Maxillofacial Surgery
Facial Proportions (Ch 2)
Built from Facial Aesthetics — Concepts and Clinical Diagnosis

What’s inside
12 sections · 178 slides
Overview
- What this deck covers
- The route the idea travelled
Why proportion at all?
Taste versus measurement, and what a clinician is really looking for.
- The oldest idea about beauty
- “
- What Durer worked out
- The question that follows
Ancient Egypt
Grids of equal squares, and beauty made permanent in granite.
- Beauty made permanent
- Queen Nefertiti
- How Egyptian sculptors worked
- The Egyptian proportional canons
- The Second Egyptian Canon grid
- Why the grid was eventually dropped
Archaic Greece
From rigid copies of Egyptian figures to statues that look alive.
- What a 'canon' means
- Three periods of Greek art
- The Archaic period and the kouroi
- A young man carved in marble
- Kleobis and Biton
- Why bronze took over from marble
- The Delphic charioteer
- Contrapposto: the pose that looks alive
- The Kritian Boy
Classical Greece
Gods in human shape, and the first written canon of proportions.
- “
- Gods in the shape of man
- Zeus or Poseidon of Artemision
- How we know anything about these statues
- Five sculptors who mattered
- The discus thrower
- The spear-bearer, built to a written rule
- The Riace warriors
- Praxiteles breaks the conventions
- Apollo the lizard-slayer
- Hermes and the infant Dionysus
- Aphrodite of Knidos
- The scraper, and a second canon
- Follow nature, not other artists
- Polycleitos and the lost Canon
- “
- What that quote is claiming
- Where did the numbers come from?
- Idea one: beauty is mathematics
- Proportional string experiments
- Idea two: the numbers came from measuring
- Two systems, side by side
Ancient Rome
Vitruvius writes the proportional rules down - including the facial thirds.
- Rome conquers Greece, and its art suffers
- Vitruvius presents his ten books
- What an architect must deliver
- Why the order matters
- The body as nature's rulebook
- The circle and the square
- Palladio on why we like a building
- “
- Symmetria is bigger than 'symmetry'
- Head and face against standing height
- The Vitruvian facial trisection
- Pliny the Elder's single sentence
The Renaissance
Alberti and Leonardo stop quoting the ancients and start measuring people.
- What the Renaissance was
- The universal man
- Leon Battista Alberti
- “
- Why that definition is useful
- Alberti on painting
- Pick one part, measure everything against it
- De Statua and dimensio
- How Alberti built an 'ideal'
- Why that method mattered
- Alberti's proportional relationships
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Training, and the Milan years
- What Leonardo read
- Measuring the human head with reference lines
- What Piero della Francesca had already done
- Human proportion as an architectural design element
- Francesco di Giorgio Martini
- Dissection in secret
- Sagittal section of the skull with proportions
- Luca Pacioli
- A polyhedron drawn for On Divine Proportion
- Mona Lisa
- Leonardo's notebooks
- Saper vedere, and the mirror-writing
- Leonardo's rule for choosing faces
- Measure yourself first
- Vitruvian Man in the circle and the square
- What Vitruvian Man shows
- The facial numbers inside Vitruvian Man
- Male head in profile with proportional divisions
- Reading the profile head study
- Leonardo's Square and the frontal facial square
- What Leonardo's Square claims
- The frontal facial square
- Craniofacial bisection and facial trisection
- Bisection and trisection
- Proportions of the face in profile
- Six proportions from the profile drawing
- The lip, throat and neck measures
- Proportions of the nose
- Leonardo's nose rules
- Michelangelo Buonarroti
- The first translation of Vitruvius
- Carlo Urbino
- Proportions of the head and chest, original and copy
- Leonardo's Square copied by a later hand
Albrecht Durer
The artist who set out to find the ideal and concluded there isn't one.
- Albrecht Durer
- Durer goes to Italy
- Adam and Eve
- Durer changes his mind
- The measurements behind the Four Books
- A range of human body proportions
- Craniofacial proportions in three dimensions
- The same craniofacial scheme from further angles
- Ideal facial profile proportions
- What the profile study measures
- A constructed male profile drawn over a grid
- Why the constructed head matters
- Durer's legacy
- “
Enlightenment and craniometry
Statue measurers, then skull measurers - measurement turns scientific.
- Two words to know
- The neoclassical canons of proportion
- Gerard Audran
- Johann Gottfried Schadow
- Head proportions and how they change with age
- Craniometry: measuring skulls
- Petrus Camper and his facial angle
- Camper's plane
- Variation in the facial angle
- What Camper found, and what he meant by it
- Camper on why skulls differ
- Why Camper's work still matters
The twentieth century
Normative data at last: Farkas measures thousands of real faces.
- What fed modern facial analysis
- Two twentieth-century advances
- Two rival schools of anthropometry
- Ales Hrdlicka
- How surgery met anthropology
- Leslie Farkas
- From surgeon to measurer
- Toronto and the normative database
- Farkas' key insight
- Norms are not one size fits all
- Why he is called the pioneer
The golden proportion
The most famous number in aesthetics, tested against the evidence.
- The most famous claim about beauty
- How the golden proportion is defined
- The Parthenon claim
- What Euclid actually wrote
- What Euclid did not write
- Pacioli makes it 'Divine'
- Facial profiles drawn in On Divine Proportion
- The Leonardo test
- Head and foot as measuring units
- When the number was actually calculated
- Zeising's universal law
- Fechner's rectangles
- Le Corbusier's Modulor
- Leonardo Fibonacci
- The golden proportion in dentistry
- Does it hold for faces?
- The methodological trap
- “
How to judge a beauty claim
The reasoning rules that separate science from dogma.
- Two ways a scientist goes wrong
- Carl Sagan on authority
- Three principles that separate science from dogma
- Principle one: science is not a system of belief
- Bertrand Russell's teapot
- Karl Popper on being uncritical
- Why methodology is the important part
- Principle three: scientific truth evolves
- The black swan
- “
- What this means at the chairside
- Conclusion
- Six things to carry away
- References
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- References (continued)
- Facial Aesthetics: Concepts and Clinical Diagnosis, 2nd Edition