from De humana physiognomonia
- Maker
- Giambattista della Porta, after Charles Le Brun
- Date
- 1586
- Source
- After Charles Le Brun · scan: Wikimedia Commons
Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source plate — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
A series of heads shading by degrees from a man's face toward an animal's — the owl, the ox, the lion — the old physiognomic conceit that a person's features betrayed the beast in their nature. The comparison runs back to Giambattista della Porta's De humana physiognomonia of 1586 and was drawn most memorably by the painter Charles Le Brun a century later. It is a striking, unsettling idea rendered with genuine artistry: the face as a scale between human and animal. We frame it strictly as history — a belief long discredited, preserved for the graphic invention of its plates and the window they open on an older way of seeing.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Man and the Beast printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate — from De humana physiognomonia (1586), held by After Charles Le Brun · scan: Wikimedia Commons. The work was published before 1931 and is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper; framed pieces sit behind acrylic, no mat.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans available, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the emblem line, the letterpress bite, the registration of colour — on stock made to outlive its owner.
Attribution: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
