The Finger: A Handbook. By Angus Trumble. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 300 pages; $28. To be published in Britain by Yale University Press in August; ￡18.99. Buy from Amazon.com
EVER given someone the finger? Did you know that this most understandable of gestures has its origins in ancient Greece and Rome where the digitus impudicus appeared in the works of Aristophanes and Martial: “Laugh loudly, Sextillus, when someone calls you a queen and put your middle finger out.”
In this intriguing but verbose book (a robust edit would have paid dividends), Angus Trumble, a curator at the Yale Centre for British Art, examines fingers from every angle and tells some appealing anecdotes along the way.
Fingers are integral to art, communication, touch, love, fashion and counting. Using complex gestures the Romans could count to 1m: the word “digit”—the numerals below ten—originates from digitus, the Latin for finger. The phraseology of fingers is rich: we can have a finger in every pie, pull our finger out, twist someone around our little finger, let things slip through our fingers and, if unlucky, get our fingers burned.
Drawing on his knowledge, Mr Trumble investigates fingers in art, from cave pictures through to Michelangelo's “Creation of Man”, classical works by Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens portraying the fashion for gloves, and Pablo Picasso's “Guernica”, with its anatomically correct knuckles and nails.
One important use of fingers (and thumbs) is to communicate—through sign language, handwriting, Braille, typing, gesture and now txt mssgng. “Index”, from the Latin for “indicator”, comes from the Romans' realisation that babies use their first finger to point. Between the 12th and 18th centuries a fist with a pointing index finger, a manicule, was drawn in book margins to denote important passages. The manicule now exists on the internet; watch your cursor change to a hand with a pointing finger when you click on a link.
The most entertaining chapter is on the whims of fashion. Nail varnish emerged in the 1920s. For some, painted nails represented a hint of the demimonde, but a classy thumbs up soon changed that. In 1929, the New York Times reported that while King George V was convalescing at Bognor, Queen Mary was seen buying nail polish in Woolworth's.
