The text analyzes how various forehead shapes and features can indicate different character traits and intentions. For example, wrinkled foreheads suggest deep thought, while smooth ones imply deceitfulness. The piece explores how artists can depict emotions and the historical significance of facial expressions based on their form.
Human Limbs
are often indicative of a sleepy soul. A forehead with hills and valleys, sharply rising, signifies a cunning and unfaithful person. Even if there are no obvious signs, it sometimes indicates intelligence, or even dullness. A wrinkly forehead almost always shows great contemplation; however, it is always adapted to the state a person is in. Those in the art of painting, who want to express amazement, must lift the wrinkles of the forehead from the middle upwards. Although reason teaches that a smooth forehead is the opposite of a wrinkled one, and suggests a person appears to have given up all worry, face readers believe such are often deceivers. There are porcelain-like, smooth foreheads that belong to sly vagabonds or secretive pinchers. About Epicurus, it is noted that he had a smooth and stretched forehead. And what a life of refinement he led is known to the world. Those with a dark forehead are often bull-like, surly, and often cruel, a cruelty that was noticeably increased when the eyebrows hang cloudily and widely over the eyes. In Venice, they once saw a marble statue of a certain tyrant, where this particular passion was well observed. Juvenal has noted elsewhere that one should not trust an evenly thatched roof.
And although it is not the forehead, but the cheeks that is the place of redness or shame of the face, it nonetheless does not remain less apparent.
Translation Notes:
"Menschelyke Ledematen" translates directly to "Human Limbs" but refers contextually to aspects of human expression and demeanor as inferred from facial features like the forehead.