Some observations on hands in portraits.
Antonio,
This is super! I really love the lighting and your pose.
Now a realization I have. I went back through each of your portraits and discovered that, except for one other case, you either exclude the arms altogether or have completely both hands. You use the hands as a great set of perfect balancing elements with which you complete your compositions. When you exclude the arms and hands, the picture relies on the face and perhaps a scarf, but works very well in each case too.
But for the first time, I realize that, if arms are present, we naturally follow then to their ends to see the pattern. When an arm goes out of the frame, it distracts and detracts from the "unity" of the composition, as it does not seem to be "born" or created by God, anymore, as your other pictures, but rather it appears that you are hiding something from us. Of course, you might have an expression that confirms that sentiment and use an entire arm leaving the frame before we see what the hands are doing.
In a social setting, since the earliest days of courtiers who wore swords, having a glass of wine in their sword hand shows everyone that they are totally peaceful. With cigarettes, when it was acceptable, a person looked really "complete" with his/her cigarette. So we have a custom of looking for the hands when we greet people and seeing folks hands is critical to understanding intent.
I went to see my father when he was convalescing from a sick spell and the immediately saw that the physician I had asked about my father's prognosis, was concentrating on choosing the car ket from his bunch of keys. So he obviously didn't think my question deserved respect and his full attention. From that I read that he was not a person I wanted to deal with.
Now I put all this together with your wonderful series and realize that we will always track the arms, if they are there, all the way to the hands and otherwise just try to read the face and the posture of the head.
But if one arm is not complete, it will always raise a question as the eye cannot help but search for what it might be holding. I do not assert that what I have said is some absolute truth, but at least here, I'm impressed that it my sense of importance of having the hands visible or both arms hidden seems to fit.
With that caveat mentioned, I must say that your work is such a high standard and you have so many well made portraits, each so different and magnetic, that I doubt that my discovered "expectation" of hand behavior is unique to just your fine portraiture. Now I have to look at the work of others.
Asher