Joined hands: from the Roman dextrarum iunctio to “asking for her hand”

Asking for a woman's hand, granting one's hand, giving one's hand in marriage: language still preserves the memory of a very ancient gesture. Joining right hands was, in the Roman world, the visible sign of an agreement and in particular of the marriage pact. Since then that gesture has passed through funerary art, medieval jewellery and Renaissance painting, becoming one of the most restrained and enduring symbols of the union between two people.

The gesture of joined right hands

Scholars refer to this gesture with the Latin formula dextrarum iunctio, the joining of right hands. In Roman culture the right hand was linked to fides, loyalty and the given word, and clasping it meant committing oneself. The gesture appeared in treaties between peoples, in political alliances and in private agreements. In marriage it took on a particular value, because it sealed before witnesses the understanding between the two spouses and between their families.

According to various testimonies, during the wedding ceremony a matron who had been married only once, called the pronuba, joined the hands of the couple. Not every phase of the rite is described precisely by the sources, and practices changed over the centuries, but the gesture of joined hands is well documented in art as the very image of marriage.

Concordia and wedding sarcophagi

Roman iconography often associated the couple clasping hands with the goddess Concordia, the personification of harmony, sometimes shown between the two spouses as if blessing their union. This scheme appears on the so-called marriage sarcophagi, where the husband, in a toga, and the wife hold each other by the right hand. It was a way of celebrating marital fidelity and the public role of the family even after death.

The same motif appears on imperial coins, where members of the ruling family clasp hands to express dynastic harmony. Early Christian art took up the model: on some gold-glass medallions and sarcophagi of the fourth century the couple hold hands while a small figure of Christ, in the centre, places a crown on the heads of the spouses, turning the ancient gesture into an image of Christian marriage.

From fede rings to the Arnolfini Portrait

In the Middle Ages the motif of joined hands passed onto rings, which for this reason were called fede rings: two carved or engraved hands clasp each other on the bezel. These jewels, found throughout Europe, represented mutual promise and trust, and gave their name to the Italian wedding ring. The Irish Claddagh ring also descends from this family.

In fifteenth-century painting the gesture of the hand took on new forms. In Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, dated 1434 and kept in the National Gallery in London, the man holds the woman's hand in his while raising the other as if taking an oath. The precise meaning of the painting has long been debated, but the gesture of the hands is one of its most discussed elements.

From the pact sealed with the right hand in the Roman world to medieval fede rings, from sarcophagi with the goddess Concordia to van Eyck's masterpiece, joined hands have expressed an essential idea: love as a mutual and public commitment. Every time we speak of asking for someone's hand, we repeat in words a gesture more than two thousand years old.