Dalla fisiognomica alla frenologia. I signa della moralità femminile nell’immaginario sociale del XIX secolo

Phrenology, founded by Franz Joseph Gall in the last decades of the eighteenth century, presented itself to the scientific and cultural panorama of the first half of the nineteenth century as a science able to reveal the natural individual inclinations, located in the brain, through the observation of the cranial morphology. On the premise of a correspondence between behavior, trends, inclinations and somatic characteristics, the phrenologists, as heirs of the most ancient physiognomic tradition, claimed the need for the application of the organological science to every area of knowledge, from the criminal law to social and pedagogical sciences. In particular, overlapping aesthetics, ethics and medicine, the phrenological paradigm imposed itself as useful tool for the moral control of female deviance in order to repress those innate tendencies considered capable of distancing women from the parameter of morality.