Figure - uploaded by Temenuzhka Dimova
Content may be subject to copyright.
Principe de contraste des paumes dans le Gestus der Beteuerung, in Gérard de Lairesse, Le grand livre des peintres, Paris, Moutard, 1787.
Source publication
Old master paintings speak their own language, which is not conveyed by vocal words but mainly by meaningful hand gestures. Painters used them to transmit theological concepts, popular customs, scientific ideas, political values, emotional states and social identities. Despite the importance of the pictorial codified gestures in art history, notewo...
Citations
... 86) , hands seem to convey precious information about sociocultural evolution and play a key role in the pictorial narrative system. Although the specific topic of hand gesture analysis has been fairly sparsely addressed in art history and digital humanities, the recent work by the art historian Dimova [3] defines the foundations of a categorization system of painted hand gestures. In total, her system proposes 30 chirograms, each referring to a specific hand pose and its possible significance. ...
... Although SLR methods are also applied to static hand poses in the case of alphabets for sign language processing [49,50], the methodology mostly applies to dynamic hand gesture recognition. Furthermore, it seems that iconographic categories of painted hands from early modern times significantly differ from the nomenclature of sign language [3]. Indeed, sign language is a living language, defined by grammatical rules that not only involve the hands but also the face and other body parts [47]. ...
... The categorization of hands in our dataset was based on an interpretation of the work of the art historian Dimova [3]. In her fundamental work Le langage des mains dans l'art, she described a total of 30 hand poses [3] (pp. 320-324), called pictorial chirograms, a notion already introduced by the father of sign language, John Bulwer, in 1644, to illustrate specific hand gestures. ...
Hands represent an important aspect of pictorial narration but have rarely been addressed as an object of study in art history and digital humanities. Although hand gestures play a significant role in conveying emotions, narratives, and cultural symbolism in the context of visual art, a comprehensive terminology for the classification of depicted hand poses is still lacking. In this article, we present the process of creating a new annotated dataset of pictorial hand poses. The dataset is based on a collection of European early modern paintings, from which hands are extracted using human pose estimation (HPE) methods. The hand images are then manually annotated based on art historical categorization schemes. From this categorization, we introduce a new classification task and perform a series of experiments using different types of features, including our newly introduced 2D hand keypoint features, as well as existing neural network-based features. This classification task represents a new and complex challenge due to the subtle and contextually dependent differences between depicted hands. The presented computational approach to hand pose recognition in paintings represents an initial attempt to tackle this challenge, which could potentially advance the use of HPE methods on paintings, as well as foster new research on the understanding of hand gestures in art.
