Henri Focilon - In Praise of Hands

Oil on wood, 69 x 57 cm. Muse du Louvre, Paris.

Anonymous

Beckmann, Max

Bein, Jean

Blake, William

Bonzagni, Arnoldo

Botticelli, Sandro

Bouguereau, William-Adolphe

Canova, Antonio

Carabin, Franois-Rupert

Caravaggio

Cassatt, Mary

Czanne, Paul

Claudel, Camille

Cobler, Veretta

Courbet, Gustave

Couture, Thomas

Da Vinci, Leonardo

David, Jacques-Louis

Degas, Edgar

Derain, Andr

Devria, Achille

Drer, Albrecht

El Greco

Euaion Painter

Fingesten, Michel

Fragonard, Jean-Honor

Gauguin, Paul

Grasset, Eugne

Greuze, Jean-Baptiste

Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros

Hayez, Francesco

Heliodorus of Rhodes

Hildebrandt, Ernst

Hodler, Ferdinand

Hokusai

Holbein the Younger, Hans

Hunt, William Holman

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique

Klimt, Gustav

Manet, douard

Michelangelo

Millais, Sir John Everett

Modigliani, Amedeo

Mouton, Georges

Mucha, Alphonse

Munch, Edvard

Myron

Pascin, Jules

Pollaiuolo, Piero del

Praxiteles

Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre

Raphael

Rembrandt

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

Rodin, Auguste

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

Rubens, Peter Paul

Santi, Giovanni

Sassy, Attila

Schiele, Egon

Stuck, Franz von

Studio Biederer

Titian

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de

Vallotton, Flix douard

Van Eyck, Jan

Van Gogh, Vincent

Zuid, Giovanni

I am undertaking this praise to the hand as I would fulfil a duty to a dear friend. When I start to write, I see my own hands soliciting my mind, leading it. They are always there, these tireless companions, who during so many years completed their arduous tasks, one holding the piece of paper in place and the other tracing multiple hurried marks, sombre but active, onto the white page. With them, man becomes aware of the difficulty of thought. They transcend the writing pad. They grant the pad a shape, a contour, and on top of that they add a style to the writing itself.

They are almost animated beings. Servants? Perhaps. Yet gifted with a free and energetic genius, as well as a physiognomy, like faces without eyes or a voice but who can see and speak. Over time, some blind people acquire a sharpness of touch that enables them to discern the individual suits in a deck of cards by sensing the minute thickness of the image, but the sighted also need their hands to see, to complete the perception of appearance through touch. The hands have their aptitude inscribed in their shape and design: the slender hands of the expert in analysis; the long and mobile fingers of the thinker; prophetic hands bathed in fluids; spiritual, tender hands which even when they are not moving, exude grace and character. Physiognomy, long ago practiced with diligence by the masters, would be enriched with a chapter on hands. The human face is mainly composed of receptive organs, but the hand is about action: it takes, it creates, and it could be said that it thinks. When resting, it is not a soulless tool abandoned on a table or hanging down the side of a body. Habit, instinct, and the desire to move are latent within it, and it does not take long to determine the intended action.

The great artists gave an extreme amount of attention to the study of hands. They felt its powerful virtue better than ordinary men because they lived by them. Rembrandt demonstrates this in the diversity of emotions, types, ages, and circumstances he paints: a hand open in shock, dressed, immersed in shadow, against the light like that of a witness in ; Rembrandts drawing hand; the formidable hand of Saint Matthew writing the Gospel as dictated to him by an angel; the hands of the crippled old man in Hundred Guilder Print, doubled by the big mittens innocently hanging from his belt. It is true that certain masters painted hands from a practical perspective with a consistency that did not disappoint, a useful anthropometric measurement for critics classifications, but how many drawing sheets betray this analysis with their individuality? These lonely hands live with intensity.

What is this privilege? Why does this deaf and dumb organ communicate with such persuasive power? Because it is the most original and the most differentiated, like a superior being of life. The wrist provides a delicate hinge articulated by ossicles. Five bone branches flow underneath the skin, with their system of nerves and ligaments, then veer off to create five separate fingers, each one made up of three joints, each one with their own abilities and spirit. A flat plain bulging with veins and arteries, rounded at the edges, connects the wrist with the fingers, whose hidden structure it covers. The palm is a repository. In the active life of the hand, it can tense and harden as well as mould itself around an object.

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Paestum, Capaccio