The Singular Countenance: The Visage as Landscape, the Landscape as Visage

The article shows that, in the effort to convey a notion of the singularity of the beloved face, especially in tragic settings, often human cultures resort to nature, and adopt animal, vegetable, and even mineral metaphors in order to rhetorically transfer the singularity of their shapes to that of the facial representations. This trend develops across cultures in world literature but imposes itself with particular emphasis in those traditions, authors, and texts that posit a systematic correlation between the microcosmos and the macro-cosmos, between body and nature, and between the face and the landscape.