Big Hands

I did my second docent tour of the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition at the DeYoung yesterday. Something I had never noticed was pointed out by two different women who'd looked at the Wax Museum portraits of Henry VIII's six wives: their hands look, as the first woman put it, "like man's hands," meaning they are disproportionately large. The question was whether the disproportion was the result of Sugimoto's chosen photographic point of view (for example, a question of focus), the craft of the wax museum figure-makers (who might have made the hands out-size to clarify their getures), or as a result of faithful translation of the original drawings/paintings by Hans Holbein (on the supposition that portraits commonly do the hands larger because it looks more correct, at least on first view).