Augmenting art history: a new story of the painted hand

The use of computational methods within the field of art history is usually restricted to
digitization and archiving tools, allowing the preservation of digital collections and their
online access to the world. However, over the past decade, many projects have shown
the possibility to use computer vision and machine learning methods to automate tasks
on large corpuses of paintings and to better outline recurrent patterns. Unfortunately,
these works are often overlooked by art historians who have limited access to these
complex computational methods and might sometimes perceive them as an intrusion
of the scientific methodology to their field. However, computer science has much more
to offer than automated data processing and should not only be seen as a new
methodological approach, but also as a door to new perceptions of artworks and
artistic practice. Through a research project on computational and historical analysis of
hands and gestures in early modern time, where different technologies are used to
better grasp the many dimensions of the painted hand, the idea of the machine as a
new agent in the relationship between paintings and art historians is envisioned. This
exploration has many facets, one of which is the creation of an interactive tool to
facilitate research on a large corpus of painted hands, directly using the hand gesture of
the user as a query. Fostering a new understanding of painted hand gestures through
computer vision, animations and enactment, the goal is to propose, through the eye of
the machine, a new way of seeing.