Dimensions
167 x 210 x 15mm
From Mona Lisa to facial transplants - what do faces really tell us, and how do art and science transform them?
The human face has been admired, interpreted, disfigured, decorated, puzzled over and reconstructed from earliest times up to the present day. We tattoo them, cover them in makeup, surgically 'improve' them. Artists obsessively paint them, and sculptors create more heads than anything else. But what do faces mean? What are they for? How should we interpret expressions? Does the face indicate personality, as 19th-century scientists believed? What makes our faces unique? Is there such a thing as ideal 'beauty' - or is beauty merely in the eye of the beholder? And how does this translate into the computer-generated world of 'cyber-models', complete with their appealing 'flaws'?
Far from the glamour world of facelifts and Botox, science is now embarking on undreamed-of facial reconstruction - a full face transplant will soon be available as the ultimate new identity under the FBI's Witness Protection Program. But what will such drastic surgery do to our perception of others, and of ourselves?
