Information technology and culture: The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has joined Google Art Project

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has joined Google Art Project, providing a virtual access to the world's largest museums to see the gems of their collections in an unprecedentedly high resolution.

Specialists have made a panoramic shot of 20 halls of the museum’s main building, which will soon be reconstructed and transformed in the "Museum town" complex. Venetian landscape painter Giovanni Antonio Canal’s «Buchinoro’s return to the pier at the Doges' Palace" (1727-1729), was chosen for digitization in giga-pixels resolution.

Besides the Pushkin Museum the project has been joined by the Roerich Museum, the Russian Museum, which had delivered for the project 50 high resolution images of works from its collection. Google, in its turn, has made a panoramic shot of "The Last Day of Pompeii" by Karl Bryullov, and made a special video on the St. Petersburg museum.  

The Art Project includes thousands of pictures, posted in the Internet, and hundreds of museum halls, shot in a panoramic (360 degrees) technology used for the well-known service Google Maps Street View, enabling you to take virtual tours.

The project was launched just over a year ago: then 17 museums from 9 countries, including the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery, the London’s Tate Gallery, the Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, and the Paris’ Versailles, linked their collections to modern technology.

This year, according to Google, over 150 museums and organizations from 40 countries worldwide became partners of the Art Project. Number of items taken in high resolution, has exceeded 30, 000 against a thousand at the project’s launch.