Dalle somiglianze di famiglia ai ritratti compositi. Un percorso a ritroso fino alla ‘grammatica della visione’ antropologico-criminale

This article aims to trace the genealogy of the notion of family resemblance, central to Wittgenstein. His metaphorical use of the notion is essentially critical of Francis Galton’s technological approach of the composite portrait, consisting of superimposing photographs to create a common type in a criminological function. In particular, certain approaches revisiting the Galtonian tool in order to refine or supplement it, coined within the French and Italian criminological schools (Cesare Lombroso, Arthur Batut, Alphonse Bertillon), will be analysed here. Apart from their differences, they shared the purpose of achieving a normalisation of the physical-psychic-moral nexus, aiming at meticulous description through anthropometric parameters. In this sense, photographing meant focusing on anomalies, namely, those common traits that were outside the norm. Both measurements and discriminatory and racist intentions fell by the wayside with its metaphorical use: among other things, it solved precisely those problems related to the storage of information that had so plagued technological approaches for their obsession with data. Despite its inherently linguistic perspective, the face remains for Wittgenstein the pivot for the explanation of the concept of game, which recalls the philosophical notion of the archive as a constantly open system, always rearranging different combinations of traces and signs.