THE ART OF GESTURE with Sharon Leahy and Rosemary Hodgson

Considered to be as beneficial as mathematics and the sciences, oratory and eloquence was an important part of educated life. As a man refined his personal behaviour increasing the distance between the gross and the refined, his public persona followed and the societal values were reflected in the stage. The gesture was and integral part of man’s development and can be defined as, a highly articulate art, based on a vocabulary of gestures with and individual meaning known to all in advance. Using the eye and hands as the principal instrument and styled with pictorial beauty, clarity, nobility, a certain idealisation, ornamentation and ceremony no person would have declaimed in public with the use of gesture.

Michelangelo, 'The Creation of Adam, (Italian: Creazione di Adamo)' 1512, 280 x 570cm