The old man face as an emblem of the Degeneration at the fin de siècle

Surrounded by the shadows of the Decline of the West, Max Nordau undertakes, between 1892 and '93, an inquiry into the decadence of Europe's fin de siècle, building his vast gallery of figures, like an anthropological museum of horrors, on the slippery slope of Degeneration. Overcoming Lombroso, he makes the degeneration an aesthetic category, diagnosing the artistic movements of the late nineteenth century as diseases. Listing the evils, accumulating citations, crowding his examples of figures, Nordau actually ends up to call the roll of the degenerates he intended to condemn and, as in the Freudian denial mechanism, gives them an extreme possibility of existence. This gallery of degenerated figures, left out of the evolutionary path, will facilitate the entrance of that ''horde of ugly" that will dominate the new century, paving the way for twentieth-century characters. The paper-like face of an old man will become the true symbol of the Degeneration. Be it "wild", as in the old man described by Svevo, or covered with make-up like in Pirandello, or be it the face of a young decrepit shriveled due to "premature senility" like in Tozzi, its parchment skin will retain as grapheme all the stigmata of ill-grown men, while the last reflection of an atavistic paper-world will be caught in the dense wrinkles’ weft.