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Composite portrait, Turin, 1888.
G. Vanetti, albumen print on cardboard with pictorial interventions
This image produced for Lombroso by photographer Giuseppe Vanetti was created following Galton’s method for composite portraits, overlapping in one single shot the photographs of two men, most probably criminals.
Francis Galton (1822-1911) invented composite portraits: a series of photographs of different people superimposed in one a single image to capture common physical traits and to visualize them in a synthetic form.
Lombros who was very interested in this method, in 1887 reported in his journal, the Archive of Psychiatry (the journal of Criminal Anthropology) a text by French photographer Arthur Batut that contains technical indications for the creation of Galton’s portraits: La photographie appliquée à la production du type d’une famille, d’une tribu ou d’une race.
In 1888 Lombroso himself made a series of composite portraits of skulls he published in his journal.