How our modern smile, which shows our teeth, was invented by a confluence of French dentistry and Parisian portrait painting in the 1780s
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The smile is the most easily recognizable facial expression from a distance in human interactions. It is also an easier expression than most others. Other facial expressions that indicate emotion – such as fear, anger or distress – require up to four muscles. The smile only needs a single muscle to produce it: the zygomatic major at the corner of the mouth (although a simultaneous contraction of it eye socket eyelid muscle is required for a sincere and happy smile). Besides being easy to make and recognize, the smiley is also very versatile. It can denote sensory pleasure and enjoyment, cheerfulness and fun, satisfaction, sympathy, affection, seduction, relief, anxiety, nervousness, annoyance, anger, shame, aggression, fear and contempt. Whatever you think, the smile does it.
Smiling comes easily to people. The facial muscles required for smiling actually exist in the womb, ready for early development in anxious parents. The smile may even predate the human species. Many great apes are known to produce them, suggesting that the smile first appeared on the face of a common ancestor long before its existence Homo sapiens. It was Charles Darwin, at his classic The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which provided the first scientific demonstration of a smiling great ape. He also showed that the smile of great apes has something of the versatility of gesture among humans: it can indicate pleasure (mainly by tickling) but also aggressive self-defense.
The smile was always with us then, and it seemed that it was always the same. It almost seems like it only takes one step further to claim that the smile has no history. But that would be far from the truth. In fact, the smile has a fascinating, if much neglected, past. To access this, we must first consider broader cultural factors. The ubiquity and versatility of the smile means that, for example, in social situations, it is not enough to see someone smile. One must know what the smile is aimed at. The expression needs untangling, deciphering, decoding. In this, it resembles the wink of an eye. As he pointed out anthropologist Clifford Geertz in 1973, blinking is physiologically identical to the involuntary contraction of the eyelids that we call an eyelash. To understand the wink as a wink rather than a blink requires an understanding of the cultural codes at play. And these, of course, can vary greatly.
In the West, we tend to recognize the variability of codes in terms of space and diversity: there is a sense that Western smiling culture differs from that found in, for example, Japanese and Chinese societies. However, the smile shows temporal as well as spatial variation. In the "archaic smile" seen in some ancient Greek sculptures, for example, the lips are formed into a smile. However, classicists are skeptical that this actually represents the expression as we know it. It may simply be intended to induce a sense of general health and contentment. In other words, the smile was there, but we don't know what it meant.
The ancient Romans showed another variation. If we take their vocabulary at face value, they made no distinction between a smile and a laugh, settling for a single Latin verb – ridere - for both. Only towards the end of the Roman Empire did a diminutive – substitute . This came with the derived noun sub-risus (later, surrisus ) a 'sub-laugh' – a little or low laugh – relating to mockery. It retained this smaller position and this diminutive, distinguishing it from laugh as it entered the Romance languages in the high Middle Ages. Around 1300, for example, French contained words for laughter ( rire ) and laughter ( le rire thele ris ) and smile ( sourire , from sous-rire ).
At about the same time and in a similar way, Italian was adopted the ridere and smile, the Spanish it reir and the sonreir , the Portuguese the rir and smile and the Provençal ones rire and sobsrire . A specific word for "smile" appeared in Celtic and Slavic languages around then, but using a non-Latin term: the Danes took smile and the Swedes, smila. English ultimately got its "smile" from a High German or Scandinavian source. It was a revelation that almost at the same time the smile entered the Western artistic tradition, in the form of the famous "smiling angel", created between 1236 and 1246, which adorns the west front of the great cathedral at Reims in northeastern France. Historians hailed this pleasant and very modern expression as signaling the arrival of new cultural values in Western civilization.
There are certainly examples of open-mouthed smiles that show teeth, but they are always negative in their associations
The smile as we know it appeared in the Western world from the 13th century onwards. Literature shows that, in the centuries that followed, it evoked much of the emotion we attribute to it in our own culture. Francesco Petrarca dreamed of his lover's "bright angelic smile," and while this kind of gentle lyricism can also be found in William Shakespeare's sonnets, the Bard knew that "one can smile, smile, and be evil." . Renaissance painting also welcomed and adopted the smile. However, its meaning was not always crystal clear: witness the legendary if infuriatingly ambiguous smile that plays on her lips Mona Liza by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-17).
However, if the smile was alive in Western culture, it was not yet ours. In Western art, it differed in one very important respect: the smiling mouth was almost always closed. Teeth appear in representations of the face extremely rarely. One can scan pre-19th-century drawings, paintings, and sculptures in art galleries and museums around the world without finding a single example of an overt smile of the kind that is so common today. There are certainly examples of open mouths and teeth, but they are always negative in their associations.
It is tempting to attribute this condition to the unhealthy state of the mouth. But, in fact, skeletal remains from late medieval cemeteries suggest that teeth were less affected by cavities than would have been the case since the 18th century. and after, with the mass advent of sugar in the Western diet. The reason for the tight-lipped smile in the period inaugurated by the smiling angel of Reims seems to owe everything to cultural values rather than biological deficiencies.
Three factors worked to minimize expression representation. First, there was a close relationship between open mouth and the lower classes. Constantly opening one's mouth to reveal inner horrors was something only plebeians did. This artistic convention reflected social norms applicable in genteel or patrician society that were articulated in the early 16th century by two highly influential works: the Mantunese diplomat Baldassare Castiglione's book The Book of the Courtier (1528) and the Dutch humanist Erasmus's On Civility in Children.(1530). Both strongly recommended not to open your mouth to others except to fulfill basic biological needs: do it any other way. Laugh if you must, was the message, but do so silently and with your mouth buttoned in a seemingly decorous and polite manner. The Laughing Cavalier (1624) by Frans Hals, for example, may have a broad smile, as the title suggests: but his lips are sealed. If he wasn't, he would seem to be denying his status as a gentleman.
The two main texts were frequently reworked in the following centuries and translated into many languages. Erasmus first appeared in English in 1532 and Castiglione in 1561 (the version apparently known to Shakespeare). Although addressed to courtiers and students respectively, the texts reached a much wider audience, particularly through the Renaissance genre of behavior book, which was supposed to show readers how kindly people should behave in every aspect of their lives. These texts were part of what the German sociologist Norbert Elias in 1939 called "the civilizing process," a kind of behavioral revolution, one of the key features of which was the control of bodily orifices, particularly in public spaces. Mouths must be kept closed when eating, for example, spitting was taboo, noses must not touch, ears must not be pierced in public, and eyes must not stare. And there should be no gas.
No doubt, in real life, these were rules to be broken. But breaking them revealed one's low character. Or – and this was the second factor at play, in art as in life – it betrayed a loss of reason. The gaping mouth was an accepted way of depicting the insane, but it went further than that, and included the representation of individuals whose rational faculties were suspended, by passions or unjust appetites. This was one reason why some of the miniature portraits showing white-toothed smiles are of children – The shrimp girl by william hogarth (1740-45) is a good example. By definition, he had not reached the age of reason and learned how to be polite. (Or maybe he was from the lower classes and would never know better.)
When the soul was calm and peaceful, the face was perfectly at rest
The third factor explaining the absence of positive depictions of open mouths in Western art relates to what were known as "historical paintings" depicting scenes from ancient history or scripture. Individuals in such scenes are often portrayed as being in the grip of a powerful emotion such as terror, fear, despair, rage, or ecstasy (whether spiritual or carnal). In the 17th century, Louis XIV's leading painter, Charles Le Brun, attempted to codify conventions regarding the representation of the passions in history painting. He drew on implicit rules he had identified in Western art dating back to antiquity, but also sought confirmation of his ideas in the cutting-edge physiology of the philosopher René Descartes.
Descartes argued that the pineal gland was the "seat of the soul," located inside the head, between the eyes and behind the bridge of the nose. The gland was the site where thought and sensation were formed, and this affected, Descartes argued, the flow of animal spirits to the muscles – including, notably, the muscles of the face. For Le Brun, it followed that when the soul was calm and peaceful, the face was perfectly at rest. Conversely, when the soul was agitated, it was expressed in the face – particularly around the eyebrows, the facial feature closest to the pineal gland. The more extreme the passion, the more distorted the muscles in the upper face – and the more the lower face was affected. It took very extreme emotions for him to open his mouth wide.
Le Brun's theories were widely spread in Europe from the late 17th century. Although the Cartesian view of the soul subsequently declined, the facial drawings with which Le Brun had illustrated them remained very popular. Indeed, throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th, copying his gallery of expressions became a standard way in which amateur artists learned how to draw and paint faces. Expressions appeared in other genres as well painting. Dutch genre painting showed drunken figures loitering in inns and taverns laughing uproariously or engaged in violent brawls. Teeth also appeared in some self-portraits by artists who presented themselves in a sardonic manner – a tradition that went back to Rembrandt and beyond. But the canonical portrait stayed true to the courtly tradition of Castiglione, the Mona Lisa and his Laughing Cavalier .
Until, that is, 1787. For it was that year in Paris that Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (related by marriage to Louis XIV's court painter) exhibited a self-portrait at the annual Salon at the Louvre (where the painting remains). With her daughter on her knee, she looks kindly at the viewer and smiles with decorative charm, revealing her white teeth.
The art world went into shock. "A feature of which artists, men of good taste, and collectors all deplore," wrote one critic, "and there is no precedent beginning with Antiquity, the feature that as she laughs she shows her teeth..." At the end of 18th century. Paris, a new phenomenon had marked its arrival in Western culture, breaking all the rules and conventions of Western art. The modern smile was born.
Vigée Le Brun may have started something of an artistic revolution on the cusp of the more famous political revolution of 1789. But there are signs that her painted smile reflected changes already taking place in French society at large. People, it seems, were smiling more and seeing new positivity about the gesture. Paris was at the forefront of this development. The French capital had established itself as an influencer of sorts before the letter, which set the trends that the rest of Europe followed in terms of fashionable behavior and merchandise. The kind of hard gravity, conventionality, and facial immobility prized at the royal court at Versailles lost its appeal for the livelier, more dynamic metropolitan culture that emerged in the French capital. In drawing-rooms, coffee-houses, theatres, shops, and the like, the most relaxed and unprofitable behavior was the rule.
The black-and-white smile, moreover, was invested with new prestige by the cult of sensibility that swept through mid-century Europe, fueled by the bestselling novels of Samuel Richardson ( Pamela , Clarissa ) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( Julie, ou la ). nouvelle Héloïse , Émile ). Modern readers of these novels are usually struck by the immense weeping and sobbing that goes on in them as the virtue of their protagonists is viciously attacked. But the characters prevail, significantly, with a wonderful smile on their face.
This was important as these novels and others like them created a desire in their readers to model their own behavior after the fictional characters.' This trend is similar to the impact of Hollywood stars and social media influencers in more recent times. The virtuous and transcendent smile that shows off the healthy white teeth in the novels became a model for the Parisian social elite in real life. It became not only acceptable but desirable to express one's natural feelings among one's peers. English travelers expressed surprise at how often Parisians exchanged smiles in everyday encounters. The city had become the smile capital of the world.
If the cult of sensibility gave the readers of the novels the desire to smile in this fashionable way, the Parisians were also lucky to have technical assistance. The French capital had become a renowned center for dental hygiene. Throughout Europe and indeed the wider world before the early 18th century, oral care was a clumsy combination of strategic tooth-picking, pain-relieving opiates and indiscriminate tooth-pulling. Now, a new kind of oral care specialist has appeared in Paris, replacing the old-school toothpicks: the dentist.
Under the Reign of Terror, the smiles had to stay under the parapet for political reasons
The term was coined in Paris in the 1720s and entered the English language by mid-century. He was a specialist with surgical and anatomical training who developed artful instruments in dental care. New dentists could clean, whiten, align, fill, replace and even transplant teeth to create a cleaner, healthier and – in its smiling version – attractive mouth. European gentlemen undertaking their Grand Tour would enter Paris to have their teeth fixed. The Parisian papers were full of articles boasting of oral cosmetics and instruments of every description. Next to toothpicks, tongue scrapers, breath fresheners, teeth whiteners and lipsticks was the toothbrush – a sure harbinger of a smiling modernity, invented at this time. de Chémant heralded a booming new industry in false teeth. This meant that one could perform the new white teeth smile without a tooth of their own in their head.
In this context, we can see Vigée Le Brun as a kind of high art advertisement for Parisian preventive and aesthetic dentistry and fashion. The public showing of the portrait at the Salon ensured a wide appeal: viewers took the new smile with them into their homes around the world. A bright future seemed certain.
At the event, the triumph of the Parisian wide-mouthed smile was both local and short-lived. She would have to wait more than a century before establishing her global dominance. Even – and perhaps especially – in Paris, the impact of the Vigée Le Brun smile was short-circuited by the French Revolution two years later and the spread of a political culture that found this kind of smile problematic. Even before the Revolution, the cult of sensibility was challenged by neoclassical taste. Jacques-Louis David's epic paintings, for example, were all about jutting jaws, facial rigidity, stiff upper lips and almost operatic bodily gestures. This style of representation prevailed after 1789. Indeed, during the Reign of Terror (1793-94), the smiles had to be kept under the parapet for political reasons. To the ardent revolutionaries, The dolce vita scandalously enjoyed by pampered aristocrats under the ancien régime. True patriotism had no time for a gesture that seemed to mock democratic earnestness.
In addition, the open mouth became increasingly associated with French revolutionaries and created gothic, gruesome and melodramatic associations. Facial mutilations of victims by angry mobs, for example, often focused on the mouth: government official Joseph-François Foullon de Doué—who in 1789 was credited with urging Parisians to eat grass if they could not afford its price of bread – appeared when his severed head was paraded through town on the end of a pike, with straw stuffed into its mouth. Goya depicted the rebels as the god Saturn devouring his children, according to one interpretation of his haunting painting. English political cartoonists supported this, depicting the working classes of Paris as cannibal slaves. Even the porcelain dentures gifted to mankind by Dubois de Chémant were the subject of sarcastic mockery by the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Such images remained in the European imagination, crowding out memories of more innocent times.
If in Paris the smile of Vigée Le Brun had lost its charm and had been consigned to the dustbin of history, this was also due to a crisis in the medical services. Revolutionary legislation closed the place within the medical system that dentists had occupied and there was no provision for training in dental surgery. For a century dentists had no institutional status and soon found themselves again in a situation where they were competing for clients with the charlatan tooth-pullers of old.
The smile hibernated as a public gesture in the West for more than a century. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that it reappeared under the influence of a number of factors. Better dentistry was an important part of history, and the world leader was not Paris but the United States, which was among the first countries to professionalize dental education from the early 19th century onwards. However, as in the 18th century, the triumph of the smile was due as much to cultural trends as to the provision of dental expertise and proficiency. Highly visual advertising practices, Hollywood star imagery, and snapshot photography also played a role. As anyone with family photo albums that go back that far will discover, it was from the 1920s and 30s that smiles first appeared – right around the time people started saying 'cheese' when faced with a camera. The portrait had been democratized – and it was smiling.
Since the early 21st century, iPhone photography and social media have confirmed that the preferred individual expression of social identity was through the smile. Technologies have also worked to erode barriers with global smiling cultures that were previously less reflective of Western practices. One in five of the more than 500 million Twitter messages sent each day, it has been estimated, contains an emoji. It is the lingua franca of the globalized mass culture of the electronic age. The most used of the more than 3,000 emoji available is the "smiley with tears of joy", an upgraded version of the original smiley.
In 2019, the long march of the modern (Western) smile received a strong jolt, with the appearance of COVID-19. Suddenly, that expression retreated behind a surgical mask. It is true that the astute among us may have been aware that a genuine and sincere smile causes a detectable crinkling of the muscles around the eyes. But then we're not all that perceptive. And who only genuinely smiles anyway? The emoji recorded success. Although the "smile with tears of joy" retained the top spot in global usage, another emoji rose dramatically: the surgically covered face. The popularity of the masked face emoji became so intense that when, in November 2020, Apple released its annual additions to the series, it was deemed wise to modify the mask emoji, adding color to the cheeks and a substantial crinkle around the eyes. so that it gives the appearance of smiling under the mask. The smile, it seemed, was back. And indeed it seems unlikely to lose its iconic cultural value and global appeal. The easing of the pandemic situation around the world gives everyone something to smile about.
*Cover photo: Self-portrait with her daughter, Julie (c1789) by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Courtesy of Louvre/Wikipedia
Source: aeon.co