Patrick Rossano
Let's complete this sort of "trilogy" of gestures that the coronavirus would like to take away from us.
A warm handshake has always sealed pacts and confirmed friendships, established relationships, expressed affection and feelings on an equal footing and together with Hugs and kisses, as we wrote in previous articles on FirstOnLine and FirstArte. Covid would also like to deprive us of this fundamental manifestation of physical contact between individuals through the hands. The "social distance" together with the use of masks and gloves aims at the heart of the geometry of proximity, of physical contact where feelings and thoughts pass.
One image is valid for all: the fingers that touch each other, get closer in the Creation of Adam in the Last Judgment painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. A symbol, a sign, an icon of life that is about to arise: from that contact between the two hands, between the index fingers, which is about to happen and will happen later, all of humanity will descend. The hands therefore as an extension of the mystical and sacred sense, as an essential tool for the transmission of the meaning of belonging to a community: with the imposition of hands one enters the Sacraments and with joined hands one prays. They are therefore gestures and languages of significant universality that affect different religions and cultures in every part of the world.
Hands occupy a very special position in the history of art. It is very probable that the first “artistic” trait was the imprint of a hand on a rock left by one of our ancient ancestor, perhaps completely unaware of the enormous symbolic meaning it would have represented. From then on, the hands constitute the fundamental "instrument" through which first the human being and then the artist gives shape to a sculpture or a painting. The study of the hands and their expressive capacities has become in the West and in the midst of the modern era a science, chirology, which in 1640 saw the creation of the first treatise on the language of the hands by John Bulwer. Yet it is not enough to have "good hands" to create a work of art, something more is needed. Michelangelo in one of his famous letters he wrote that “si paints with brain et not with your hands".
In sculpture, the Romans already knew well how hands could symbolically convey fundamental social, cultural and political messages. Suffice it to recall the raised index finger of the statue of Constantine (what Suetonius called digitussalutes ) then taken up in modern times by the statue of Maurizio Cattelan (in this case the middle finger) located in front of Milan's Piazza Affari.
It will perhaps be first Michelangelo, with his hands of David, Moses as well as the Pietà to make them tangibly plastic not so much and not only as a simple extension of the human body but more for the different feelings that they intended to communicate through them. After him, in classical sculpture we limit ourselves to citing Bernini of the group of the four rivers in Piazza Navona with his famous hand raised towards the facade of the church of S. Agnese, fearing it might fall; Canova who devoted significant attention to the posture of the hands and, finally, Auguste Rodin who has dedicated so many important works to his hands.
Another important chapter that affects hands in the history of art refers to drawing and painting. You can start with Leonardo and his anatomy studies that led him to create some of his most important masterpieces where the hands take center stage: from the Lady with an Ermine to the SalvatorMundi. Centuries of masterpieces lead us towards the works of Albrecht Durer, perhaps the best known and most affirmed "scholar" of hands, passing through Van Gogh with his "Study of hands" up to Henry Moore with his work “The hands of the artist”. Not to be forgotten is the study of Moravia's hands by Renato Guttuso.
Finally, it is necessary to remember the hands in the graphics (one above all: The hands that draw by Escher) as well as in signage graphics and the hands in the photograph constitute important paragraphs where the synthesis of a part of the human body with the message it carries takes place. Speaking of messages, a final note on "Le mani sulla città" by Francesco Rosi, a 1963 film where the whole perverse interweaving between politics and morals is highlighted with the metaphor of the hands.
