13 January 2009

Using Google Earth to explore art masterworks



Google mappers have collaborated with Madrid's Museo Nacional del Prado to digitize fourteen of the iconic paintings in that museum.
The Google Earth images have a resolution of 14,000 megapixels, some 1,400 times greater than a picture taken on a standard 10 megapixel camera. They were sewn together digitally from more than 8,000 high-resolution photographs of sections of the paintings.

The technology allows internet users to fly across the surface of the canvases, homing in on details that would be invisible to the naked eye if they visited the Madrid gallery in person.
I've embedded above a screencap of the zoomed-in view of the infanta Margarita in Velazquez' The Family of Felipe IV. In this case seeing the linen fibers of the canvas doesn't enhance my appreciation of the painting, but to someone with a greater knowledge of art history and artistic technique the detailed view might be important.

The lower image above shows a blue bird with a cookpot on its head eating a human who has blackbirds flying out of his/her nether regions. This is from Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, and provides a case in which enhanced detail may be useful - or not, depending on what you think of the painting.

Other digitized works include Goya's El Tres de Mayo, Rubens's The Three Graces and paintings by Titian, El Greco and Rembrandt.

More details at the Guardian link. If you want to jump right to Google Earth and start exploring the paintings, the pictures are in the preview section of the geographic web part of the layers menu.

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