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Hand on heart: Private text of English miniature portrait
https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2019-5-29-48
Abstract
This paper focuses on the gesture of a hand pressed to the heart and on the possibility of interpretation of this gesture in a single work – the famous Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature. Portrait miniatures of the late 16th century performed the function of a private message transmitted through various elements of the image, including the posture and gesture. Quite common in European art the heart motif of a hand, pressed to a chest, confirms the growth of interest in the inner emotion of a portrayed personality as main content of the portrait in the Early Modern time. The art of miniature, which became in Elizabethan England quite an independent kind of portrait genre, combines typical and individual features in the treatment of the depicted persons poses and gestures. Special attention to the private life of a person, his feelings and states, is manifested in the necessity of self-expression, translation of emotional experience through a portrait. Those features were likely embodied in the Hilliard’s portrait miniature known as “Young Man Among Roses”. The article attempts to interpret the ‘hand on heart’ gesture based on the iconographic analysis of this visual expression in European art. The position of a hand pressed to the heart is studied in the article both as an artistic device and as a rhetorical formula. At the same time, the key to the meaning of that gesture lies in the drawing and composition of the portrait image.
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About the Author
A. A. TroitskayaRussian Federation
Anna A. Troitskaya, Cand. of Sci. (Art History), Institute of Philosophy
bld. 5, Mendeleevskaya Line, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 199034
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Supplementary files
For citation: Troitskaya A.A. Hand on heart: Private text of English miniature portrait. RSUH/RGGU Bulletin: “Literary Teory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies”, Series. 2019;(5):29-48. https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2019-5-29-48
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