Still, he admits, it is true that prominent men have prominent noses — everyone since Aristotle has agreed about that. An aquiline nose, we learn, is a necessary component of a hero’s face, accompanied by a wide and raised forehead, thick eyebrows, and eyes angled such that “the interior corners make an angle above the horizontal line which then cuts only through the outer corner”. Variation from this theme is a sure sign that Minerva, the patron goddess of geniuses, has never come to visit. The beakish nose is only good for the eagle-like, who is resolute in his toga: le Brun’s raven-man, frowning toward the viewer and cawing in three-quarter profile, is prone to even the “most condemnable” passions (perhaps this is because, as Aristotle argued, the nose is under the rule of Venus). The parrot-man, in his soft cloth cap, may recall a Renaissance philosopher — but a parrot’s beak, of course, is a sure sign of the babillard outré, an extreme babbler.