Non-verbal communication is a scholarly subject usually studied by academics looking at modern human behavior. Physical gestures of course existed in past times too, but often there is little written evidence — whole catalogues of affective conversations that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone are closed off to historians, because they were so rarely written about. So thank goodness for Renaissance elbows.
As research undertaken by Joaneath Spicer shows, European portraiture of the 16th- and 17th- centuries features a prominence of elbows — these jut out at angles akimbo in a display posture so common as to constitute “an explosion of male elbows”.
I just featured a couple of paintings here, but the more you look, the more you find. The first is a self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer from 1495 — check out the confident gaze, the rich attire, and the elbow positioned aggressively in the lower part of the frame, claiming space between the subject and the viewer. Dürer here got to feature himself as the powerful nobleman he wanted to be, and the elbow thing was part of that message.
The second picture shows the Dutch artist Frans Hals’ _Smiling Cavalier_, from 1624. The portrait typifies a few tendencies behind the subjects comporting “the Renaissance elbow” — usually male, often in military attire, wealthy, and frequently Dutch. Holland’s military and economic power had of course escalated on the world stage at this time, so it makes sense that so many would want to convey swaggering confidence, or, as Spicer characterizes about one typical elbow portrait stance, it was “just oozing macho assertion”.
When discussed in written texts, the Renaissance elbow is frequently criticized for showing too much pride. Erasmus wrote about it in 1532 with the critique that the pose where men “stand or sit and set [one] hand on [the] side which maner to some semeth comly like a warrior but it is not forthwith honest”. A heaping lot of rich men who wanted their portraits done didn’t care about appearing humble. The Renaissance elbow was their version of a social media profile pic.
Source(s): “The Renaissance elbow,” Joaneath Spicer, in _A Cultural History of Gesture_ Ed J.N. Bremmer and H Roodenburg, 1991, Polity Press
