Hands

Hands are tough because they’re attention magnets. They’re very expressive, like faces, differing from one person to another. Most people wave them around when they speak. If not, that catches our attention. (The politician speaking to the camera with folded hands glued to the desk in front of him.)

Notice the hands in old-master portraits – the Mona Lisa’s hands, for instance. If you look at them closely, they’re hardly hands at all. They’re schematics of hands, with carefully tapered fingers that express nothing. They serve a compositional purpose, and there was no way to avoid showing them in a full-upper-torso portrait, but I think Leonardo was trying to sap the character of the hands so we wouldn’t be distracted, would accept them as ornaments only, and would concentrate on the face.

Hands are as tough to deal with as faces, but of course like faces they can be wonderfully expressive too. We ignore their power at our peril. The devil finds work for idle hands.