Only a Hand

Detail from the Louvre
Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1528)
by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497 - 1543)

Preliminary Sketch
from the 1523 London Portrait

"How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes...Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells."

(Chapter 8, p 171; ellipses in original)
from the novel
If on a winter's night a traveler

by Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

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Full Portrait
plus other renditions
of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus
(1466 - 1536)

It looks like
Artist Douglas Granville Chandor (1897 – 1953)
had a similar idea for his
1945 portrait (oil on canvas)
of Franklin Deleno Roosevelt (1882–1945)
Thirty-second President of the United States, 1933–1945

P.S.
Not forgetting
The Addams Family!

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Longer excerpt from Calvino
on my current book blog:

"Readers are my vampires"
@Kitti's List