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.