Facebook banned Holbein's hand – but it isn't even art's sauciest

If the Renaissance master’s simple drawing breached community standards, you wonder what Facebook would make of these other delightfully erotic digits

Facebook’s habit of censoring great art has gone from the silly to the utterly surreal after it claimed that a drawing of a hand by Holbein breached its community standards.

The social media giant has previously been criticised for banning Gustave Courbet’s painting The Origin of the World (1866), a masterpiece of modern art that hangs for anyone to see in the popular Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Now, not content with censoring a painting studied by every art history student, it has temporarily banned a work whose offensiveness is very hard indeed to discern.

Hands can be obscene in art – of course they can. Fingers can be suggestive, saucy things

Related: The top 10 sexiest works of art ever

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