The Gestures of Hands in Drawing Books: A warburgian reading using the Historical Archive of the University of Porto

Abstract

The paper deals with the archival material from the Rectory of the Universidade do Porto, specifically with engravings published in Drawing Books from several figures of History of Art, namely: the Carracci family’s educational prints and Francesco Bartolozzi engravings, both from the 18th century as well as Robert Sayer’s edition from 1762(?)). The proposal aims to reflect through our empirical contact with these archival materials, mainly focusing images instructing how to draw hands. Such images are engravings and were used in the early beginnings in the practice of teaching drawing in Porto, Aula de Desenho from the Academia Real de Marinha e Comércio da Cidade do Porto. Following Aby Warburg’s thesis of Pathosformel, our reflection attempts to show how the representations of hand gestures “survived” in the pedagogy of drawing. More importantly, we will underline how the drawn hand gestures and poses are an emotional product of phenomenological forces of human experience. The arguments and reflections are grounded on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis and his work around Aby Warburg’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings. (Didi-Huberman 2011, 2000, 2010). We will articulate texts from art history, theory of image, anthropology and neuroscience literature, with our own visual essays to enlighten our phenomenological experience when working around the archival material from the University of Porto