This book of prints of the human head, showing the range of emotions and expressions, were engraved by the most skilled artists of the day from tracings and drawings made by Nicholas Dorigny from the famous cartoons that Raphael designed in the early 1500s to be made into tapestries for the Sistine Chapel.

In 1688, Charles Le Brun, a French academician, delivered a lecture on expression that was so popular it was published in sixty-three separate editions and influenced all discussion of the subject throughout Europe for over a century. This book reconstructs and translates the text of the lecture (badly garbled in all previous versions), explores the context in which it was conceived, delivered, received, and finally rejected, and reproduces the images that accompanied the lecture.