Painted Hand Pose dataset

Hands represent an important aspect of pictorial narration but have been fairly little addressed in art history and digital humanities. Furthermore, the classification of depicted hand poses requires a specific nomenclature which has not been built yet. Based on recent art historical works on hand gestures, we present the first annotated dataset of painted hands and introduces a new classification task. The Painted Hand Pose dataset was built from the photographic collection of the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History from Early Modern European paintings. It holds a total of 1'398 images dispatched into 9 categories.