Le Brun, Louis XIV's first painter, delivered several speeches to the Académie on the expressiveness of human faces. To reinforce the effectiveness of his arguments, he included drawings to illustrate his points. In his lecture on the relationship between human physiognomy and that of animals (the text of which has not survived), he examines the link between character or emotion and facial features. He employs four different approaches. First, he studies the features of famous men from Antiquity, whose personalities and representations are fixed in the collective imagination (Nero is cruel,
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