IT and Culture: Art Project unveils museum masterpieces in incredulously high resolution

On February 1 2011 Google announced the launch of its Art Project – a result of a unique collaboration mounted between Google and the world’s most acclaimed art museums. This project will enable people to familiarize themselves and explore in the smallest detail more than a thousand of celebrated works of art brought together at googleartproject.com.

Within one and a half year Google’s specialists have been working with 17 art museums, including the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg and State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The fruits of such a partnership may be viewed on the website which provides access to the collection of world’s renowned works of art. 

The virtual collection features such masterpieces as Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”, pictures by Paul Cézanne, Byzantine icons, ceiling paintings of the Palace of Versailles and interiors of ancient temples of Egypt, works by Whistler and Rembrandt. The project numbers 486 artists from different countries of the world, including Rembrandt’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” form the collection of the State Hermitage and Alexander Ivanov’s “The Apparition of Christ to the People” (“The Apparition of the Messiah”) of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Users may travel through the galleries, choose works of art they like best of all, read information on them or explore images in incredible detail. The high resolution 360 degree images were captured by a specially designed equipment that enables smooth navigation of over 385 rooms within the selected museums.

Selected works are accessible in incredulously high resolution. Each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail. Each of these images contains around 14 billion pixels – unveiling brushwork and other fine details that ordinarily could not be seen with the naked eye.

Users are free to create their own collection to keep works they liked most of all from more than 1000 available through the project.