[HN Gopher] Secret Hand Gestures in Paintings (2019)
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Secret Hand Gestures in Paintings (2019)
Author : Jaruzel
Score : 130 points
Date : 2024-06-07 09:36 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| AdamN wrote:
| "During the Renaissance period, hands were as important a focus
| of attention as the face was, because they were the only other
| visible area of the body."
|
| [Example painting is a Titian with a naked Mary Magdalene]
| baldr333 wrote:
| Hitler also had the same hand gesture in his portrait by Heinrich
| Knirr
| imglorp wrote:
| More than one evidently.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Hitler+portrait+by+Heinrich+Knirr&...
| SamBam wrote:
| Most likely the artist referencing the style of the earlier
| paintings.
| Dr_Birdbrain wrote:
| I am confused why this appears on NIH.gov
| lgessler wrote:
| A division of the NIH (NCBI) maintains a repository of open
| access publications in life sciences called PubMed Central
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubMed_Central) and this article
| was in a qualifying journal.
| vlark wrote:
| Specifically, this journal:
| https://mattioli1885journals.com/index.php/actabiomedica
| troymc wrote:
| One of the proposed explanations was that lots of people
| actually had fingers which naturally posed like that, which, if
| true, would be of interest to people in biomedicine. The paper
| was published in _Acta Biomedica_ , an international, peer-
| reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research
| articles, reviews, and case reports in the field of biomedical
| sciences. It then got slurped into various journal indices and
| online libraries, including the National Library of Medicine at
| the NIH.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Syndactyly is a medical condition; paintings seemingly display
| this as being more prevalent than reported in medical records
| of the time.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndactyly
| mandibeet wrote:
| Symbolic language in paintings is always so interesting for me to
| discover
| irrational wrote:
| > Finally, there is no letter or religious gesture, Hebrew or
| otherwise, similar to the splayed hand.
|
| Isn't there? Not including the thumb, it looks like the letter
| shin. Of course, the Vulcan salute also famously makes the shin
| letter (but, includes the thumb).
| wmanley wrote:
| Of all the hypotheses they considered, they seem to have missed
| the obvious one: Cosimo I de' Medici is Eastside and Jesus, God
| and Mary Magdalene are Westside.
| ggaughan wrote:
| https://www.justnerd.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Ali-G-Sac...
| dmurray wrote:
| The only two plausible explanations to me are either that
| _artists_ conventionally drew hands like this (for religious,
| artistic or other reasons) or that artists ' _subjects_
| conventionally posed like this, for a similar variety of reasons,
| or because the artist told them to.
|
| The article helpfully rules out a third explanation, an "epidemic
| of syndactyly", but doesn't make a strong decision between the
| other two. It seems to lean towards this being a quirk of the
| artists, but it could do with a quantitative study: if artist A
| painted subject A like this, what happened when artist A
| portrayed other subjects, or other artists portrayed A?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, to me it is an artistic thing (then followed perhaps by
| painters copying "the Masters").
|
| Fingers spread evenly is artistically uninteresting -- naive
| even. Fingers all joined is also rather dull -- suggests a
| rigidity in fact.
| kmoser wrote:
| My thoughts exactly: by bringing two of the five fingers
| together you achieve a more interesting effect of overall
| asymmetry among the fingers, and yet because the two joined
| fingers are each flanked by a "detached" finger, it creates
| another layer of symmetry within the non-thumb fingers.
|
| The overall effect is quite pleasing to the eye, which may
| account for it having caught on to the point where it became
| a trend. I see this as the Occam's Razor of explanations.
| criddell wrote:
| I love that there's a section for conflicts of interest.
|
| Would have been interesting to see a disclosure for a pharma
| company working on syndactyly or a disclosure that the authors
| belong to some secret society.
| massinstall wrote:
| From the publication: "The speculation that the hand gesture
| herein presented is a freemasonry's conveyed code is fascinating,
| but it is hard to accept."
|
| This sentence concluded a very short paragraph that apparently
| aimed to explore whether the hand sign could have a Masonic
| meaning. But instead of giving any explanation for their
| conclusion, the authors merely postulate the above without any
| given reasoning. I'm surprised to find this in what appears to
| aim to be a scientific analysis. Even more so would it surprise
| me if any conscious reader found this conclusion satisfactory.
|
| Any thoughts?
| runjake wrote:
| 32deg Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match
| any masonic hand positions I am aware of.
|
| However, there were numerous other fraternities and secret
| societies during that era, although they were typically gender-
| specific. Seeing both men and women using the same hand signals
| suggests these were likely common societal practices of the
| time. And since, presumably the hand positions are secret,
| _they 're not going to be immortalized in a painting_.
| fidotron wrote:
| > 32deg Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not
| match any masonic hand positions I am aware of.
|
| Would you actually be able to say it if they were?
| flir wrote:
| The other guard always lies.
| runjake wrote:
| Link to the logic puzzle that flir is referring to:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Ask what would the other do and do the opposite.
| runjake wrote:
| I would just not comment, in that case.
| nick238 wrote:
| Maybe that knowledge is unlocked when hitting 33deg.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Probably not, the Freemason Police patrol this internet web
| site daily, and he'd disappear in the middle of the night,
| never to be heard from again. Be sure to follow up on his
| comment history a month from now, to see whether he's said
| anything since.
| rubyfan wrote:
| Most of the secrets and symbols are available in
| publications and online for a very long time.
| runjake wrote:
| There's a surprising amount that aren't.
|
| And even then:
|
| 1. Every Freemason knows what's on the Internet.
| Identifications have evolved.
|
| 2. The leaks lack... important contexts... about what
| they are.
| endofreach wrote:
| But what are they actually used for? The only things i
| heard about freemasonry were from conspiracy theorists.
| But i never really found out, what they actually do. And
| the secret handshakes are performed with strangers to
| tell each other secretly they're unknown brothers?
| flir wrote:
| > presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going
| to be immortalized in a painting.
|
| I wouldn't bet on it. Performative secrecy is very common in
| esotericism.
| runjake wrote:
| Touche. You are correct. In fact, a number of paintings of
| esoteric figures now come to mind where their hands are in
| a particular configuration.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Sometimes with these sorts of organizations their deepest
| secrets are the meaning of their public symbology.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Do you have any examples you could share?
| temporarely wrote:
| Sorry to break the news to you Jake but there are two orders.
| Those of "that era" are the actual power breakers, you guys
| are the peculiar but innocent window dressing.
|
| > And since, ..
|
| No, the meaning is the secret :) Oh dear.
| bgoated01 wrote:
| Having been involved in peer reviewed publishing before, I
| wonder if this was an afterthought prompted by a peer
| reviewer's comments on the paper. Perhaps they quickly added
| this point just to get it to pass review. Sloppy, if so, but
| I've seen similar (though not as blatant) things happen.
| crdrost wrote:
| I mean the whole paper is sloppy here. They kind of are
| writing to a biomedical journal and then say "well, it's NOT
| biomedical..." as kind of a little brush-off? And then they
| go through a couple explanations they have heard and dismiss
| them without really going through the evidence. (I especially
| liked the sloppiness of self-contradiction, in one section
| they're like "well there are no Hebrew letters that work for
| this" which is wrong, you could make decent arguments for
| both shin and tsadeh -- but then almost immediately after
| they're like "well this could be an M or W, W _can
| symbolically be the Hebrew letter_ Vav... ")
|
| And after cursorily dismissing them they just say "therefore,
| it's an aesthetic meme. This is just what perfect hands look
| like, sorry."
|
| A hypothesis that was not considered, for example: 'We asked
| people at school to imagine that they were going to be
| sitting still for the next three hours on a stool, and to sit
| on it in a way that was perfectly relaxed. We then prompted
| them "remember, in old times you'd have had to sit here for
| three hours, really relax." Finally, we then picked up their
| left wrist, turned it, and placed it on their chests saying
| "great, now can you just hold this hand here," and took a
| photograph. In 30% of these photographs we also see, even
| without syndactyly, that the two fingers get forced together
| just by the process of having your wrist twisted by an artist
| and then the fingers having to conform to the contours of the
| chest.'
|
| I don't know what that percentage is, but I'd be surprised if
| it were 0%, right?
| burnished wrote:
| The genius of your proposition is that you wouldn't have to
| be surprised, you'd just know
| karaterobot wrote:
| There were enough basic grammatical errors in that article--
| not to mention a general lack of clarity and specificity--
| that I initially wondered whether it was a preprint, or maybe
| somebody's blog. But no.
| panarchy wrote:
| This reads like it belongs in an episode of The Curse of Oak
| Island not an article.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I noticed that too. Eventually they drew the conclusion that
| people just copied each other to look cool. I have no idea
| whether there's more to the 'hidden meanings' conjectures or
| not, but if you're going to dig into a topic, dig in properly.
| Waste of reading time in my view.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| > hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was,
| because they were the only other visible area of the body
|
| Huh, I had always assumed the reason that they were featured in
| renaissance art was the trend of depicting subjects with a sort
| of realism, combined with hands tending to be a more difficult
| feature for artists to master; so a good depiction of hands
| showcases the skill of the artist and enhances the work's merit
| as a status symbol for its owner.
|
| I guess both could be true. Hands are an important focus of
| attraction in the modern day tbf.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| I am reminded of a short scene in the film Goya's Ghosts, where
| the artists claims to charge more if the portrait he is
| painting includes one or two hands.
| ffhhj wrote:
| The knife in the hand and the knife-like hand:
|
| https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/82e1c6954dc87273a...
| mbivert wrote:
| > unnatural hand position
|
| Is it really unnatural? Interestingly, as a right-handed, the two
| middle fingers of my right hand tend to effortlessly group
| together; this feels noticeably less true on my left hand, but
| still observable if I try to relax it.
|
| The peculiar "mission tile" (half-cylindrical) flexibility of the
| palm region, encouraged by writing for example, may foster this
| grouping.
|
| It's a bit surprising for the article not to address potential
| anatomical causes.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I naturally keep my pinky and ring fingers together on my right
| hand, and I think this is a result of how I hold my phone. It
| made me wonder if there is an easily overlooked common activity
| of that time that would cause people to naturally hold their
| middle and ring fingers together.
|
| Your example of writing makes sense too. Perhaps because
| writers were a more exclusive club then, prominently showing
| your subject's hand with that finger grouping was a message in
| itself.
| taeric wrote:
| Agreed. I think it is somewhat uncommon to have the fingers
| touching, but the pinky and pointer are both much more
| separable from the rest.
| w10-1 wrote:
| The ulnar nerve goes to finger 4 and 5, and the median to 2 and
| 3 plus a branch to 4. For me, 3+4 is the most difficult
| combination to maintain, and raising 4 is the most difficult,
| but the effect (as you suggest) is strongest in the non-
| dominant hand.
|
| So I interpret this position as simply the most difficult hand
| position to maintain, thus indicating some intention, practice,
| or awareness -- and thus self-control, which was considered the
| master virtue classically.
| dim13 wrote:
| Same here, just a natural anatomic relaxed hand/finger position
| in my case.
| mordymoop wrote:
| If I absently place my hand on my chest, the resulting
| configuration looks just like the "unnatural" one in the
| painting.
| carabiner wrote:
| Maybe because you're biased having read the article? I just
| looked at a picture of me waving at the camera taken 2 weeks
| ago, and my fingers are splayed apart with even spacing.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| As an exercise, pretend you're a 16th century lord, or just a
| very theatrical person, and raise your arm with a drooping
| hand, then gently touch your chest with your fingers splayed
| and wrist at an angle. Your two fingers in the middle naturally
| touch first, and stay together once you lay down the whole
| hand, exactly like in the portraits. It's not a straining
| position.
|
| I'm also surprised the paper (?) doesn't go into simple
| behavioural explanations for this.
| Oarch wrote:
| This kind of speculation is what Friday afternoons were made for.
| legitster wrote:
| Great, now I can't stop thinking about what I do with my hands
| all day. Thanks.
|
| But for real, this seems like selection bias. Is combination of
| fingers touching actually any more or less common than any
| others?
| rebuilder wrote:
| Well, faces and hands are _still_ considered important. There's a
| saying that if you get the face and hands right, you can get away
| with anything.
|
| Also common advice for artists is to group the middle and ring
| fingers together. It just looks better and they kind of tend to
| do so naturally anyway.
| hamasho wrote:
| This reminds me of Korea's progressive feminist hand gesture [0].
| For some reason, a video about Korea's gender war [1] ended up in
| my YouTube recommendation and somehow I decided to watch the
| 47-minute video (and another 110 minutes for part 2)...
|
| Basically, aggressive feminist groups use a hand gesture as a
| disrespect against men (or misogynists), but the gesture is so
| general and anti-feminism is so large in Korea, that a lot of
| people mistook the otherwise normal picture in anime/games as a
| hidden attack against men. It caused riots and several people
| lost their jobs or sometimes the entire projects/companies went
| down.
|
| I think it's not a good idea to associate a very natural gesture
| with horrible intentions...
|
| [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/02/business/south-korea-
| busi... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74
| flir wrote:
| > I think it's not a good idea to associate a very natural
| gesture with horrible intentions...
|
| I imagine it's a very good idea, if you have horrible
| intentions.
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ok-sign-wh...
| Dig1t wrote:
| This entire thing is a hoax.
|
| > It has become an extremist meme, according to the Anti-
| Defamation League.
|
| The ADL maintains a "glossary" of every random meme and
| inside joke from 4chan and claims that they are all somehow
| connected with Nazis.
|
| The ADL itself is in fact considered a hate organization by
| many people.
|
| >Under the guise of fighting hate speech, the ADL has a long
| history of wielding its moral authority to attack Arabs,
| blacks, and queers.
|
| https://droptheadl.org
|
| https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/emmaia-gelman-anti-
| def...
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > This entire thing is a hoax.
|
| While the usage of the ok sign likely began as a LARP hoax,
| it has since become adopted as a high sign/shibboleth by
| actual white supremacists and adjacent fringe groups like
| Boogaloo Boys, similarly to Hawaiian shirts.
|
| That's the entire point of these types of signaling
| behaviors - they're plausibly deniable, innocuous or not
| obviously offensive or aggressive, and they're usually
| inscrutable or indecipherable to the out-group while being
| effective as signifiers of the in-group.
| Dig1t wrote:
| It just sounds like a conspiracy theory. The right has
| tons of theories about "elites" using secret hand signals
| and gestures meaning all kinds of satanic things.
|
| Both are conspiracy theories for the same reasons.
| flir wrote:
| "Just a joke, bro"
|
| I hear that a lot.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If people are attacking women and destroying companies because
| they think they might be associated with women's rights, it's
| not a hand gesture that's the problem. "Horrible intentions"?
| ruined wrote:
| west side
| karaterobot wrote:
| My thought as well. The article suggests it's an "M" for
| Medici, but it could just as easily be a W" for "Westside
| Connection". This sort of proves a theory of mine, that Ice
| Cube has a time machine.
|
| (Presumably he developed it in order to travel back to the best
| day of his life, the day he messed around and got a triple
| double, and then later used it to travel back to the 16th
| century and influence the late Renaissance... but here I am
| speculating)
| leocgcd wrote:
| i think papers like this reveal the benefits of domain-specific
| methodologies. a scientific paper is a bad choice for
| historiography.
|
| art historical texts are usually much more concerned with close
| reading of artworks to establish syncretic pathways of artistic
| convention. art writers are usually unconcerned with null
| hypothesis and burden of proof. the authors here had no real
| claim about history or any interesting reading of artwork. i
| couldn't imagine something like this being disseminated in an
| arts journal or publication-- there just isn't enough time spent
| with the methods of art history, i.e close readings of the
| examples presented, primary source inclusion, historiographic
| narrative, formal analysis, etc.
|
| i wish i could provide a counterexample, but my work is on
| american conceptual sculpture, not renaissance art. i think the
| last very good text i read on the renaissance was james hall's
| book on michelangelo's anatomy published some years ago.
| greenhearth wrote:
| The spread fingers make three points on a fibonacci curve. It is
| just the most aesthetically pleasant gesture. The artists were
| always in pursuit of beauty and this is what it is.
| koolala wrote:
| Maybe those are their herb fingers while they sit still waiting
| during the photo and walt disney edited it out
| antognini wrote:
| Another hand gesture you will frequently see in religious art is
| a figure (usually a Pope or bishop) pointing upwards with their
| index and middle finger. This is somewhat unnatural since you
| would generally point with your index finger alone. The use of
| two fingers represents the divine and human natures of Christ.
|
| A few examples:
|
| https://i2.wp.com/catholicism.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/fil...
|
| https://jimmyakin.com/wp-content/uploads/st-augustine-and-fo...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Urban_VIII#/media/File%...
|
| It shows up in formal photographs of the Pope in the 20th
| century:
|
| https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ch3pBw3dBY0/WeG5Oo9_k1I/AAAAAAAAC...
|
| And the TV series The Young Pope even included this gesture as a
| detail: https://youngpopesart.wordpress.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/...
| throwawayForMe2 wrote:
| It also frequently seen in images of the child Jesus.
| dvh wrote:
| The pope photo is not him pointing upward, he's doing the
| blessing. Imagine someone standing right in front of him and
| he's pointing two fingers at their head, then move to torso,
| then left shoulder, then right shoulder. Depending on the speed
| of the camera at that time, he might pose like that for a
| second just to take the photograph as if he's in the middle of
| the blessing someone. I've never seen priest doing it with one
| or three or four fingers.
|
| Tldr: they're not pointing upwards, they're pointing to
| someone's head (the viewer of the painting/photography most
| likely)
|
| I bet when they used one finger people were asking "me?" and
| then looked behind them to see if there is someone else. If
| priest uses two fingers it's obvious he's not pointing at you
| or someone behind you. It also helps if he points it little bit
| higher not just right between your eyes like a gun.
| Loughla wrote:
| It's literally the hand sign of dual nature of Christ.
| Blessing or posing.
|
| The Catholic Church has had quite a few years to solidify and
| formalize their rituals. Nothing a priest does during mass is
| accidental or coincidental. They go to school for these
| things.
| fortran77 wrote:
| > Another hand gesture you will frequently see in religious art
| is a figure (usually a Pope or bishop) pointing upwards with
| their index and middle finger. This is somewhat unnatural since
| you would generally point with your index finger alone. The use
| of two fingers represents the divine and human natures of
| Christ.
|
| At Disney employee training they taught me to point with index
| and middle finger (or my whole hand) too.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That is less about the gesture than it is about avoiding a
| different gesture. Many cultures do not appreciate pointing
| with a single finger. So Disney wants their people to use
| two.
| scifi wrote:
| I just wanted to add something I didn't see mentioned in the
| article or the discussion. In the Christian tradition, figures
| are often portrayed with their pinky and ring fingers curled up,
| while the thumb, index, and middle fingers are extended. This is
| done to symbolize the holy trinity.
| every wrote:
| I discovered I was using that very gesture on my touchpad to
| scroll through the article and this thread...
| _tk_ wrote:
| Same here.
| bakul wrote:
| Note that "mudras" have significant meanings in Hinduism, Jainism
| & Buddhism. Mudras used in Indian dances convey feelings or
| elements of story etc. Also used in yoga. And mudras are not just
| hand gestures but also facial expressions, eye movements and so
| on.
|
| Though there does not seem to be any connection of mudras with
| European paintings. There were cultural links between India and
| the Greco-Roman world in 2nd-1st century BCE around the time of
| Indo-Greek kingdom (northwest of the current India) but seems
| unlikely that would have such an influence centuries later.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudra
| DonHopkins wrote:
| One of my aspirational hobbies is designing Apple Vision Pro
| games and interfaces that trick people into unwittingly making
| embarrassing hand gestures in public.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsGnqf3CUW8
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