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Hands drawn in metalpoint and white, resting and gesturing, perhaps connected with a portrait or the lost lower part of Ginevra de' Benci.
The hands are drawn with a metal stylus on paper prepared with a pink-grey ground, and heightened with white so that light seems to sit on the knuckles and fingertips.
One hand rests across the chest, another holds something lightly. Leonardo cared about hands as much as faces, because they speak: he wrote that a painter should study how people move their hands when they argue, persuade or pray.
The Royal Collection now dates the sheet about 1490. Older writers linked it with Ginevra de' Benci, whose portrait was cut at the bottom and lost its hands.
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by Marie Curie 
