A pure extremity study in ink — two hands or a hand and a foot drawn on the same page, isolated from the body, observed as objects in themselves. The upper element is a closed fist seen from the back, the knuckles drawn as a grid of intersecting lines — four knuckle-rows crossing four finger-columns, the grid rendered almost diagrammatically in its precision. Below it, a second element: an open hand or the top of a foot, the digits separately indicated, more loosely handled than the fist above.
The fist is the collection's most systematic study of the knuckle — the grid of the folded hand's dorsal surface described with ink marks that prioritize structure over feeling. Where Sidney typically draws hands as expressive gestural elements in a larger figure, here the hand is isolated and studied as anatomy, the lines mapping its surface like a topographic survey.
The two elements are positioned on the page without any compositional agenda beyond their own study — the fist in the upper register, the open hand below, connected by the arm's continuation as a single clean line. The relationship between the closed and open states, the fist and the open hand, gives the page an accidental poetry: containment and release on the same sheet.
Within the collection's extended observation of hands — from the life drawings' incidental hand details to Hand at the Throat (1358) to Hands on Hips (1328) — this ink study is the most formally analytical. The hand observed not as expression but as architecture.