zlacker

The only two plausible explanations to me are either that artists conventionally drew hands like this (for religious, artistic or other reasons) or that artists' subjects conventionally posed like this, for a similar variety of reasons, or because the artist told them to.

The article helpfully rules out a third explanation, an "epidemic of syndactyly", but doesn't make a strong decision between the other two. It seems to lean towards this being a quirk of the artists, but it could do with a quantitative study: if artist A painted subject A like this, what happened when artist A portrayed other subjects, or other artists portrayed A?

>>dmurra+(OP)
Yeah, to me it is an artistic thing (then followed perhaps by painters copying "the Masters").

Fingers spread evenly is artistically uninteresting — naive even. Fingers all joined is also rather dull — suggests a rigidity in fact.

>>JKCalh+D4
My thoughts exactly: by bringing two of the five fingers together you achieve a more interesting effect of overall asymmetry among the fingers, and yet because the two joined fingers are each flanked by a "detached" finger, it creates another layer of symmetry within the non-thumb fingers.

The overall effect is quite pleasing to the eye, which may account for it having caught on to the point where it became a trend. I see this as the Occam's Razor of explanations.