Rethinking the Look of Things No. 57 - Science of The Soul

What is it about finding an intriguing treasure that draws you to it, flirting with you until you cannot resist it? It has a familiarity to it, but for some reason "this one" also has a mystic that you must add to your home's story. That's what happen when I was captured by two age-worn, attractively discolored pages in a vintage book as I flipped through it in a back room of a antique establishment. The lithographs of Phrenology on these pages are now framed and hanging in my home. And, yes I walk a little slower past them often.

Then this Phrenology thing wasn't done luring me yet. Again it enticed me with ceramic versions of this "science of the soul".  That's what Thomas Forster titled it in the Americas. Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall is known for his theory of brain and science of character reading in early 1700s England.

From plaster or pine, which is a rarer form, to ceramic models Phrenological heads have been introduced over these many years to tell the story of this science of the soul. So what does the "L.N. Fowler" mean on the later models? The Fowler brothers began reading heads in New York in the late 1840s. Gives new meaning to "get your head in the game" one could say. 

 Although my obsession of old paper got me at first, and then the eyes on a Phrenology head, the idea that a theory into the science of the soul was born and then evolved into such an amazing illustration, became part of my home's story. But after all isn't it our very soul that should be the expression we have in our home design?

Sources: Doe & Hope, History of Phrenology.org, Pinterest, Tumbler