Les emocions classificades: Darwin i Le Brun

Abstract

Classifi ed Emotions. Darwin and Le Brun.
One of the bibliographic sources used by Darwin when writing The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) was the text and images of the “Conference on the expression of passions” given by Charles Le Brun, First Painter to King Louis XIV of France, in 1668. Darwin used the morphological
descriptions of Le Brun, but discarded the physiological explanations, which were fully based on Descartes theories. Although these explanations seem nonsensical today, or in Darwin’s time, they refl ect the great effort Le Brun made to demonstrate the existence of semiotics of the soul.