Twelve famous paintings and drawings in which the hands tell the story, counted down from twelve to one, from Dürer's Praying Hands to Michelangelo's Creation of Adam.
Hands were the hardest part to paint, and until the 1800s a British portrait that showed them cost more than one that stopped at the shoulders. Here they pray, rob a young man behind his back, and lie on a dissecting table where no one looks at them.
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How These Were Chosen
The list starts from that difficulty. In a Renaissance workshop, an apprentice copied studies of hands long before the master trusted him with a face, because fingers gave a weak painter away.
Gestures also speak. Painters knew that a raised palm, a closed fist or two joined hands could carry a meaning without a word, and preachers and actors relied on the same gestures.
So each picture here was chosen because its hands carry as much of the story as the face, whether they bless, grip, steal, pray or reach out. Drawings count as well as paintings, since some of the best known gestures in art were never painted at all.
12. Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight, Albrecht Dürer (1500)
Against a black background, a young man with long curling hair faces straight out of the picture. Albrecht Dürer, the German painter and engraver from Nuremberg, painted himself this way in 1500, on a panel of lindenwood, a board of wood.
His right hand rises to the middle of his chest. The fingers are bent and slightly apart, and their tips rest in the fur that lines the opening of his coat. Beside his head, a line of Latin gives his name, his city and his age, twenty eight.
The straight-on pose was not a neutral choice. In the churches of his time, Christ was painted this way, face centered and looking out, often with his right hand raised in blessing. Painters who portrayed themselves usually turned to the side.
Dürer's hand sits where those images placed the blessing, and many historians read it as an echo of that gesture. For a painter, borrowing the pose of Christ was a large claim.
In 1500, painting in Germany still counted as a craft, paid by the job, the way a joiner was paid for a table. Learned men were scholars and poets.
Dürer painted this panel for himself, with no patron to please, and signed it in Latin, as an author would. He painted the fur under his fingers almost hair by hair, so the proof of his skill lies right beside the hand that produced it.
At a Glance
Artist: Albrecht Dürer (1471 to 1528)
Painted: 1500, Nuremberg
Medium: Oil on lindenwood panel
Size: 67.1 × 48.9 cm (26.4 × 19.3 in)
Where to see it: Alte Pinakothek, Munich
11. The Angelus, Jean-François Millet (1859)
At dusk, in a flat field near Barbizon, a church bell rings in the distance and two peasants stop work to pray. Barbizon was a village south of Paris where several painters had settled to paint the countryside.
Jean-François Millet, one of those painters, finished the picture in 1859, after working on it since 1857. He named it after the prayer the bell announces, the Angelus, which Catholics said in the morning, at noon and in the evening.
The woman has already joined her hands under her chin. The man has not joined his.