In March 1671 the painter Charles Le Brun, favourite artist of Louis XIV, gave a lecture at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris comparing human and animal faces. Over 250 pen-and-ink drawings survive, now at the Louvre, showing men with lion manes or owl eyes and bulls' heads labelled obstinate or stupid. Le Brun believed the slope of the eyes and the brows revealed a person's dominant character, and he used equilateral triangles over animal heads to show geometry in his theory. The drawings reflect 17th-century ideas linking the soul to the body, drawing on Giovanni Battista della Porta and Descartes. They were published as a collection in 1806 and later fed into 19th-century physiognomy, phrenology and criminology.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.