I segni della colpa: il giurista e la lettura del corpo a Venezia nella prima età moderna

• Main Author: Manuela Bragagnolo
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: École Normale Supérieure de Lyon Editions 2020-12-01
• Series: Laboratoire Italien
• Subjects: physiognomy; law; medicine; Ingegneri (Giovanni); Casoni (Francesco); Venice
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/laboratoireitalien/5552
• ISSN: 1627-9204; 2117-4970

The reading and interpretation of “moti” (motions), “gesti” (gesture) and “cenni” (signs) played a major role in the legal practice of the Early Modern period. Not only did the uncontrolled and temporary appearance of emotions on the defendant’s face and in his gestures constitute clues of guilt, but signs on the face and body could also reveal the defendant’s inclination to crime, thus making visible to the judge who was able to interpret these signs the invisible nature of the human soul. This article shows how physiognomy, construed as a science in the West since the 13th century, constituted an interpretative grid through which jurists paid increasing attention to reading the signs of guilt on the defendant’s body. Already present in medieval legal practice, however, it was in the sixteenth century, and especially in Venetian and Paduan intellectual circles, that the interweaving of law and physiognomy became more prominent. In fact, jurists dealt more and more with physiognomy, not only in the Practicae criminals – for example the one by Francesco Casoni – but also through the drafting of treatises on physiognomy, as in the case of Giovanni Ingegneri. Through the analysis of these writings, the article shows not only the composite intellectual identity of the jurists of the Early Modern period, characterised by the need to interact with knowledge such as physiognomy and medicine, but also the porosity of the intellectual categories used by jurists, doctors, natural philosophers, and physiognomists, especially around the concept of signs and the logic of conjecture.