While she holds on, a cloud of
safety is always with him.

THE ARTIST

Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619) did not always work small, but his miniatures
are his fame. His images have become icons of the Elizabethan court,
preserving the faces of the Queen, Francis Drake, Philip Sidney and others. The Portrait of an Unknown Man Clasping a Hand from a
Cloud offers an antidote to that anxiety. The woman left behind becomes like a
guardian angel, hovering and watching over her travelling lover, and keeping
him from trouble.

GK Chesterton said that “to love anything is to see it at once under lowering
clouds of danger”.

It’s as if her hand, by
holding the token of the absent man, has managed to cross the distance
between them, and reach him, wherever he was, and take his. The fact that
she holds on to his miniature means that his hand will always be in hers.

And more than fidelity or intimacy, Hilliard’s theme here seems to be
protection. The hand emerges from a cloud, and is therefore a helping or a
guiding hand, a hand from heaven. So
it is a natural symbol of dedication, fidelity, intimacy, protection,
linkage across distance. And here, the way the woman’s hand enters the oval
from the outside to clasp the man’s makes this image-magic explicit It acts
out the bond that any love-miniature embodies.

This image, in other words, is like a lock of hair in a
locket. It’s an image to be hung round the neck (rather than on the wall),
worn close to the body, near to the heart And it must be some kind of love
token. Though the man is unidentified, and the inscription is obscure –
“Attici amoris ergo” – it has love as its middle word, and it seems to be a
lady’s hand that descends from the cloud to hold the gentleman’s. Getting
both hands and the tuck of cloud into this little world is a squash Most
miniatures make do with a head and shoulders. But the presence of the hands,
hand-in-hand, gives a special stress to this one. It emphasises that a
miniature is not just a small and portable image It’s specifically
hand-sized It is something a hand can close on.

Hands give Hands clasp Hands plight their troths Hands hold tight, hold on
Miniatures are rich in amorous hand themes. The miniature says: I give
myself to you, I put myself in your hands, hold on to me, keep me safe,
never let me go.

The miniature encapsulates its subject, turns a person into
something that can be wholly enclosed, wholly given and wholly grasped. (Unlike most pictures, miniatures
generally get enlarged in reproduction) In reality its dimensions are six
by five centimetres. All the same, with the portrait miniature, size is
crucial.

Nicholas Hilliard’s Portrait of an Unknown Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud is
much smaller than you see it here. It referred originally to the red lead
paint with which the capital letters of an illuminated manuscript were
painted. But the name got transferred, partly because of the verbal mix-up,
to the little pictures that were painted inside these letters, and then to
any little picture. On top of everything else, you lose a sense of its scale.

The miniature, as a matter of fact, is not named after its modest size. The
word doesn’t come from the Latin minimus, meaning very small It comes from
the Latin minium, meaning red lead.

And to gaze on it through security glass
suggests that its purpose is to be looked at, and only looked at. And to go
to the next step, and see it in reproduction – that is probably even more
misleading. To find it on display gives the impression that the public
domain is where it belongs. It may be gazed at from time to time, but
when it’s not in view it’s still playing its role.

Yet if the image in question is not a family snap, if it’s an old portrait
miniature, then it tends to lose that role It ends up in a museum or
gallery The private proxy image is turned into an art object It is very
misleading.