Thursday, February 3, 2011

Google's Art Project



The Princess from the Land  of Porcelain by James Abott McNeill Whistler
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian


Google has used its Street View technology to bring 17 of the world's great art galleries right into your home.  The recently launched Art Project offers online visitors the chance to view thousands of paintings which they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see, add their favorite images to a personal gallery, and share their gallery electronically with friends.  Each painting uploaded to the site from the participating museums is viewable in detail using a custom zoom viewer, and one painting chosen from each of museums is available in extreme detail - the 17 special images were shot using "gigapixel" photo-capturing software providing pictures containing 7 billion pixels worth of information.


Each painting shot using "gigapixel" technology allows for high-resolution detail views.
Here it is easier to see Whistler's painting technique.
The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (detail)


I spent my afternoon at the Tate Britain in London and The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and look forward to visiting the other museums soon.


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5 comments:

Molly said...

As soon as I saw the Whistler, I thought of you. I really enjoyed getting such a close look at it.

innisart said...

I wanted to find a good example of the 'gigapixel" images, and once I saw the Whistler, I knew it was the one I wanted to use. You can see how he scraped down the canvas during the previous layers! I could have zoomed-in farther, but it became harder to recognize what part of the original I was displaying. This would have been a great image to use on my previous post about Whistler's color palette.

http://underpaintings.blogspot.com/2010/03/color-palettes-james-abbott-mcneil.html

Johan Derycke said...

Yes, 't was in the newspaper yesterday! Wonderful tool by Google.
I hope they will add more ultra high res images in the future.

Jewels said...

I am so excited about this. Had a lot of fun perusing it when it was released. :D

Jose Ramon Santana Vazquez said...
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