Nicholas Hilliard(1547-1619),Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud, 1588, Watercolour and bodycolour on vellum, 6.0 cm × 4.95 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This small miniature portrait (limning) is a tight theatre of signs, where colour, gesture, and motto create an image at once intimate and enigmatic.
By 1588, Hilliard was painting in a voice honed by his French experience and tempered in the atmosphere of Henri III’s Valois court, where allegory and cipher were as important as likeness. This limning is one of the clearest proofs of that refinement: the sitter’s poised gesture, the hand descending from cloud, the lapidary blue ground and the motto in fine gold all combine in a closed performance.
This portrait presents itself as a riddle that resists resolution, inviting reflection rather than disclosure. As with many Renaissance portraits, ambiguity was not a failure of language but a mark of wit.The Latin motto, ‘Attici amoris ergo’, lies at the centre of the mystery. Attempts at translation—‘for the sake of Attic love’, ‘in honour of Greek love’, ‘by reason of Attic style’—never settle. Elizabethan courtiers, like their Valois peers, delighted in fractured Latin, half-remembered from school and burnished with a learned gloss. By the late sixteenth century, such phrases often had little of the integrity of Cicero; they were gnomic, compact, designed to carry resonance only for those in the know. Meaning was shaped by context, shared memory, and the intimacy of private exchange. The motto may have had force only for sitter, recipient and artist, opaque to all beyond that circle—just as our own invented idioms, memes or wordplay would puzzle strangers centuries later.
Tracing possible sources only multiplies uncertainties. ‘Attici’ might conjure Athens and its rhetorical elegance, making the cloud-hand an allegory of muse or beloved; it might equally recall the Elizabethan commonplace of ‘Greek love’, ranging from exalted friendship to more explicit suggestion. Neither can be proved. The clasp itself may signify fidelity, mystical union, or staged desire that refuses to name its object. It is not even certain whether we see a man’s or a woman’s hand, and while some propose a mourning context, the motto resists such a reading. What remains is irresolution, and this irresolution is central to the very purpose of impresa limnings—works never intended to yield a single solution, but to preserve an enigma bound to private understanding.
Portrait miniatures like this one were intensely personal objects, often worn close to the body and intended for the gaze of only a few.To demand transparency is to misread their function. They are dialogues in image and fragmentary Latin, and their unresolved nature is the very essence of their operation. Just as private groups today mint their own verbal codes, so Hilliard’s patrons cultivated mottos legible only to themselves. The cloud, the hand, the inscription together form an emblem whose meaning has slipped from us; but in that very loss lies its testimony to the closed culture that produced it. What appears as a riddle without answer is in fact the survival of a language meant never to be public in the first place. The limning’s enigma is not an obstacle to interpretation but its core.