by thenewgreen

It hadn’t always been this way. For hundreds of years, a painted portrait was supposed to look like the person it portrayed. Even especially talented and artful portrait painters — like Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543) — had to think of portraits primarily in terms of a good likeness. Holbein’s portrait of Christina of Denmark (1537) is, for instance, an especially beautiful painting. Her hands are the best part. That’s because of the way she grasps a glove between her two hands, the index and middle finger of the left hand intersecting gently with the fingers of the right. Christina’s face is impassive, hard to read. Her hands, though, reveal a tremendous vulnerability. When you look at those hands, you are forced to like Christina of Denmark.