This is the story of Rodin's sculpture as told by the plastic surgeon Henry Schireson in his 1938 monograph, As Others See You:

The sculptor Rodin in 1864 submitted to the Salon in Paris a head that has been at the center of an art controversy ever since. He described it in the title: Man with Broken Nose. The piece had all the rugged strength characterizing the other work of Rodin. It was as cleverly modeled as his famous Thinker-- but the jury rejected it.

The reason given was that it was ugly. Promptly a storm of criticism broke about the jury's ears. There is a certain beauty, said Rodin and his backers, in ugliness. The broken nose was extolled for its lifelike characteristics. Critics of the Salon argued that thousands of men and women had noses exactly like the statue's.

Rodin threw oil on the flames, and incidentally launched what most artists now agree was a major fallacy, when he asserted that "Nature is always beautiful." In this statement he ignored the fact that nature when imperfect is very often ugly and repellent. A thing cannot be both beautiful and ugly.

"Art is called art," said Goethe, "precisely because it is not Nature." (99)

Opening his chapter on "Remodeling the Nose" with an account of Rodin's infamous modeling, Schireson charts a history of plastic surgery that finds its most immediate motivation in the aesthetic travesty propagated by Rodin's Man. He continues:

The cult of ugliness undoubtedly has caused thousands of its followers to suffer untold discomfort, to say nothing of offending the esthetic senses of their friends. This is more true of the nose than of any other facial deformity. The nose is the one feature which has no disguise.

Logically, therefore, plastic surgery started with nasal reconstruction. In that area also, pioneers in the art laid the foundations for specific techniques now used in corrections of the defects of all other features, and of all other parts of the body. The first grafts were made in the nose. (100)

The logic here is causal: Rodin's statue embodied, encouraged, perhaps created a misguided "cult of ugliness" that confounds "Nature" with "beauty," artistry (the technical ability to produce "lifelike characteristics") with Art (the creation of a beautiful ideal). That cult of ugliness in turn "has caused thousands of its followers to suffer untold discomfort, to say nothing of offending the esthetic sense of their friends;" i.e., in suggesting not only that physical deformities are physical assets, but also that they simply are, that, like the statue's broken nose, they are unalterable, set metaphorically in stone, this "cult" has thoroughly confused people, leading them not only to believe that they should accept physical flaws in themselves and others, but that they should embrace them as "natural" and even "beautiful."

The "suffering," "untold discomfort," and "offended esthetic sense" brought on by this effort is specifically the result of its unnaturalness. According to Schireson, it is neither possible nor desirable to reconfigure the sensibilities in this way: "A thing cannot be both beautiful and ugly." Modern rhinoplasty thus emerges "logically" from Rodin's statue, whose "major fallacy"--that "Nature is always beautiful"--is corrected by the modern operation for "nasal correction." In other words, The Man with a Broken Nose "caused" modern plastic surgery by aestheticizing deformity in an ethically irresponsible way; its focus on the disfigured nose as the locus of a new, natural beauty violated the awful reality of disfigurement, a reality that is nowhere more acutely expressed than in "the one feature which has no disguise."

Schireson's picture of The Man with a Broken Nose as plastic surgery's aesthetic antithesis and precipitating cause stands in telling contrast to the accepted understanding of Rodin's work as the innovation that enabled avant-garde sculpture to come into being. Histories of modern art see The Man with a Broken Nose--along with the rest of Rodin's oeuvre-- as a turning point in the ways and means of sculpture. Noting that Rodin was an impressionist of mass, they argue that it was in his work, more than that of anyone else, that form began to be separated from figure, and that the human body began to take shape as the background against which form as such emerged, rather than the other way around. This, the story goes, was the break with tradition that made the modernist revision of form possible (see fig. 16). My interest here is neither to defend nor contest this narrative, but rather to compare it to Schireson's account of its emergence--for if the Greeks supplied plastic surgery with its anachronistic vision of the face of the future, Rodin provided it with a mission in the shape of a beautifully modeled ugly face. As a portrait of an ultimately dehumanizing aesthetic, The Man with a Broken Nose was a distinctly medical emergency, a development in sculpture whose sickening dimensions required surgical re-alignment. In correcting individual faces, then, plastic surgery aimed also to countenance an aesthetic tradition that had begun to lose face.

This is Schireson's picture, anyway. But Rodin's was not a clean break with tradition: The Man with a Broken Nose may have triggered transformative reactions in sculpture and surgery, but he was himself a pretty representative figure, the descendant of a long line of bent and busted busts. This is one of the themes of Maxwell Maltz's 1936 treatise, New Faces--New Futures, which reprints Rodin's Man alongside numerous photographs of Greek, Roman, and early modern representations of human deformity. As noted earlier, there are an Olympian head of a boxer with cauliflower ears, c. 300 BC (see fig. 8); a Roman bust of a boy with lop ears, c. 96-117 AD (see fig. 7); a bust of Cleopatra featuring her long, hooked nose (see fig. 6); and there is Guido Mazzani's fifteenth-century terra cotta head of a man with a wart in his nose (see fig. 9). Maltz's misshapen history extends into the Renaissance, when paintings of poorly made people temporarily replaced sculpture: there is Feuchtwanger's The Ugly Duchess (said to depict the ugliest woman in history) (see fig. 17), Brouwer's Man with a Long Nose (diagnosed as a case of rhynophyma) (see fig. 18); and Ghirlandajo's portrait of a man with malignant growths in his nose (see fig. 19). The last piece in Maltz's series is Rodin's Man with a Broken Nose, who figures both as the latest incarnation of an aesthetic as old as western sculpture, and as the point where sculpture resumed a role it had--in this potted history anyway--ceded to painting several centuries before.

Where Schireson wants to argue that Rodin's sculpture marked the moment when art became too realistic for its own good, Maltz's images work together to form an alternative genealogy of both modern art and the modern head. Suggesting neither that people have gradually deviated from an ideal type exemplified by Greek sculpture (as Vilray Blair did), nor that Rodin's sculpture disrupted people's sense of ideal beauty by deviating sharply from mainstream sculpture (as Schireson did), but that sculpture itself had been modeling poorly modeled heads for ages, Maltz simply treats the presence of deformity in art as an index of human reality since antiquity. Noting that "Greek noses . . . were probably no more common among adults of classical Greece than they were anywhere else" (58), Maltz suggests that the truth of human looks can be found in the historical record of imperfect appearances: "judging from the sculpture and painting which have descended to us, and from the descriptions historians have left," he writes, it is reasonable to assume that disfigured features are as old as the historical record itself. Even "famous historical figures were not exempt from natureÕs anatomical pranks," he notes; "Caesar's mighty Roman beak is familiar to all school children. Anthony had a crooked nose, and the nose of Cleopatra . . . was humped and hooked" (60).

Returning again and again to the aesthetic career of the misfit nose, Maltz represents the nose as the most prominent feature in both the history and the art of unattractive faces. The Man with a Broken Nose thus appears in Maltz's work as an image of broken nose-ness, a classic representation of the classic presentation of this injury, just as the lop-eared Roman appears as an exemplary case of lop ears, and the Olympian boxer appears to show off an ideal cauliflower ear. These are not pieces of an evolving aesthetic tradition, so much as they are proof of the universal nature of defect, which manifests itself with perfect consistency over time and space (a broken nose in bronze is as telling as a broken nose in the flesh; 2,000 year-old lop ears are as current as lop ears today).

Using these sculptures as images of historical reality and medical ideality, as evidence of what people looked like and as normative illustrations of common flaws, Maltz treats their misshapen solidity as the sad inevitability of realism in a world without advanced medical technology. For Maltz, these works demonstrate both the faithful rendering of the sculptor and the primitive conditions of a medicine that had no power to return a mutilated or deformed feature to its rightful contour. His writing is consequently full of a sense that such confused sculpture would neither have been possible nor necessary in a more medically perfect world. Hence the pictorial nose job he performs on Cleopatra: printing pictures of her stony profile before and after imaginary rhinoplastic retouching, Maltz envisions an ideal past in which, in remodeling the faces of real people, plastic surgery would have made it possible for sculpture to be both real and ideal at once, to represent the actual looks of people whose features had already been perfected (see fig. 20). In this vision, the sculptural ideal is both the standard for plastic surgery (the shape it copies) and, increasingly, a reflection of a reality whose standards have been raised by plastic surgery (a copied shape). In other words, Cleopatra would have made a more perfect statue if she had been a more plastic woman. For Maltz, this is not a trivial point; indeed, he reads in Cleopatra's hooked profile the sign not simply of sculpture gone awry, but of history nearly run amok: "Pascal thought that if Cleopatra's nose had been just a bit longer still, the whole geography of our planet might have been different. To his mind, apparently, no charms of personality could have entirely overcome such a handicap" (60).

Maltz projects his skills backwards in time and sideways, away from flesh on to stone, in such a way as to suggest that if plastic surgery has always been able to make people look like statues, statues would always have looked like statues too. That Maltz should find it necessary to promote plastic surgery in twentieth-century America by performing a pictorial rhinoplasty on an ancient bust reveals a great deal about plastic surgery's historical and aesthetic vision. On the one hand, plastic surgery is situated as the logical endpoint of an artistic tradition that originated in ancient Greece: what sculptors have done in marble may now be done on flesh, the argument goes; what was formerly an ideal can now become a living reality. On the other hand, plastic surgery stands as a sort of revolutionary break with the classical tradition, a technology that not only renders sculpture obsolete (why model in marble when you can shape flesh?), but casts the history of art as a medical record of uncorrected deformity, a history of wishful thinking whose occasional realism exposes it as an attempt to mask a shockingly ugly reality, the transcendent ugliness achieved by human beings over time.

The urgency with which Maltz fantasizes about a plastic antiquity may seem pointlessly paranoid: why worry about how an uncorrected deformity that did not exist might have changed the course of a history that has already happened? Why be concerned about how plastic surgery might have made sculpture different from what it was? These are nonsensical concerns, worries about the past that take that past to be as totally unpredictable and as deeply contingent upon the present as the future. They begin to make more sense, though, when one considers that as far as Maltz is concerned, the past was the future--or would have been, if the promise of plastic surgery had been recognized for what it was and properly cultivated. One statue stands out from Maltz's visual archive of ancient imperfect heads, the head of Justinian II, the eighth-century Byzantine emperor who not only had a nose job, but commissioned a statue of himself to commemorate the event (see fig. 21). Having lost his nose during battle, Justinian sought far and wide for a surgeon who could rebuild his nose. He finally found one, had his nose rebuilt by means of the Indian flap technique, and then had his head sculpted so as to show the scar the surgery left on his forehead. Replacing the dignity of a war wound with the record of that wound's repair--replacing in other words a battle scar with a surgical one--Justinian's head announces the advent of a new era, an age in which what is permanent is not bodily injury, but surgery's ability to erase the fact of injury by redrawing bodily lines. Or it should have: Justinian's surgically scarred forehead marks the moment when both sculpture and history could have become the beneficiaries of plastic surgery, could have become both more beautiful and more powerful, but just plain did not.

Maltz's anxiety about Cleopatra reflects this sense of opportunity lost; it is founded not on what she might have been if she had lived in a different world, but on what she might have been if she had lived more capably in her own world. Giving Cleopatra an imaginary nose job allows Maltz symbolically to correct the past that ought to have known to correct the nose and to express his frustration with the negligence of a woman who did not make better use of the medical technology that was available to her. Retouching Cleopatra's statue's photograph is a gesture of annoyance akin to the more familiar practice of drawing mustaches beneath pictures of noses, itself identified as a quintessentially modernist gesture by Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa with a Moustache: where the one shows disrespect for the idea of a priceless, transcendent image by desecrating the particular image it reproduces, the other corrects the image (of the image) of a person in order to show her disrespect for herself. That Cleopatra came so close to being impossibly ugly, that she did nothing to fix her nose, and would almost certainly have done nothing if her nose had been worse off than it was--this is to Maltz an error of monumental ignorance, the sign of a colossal lapse of individual judgement whose repercussions would have extended well beyond her time. It is not just that the geography of the planet might have been different if the queen's nose had been longer, to return to Pascal's formulation, but that the geography of the planet need never have depended on her nose at all.

Twentieth-century surgery is thus, in Maltz's view, making up for lost time. As exciting as the new advances in plastic surgery are, they are ultimately belated responses to a scientific potential that has been allowed to languish for thousands of years. As such, they are less harbingers of a plastic future than reminders of a plastic potential that was lost more than once to an ignorant past. Building on ancient Indian techniques, the Roman physician Galen had taken up plastic surgery in the second century AD, but his insights were lost during the Middle Ages. The Italian surgeon Tagliacozzi revived it during the Renaissance, but the advances he made died with him, along with awareness that such surgery was even possible. Plastic surgery's importation into England during the 1790s, and its subsequent spread to Europe and America, was just the most recent revival of a practice that had a history of dropping out of history altogether. Maltz is acutely aware of this pattern, and his sense of the permanence and continuity of defect is thus exacerbated by his painful awareness of plastic surgery's own erratic and discontinuous record. His book is his effort to keep plastic surgery on the books. Charting the inconsistency of plastic surgery across the solid tradition of sculpture, Maltz plots the present moment as plastic surgery's arrival, the moment when, in making people look like statues, it achieves the permanence of statuary itself.

Rodin's Man with a Broken Nose occupies a special place in Maltz's account of plastic surgery's plastic history. Positioning the piece as the descendant of a long line of classically bungled heads rather than as the originator of a new sculptural look, Maltz depicts the statue as the modern embodiment of a tradition that science was fast rendering obsolete (by 1865, flap operations for lost noses were being done across Europe, and operations to repair cleft lips and palates were becoming increasingly common). In so doing, Maltz indicates that Rodin's aesthetic was predicated on--even synonymous with--clinical ignorance, on an anachronistic understanding of broken noses as permanent, unchanging features, and on a misguided belief that to render such features in art, as art, would be to the benefit of art and humanity both (as Rodin expressed it elsewhere, "Mutilated, we remain entire"). As such, the statue embodied the potential for another episode of plastic forgetting. In its very timelessness, in its appeal to the universal beauty of all human forms, and in its revival of a sculptural tradition as old as recorded time, The Man with a Broken Nose utterly effaced an important reality: that facial disfigurement was not only treatable, but that advances in medical technology were daily making it more treatable than it had ever been before.

According to the judges at the Salon of 1865, what was wrong with Rodin's Man was that it was a sculpture of a man with a broken nose: in casting the facial deformity of his model as the focal point of a work of art, Rodin was asking people to see the ugly as beautiful, and in so doing he was setting himself a task that was as impossible as it was undesirable. Plastic surgery's frustration with Rodin's piece ran even deeper--for physicians such as Schireson and Maltz, the problem with the bust was not simply that it aestheticized facial deformity, but that in so doing it immortalized it. As far as they were concerned, the point about broken noses was not just that they were always and only ugly (in this they were in perfect agreement with the statue's original detractors), but that now, for the first time in history, they could be fixed. To put it another way, what surgeons such as Maltz and Schireson disliked about Rodin's statue was the disregard for medical advances in the treatment of human suffering that underwrote his formal experiment. The suggestion that imperfect faces could--even ought--to be seen as part of the aesthetic canon was one that depended on totally divorcing the form of the face from the content of that face's experience. It was the flattening of deformity into form, and worse, into the means of making a point about form (of making it into a metaphor for formal experimentation). As we have seen, arguments for plastic surgery (arguments that originated in the deformed nose) centered on the emotional effects of both deformity and its surgical correction. The Man with a Broken Nose substituted the shock of a gorgeously molded malformation for the pain of being malformed. It treated disfigurement as a metonymy for a reconfigured art, rather than as the painful, palpable, treatable thing it was. It was a violation of aesthetic and ethical standards, a sculpture that, in giving a timeless quality to a type of face that was no longer a historical fixture, never should have been made.

All of this is to say that during the first decades of the twentieth century, plastic surgeons were as busy shaping sculpture as modern sculptors were. Each officially ignored the other. Plastic surgery makes no reference to modern sculpture (as if to suggest that Rodin personally destroyed the sculptural tradition, its history breaks off with The Man with a Broken Nose). Likewise, modern sculpture does not acknowledge the competing claims of plastic surgery. But each was nonetheless completely taken up with the sense that the time had come for a new approach to sculpture, and that it was through this new sculpture that the world would begin to be a better, more beautiful place. They were, indeed, mirror images of each other, reflections of what each might have looked like if it had stepped through the looking glass. Where plastic surgery insisted on the ethical and aesthetic importance of not severing form from content when it came to the shape of the head, modern sculpture, as we have seen, was a positive mandate for separating form from content by deforming the head. And where plastic surgery imagined that sculpture ought to supply the template for the surgical remodeling of human faces, sculpture (and painting) sought to relieve the weight of formal obligation by describing their faceless formalism as facial expressions. Here is Matisse in 1908: "I do not insist upon all the details of a face, on setting them down one-by-one with anatomical exactitude . . . . Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive." And Jean Metzinger in 1910: "Picasso," more than any other artist, "unveils to us the very face of painting." And Kasimir Malevich in 1916, "A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life, and this allusion is only a reminder of the living. . . But a surface lives, it has been born . . . . The square . . . . is the face of the new art . . . . Any painting surface is more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and a grin jut out." And Paul Klee in 1924: ". . . each formation, each combination will have its own particular, constructive expression, each figure its face--its features" (348). As the face ceases to be realistic subject matter for sculpture and painting, it becomes an ideal metaphor for abstract expression.

Plastic surgery figured the relationship between sculpture and face far more concretely. Not only were faces not figures, neither were sculptures. Plastic surgery's persistent will to see the history of sculpture as a history of human disfigurement, and to cast sculpture as the embodiment of an essentially clinical sensibility, speaks not to the myopia of physicians (many advocated the study of art, especially sculpture, as a way to cultivate an expansive professional vision), but rather to a desire on the part of those surgeons to conserve a particularly literal concept of artistic "truth." The nature of that "truth" may be usefully approached by turning momentarily to Oscar Wilde's depiction of Greek statuary as one of art's consummate lies:

Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvelous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore highheeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own day. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

Wilde's hyperbolic picture of Greek women laced and dyed and painted within an inch of the 1890s denies the historical accuracy of art by denying historicity itself. In asserting a profound rupture between Greek statuary and Greek people, Wilde asserts an equally profound identity between Greek women and Victorian women; the picture he paints is of an art permanently estranged from a subject matter that is itself--like art--permanently estranged from time, frozen--like a frieze--in an incredibly static relation to change.

The irony in Wilde's vision is that real people provide the kind of historical access representation does not: art may have "never once told us the truth," but it hardly matters when we can learn what Greek ladies looked like just by looking at "any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own day." These Wilde images of the Greek statue as a liar and of the modern woman as the hollow truth of an eternally shallow past form an uncannily precise antithesis to plastic surgery's belief in the Greek statue as the cold, hard, beautiful reality that has been belied by modern appearances; as such, they suggest that what plastic surgery finally wants from sculpture is not representation, not vision, not imagination, but truth itself. In his 1928 monograph, The Making of a Beautiful Face, J. Howard Crum argued that the beauty of Greek statuary points to the actual beauty of Greek people:

The most beautiful people of all time were the ancient Greeks. They have given to the world undeniable proof of the efficacy of their methods of physical and beauty culture. These proofs have come down through the ages carved in exquisite lines on peerless marble statues by their great sculptors. These statues were not mere dreams of the sculptor as some would suppose--they were the real images of real people chiseled in cold marble and are indisputable evidence that these people were actually beautiful in body and face as a result of their athletic sports and from observing plain common sense rules of health. (75)

Crum's deterministic realism allows him to assign Greek sculpture an evidentiary function: he can see beautiful statues as proof of the existence of equally beautiful people because he imagines that the sculptor (like a photographer working in stone) must make what he sees. Suggesting not only that the sculptor can capture the "real images of real people," but that there is a discrete, concrete reality outside the realm of representation (one whose warm life is apparently best grounded in "cold marble"), Crum draws a peculiarly flat picture of sculpture, one whose drive to define a precise relation between Greek statues and Greek bodies winds up denying all but the most material difference between them: the only real difference between their identically "exquisite lines" is the difference between flesh and stone. Reading art as the historical record, Crum infers truths from representations (what Wilde called "lies") by invoking a sort of deus ex mimesis, a theory of art that imagines that art cannot imagine, that it can only ever copy a beauty that already exists elsewhere.

Crum's vision was an extreme one, but it points nonetheless to a problem that arose continuously for plastic surgeons: the problem of what exactly classical statuary--or indeed any art--may be said to document. Plastic surgery's interest in classical statues was principally a documentary one: surgeons were interested in using Greek art to demonstrate their own unique expertise, and they did so by handling the statue in two essentially contradictory ways, treating it as both the origin of a history of art that makes plastic surgery possible (the timeless aesthetic that ennobles its modern clinical adaptation), and as an art that only becomes truly meaningful once it has become the guiding aesthetic of plastic surgery (the aesthetic whose time has finally come). In the hands of plastic surgery, Greek statuary documented both the existence of a centuries-old classical tradition and the failure of that tradition to realize itself effectively; in other words, Greek statuary documented plastic surgery's unique ability to document the importance of classical aesthetics, and in the process, to document its own importance to the history of aesthetics.

More to the point--as Crum's reading suggests--even as plastic surgery evinced an ongoing desire to place itself squarely in the history of art, it also displayed a great deal of confusion about what that history was and what it meant. Some, like Crum, read it as a history of degeneration: the distance between modern faces and Greek statues, a distance indexed by art over time, signals not the rise of realism, or the evolution of aesthetic standards, but the decline of the human race, a decline that is registered as the inability of contemporary people to measure up to classical statues. This, recall, was Blair's basic argument. Others developed more complicated perspectives--not by framing a more subtle theory of art's relation to reality, but by focussing on less attractive strands of art history. Where Blair and Crum concentrated on perfect statues of perfect subjects in order to cast plastic surgery as the realization of an ideal realism--as the practice that makes it possible once again to make bodies match their most beautiful representations--Maltz and Schireson dwelt on art's historical fascination with human ugliness in order to represent plastic surgery as the salvation of both ugly people (whose horrible experience art records) and ugly art (which it construes not as an art lacking in skill, but as an art lacking in subject, one whose technical expertise simply has not had enough pretty things to copy). So it is that where the metaphor of art as a face described an avant-garde aesthetic that did not rely on facial expression--or even faces--to express itself, plastic surgery cast itself as the art of restoring expression to damaged--and so improperly expressive--faces.

For I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase

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