Collaboration with 17 museums allows users to take virtual tour of
galleries and view paintings online in high resolution
Even the director of the Tate was unaware that if, with patience,
you look really close up at Pieter Bruegel's world-famous 16th
century paintingThe
Harvesters, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, then you will
see a family enjoying a jolly Shrove Tuesday game of throwing
sticks at the tied-up goose.
"I didn't know about this rather cruel game, no," said Sir Nicholas
Serota. "Next time I'm in New York I shall take a closer look."
Serota was speaking at the launch today of a significant
new art project by Google. The reason we can now
examine Bruegel's painting in such astonishing detail – every tiny
scene, every brushstroke, every hairline crack can be seen – is
because it has been captured using super-high resolution, or
gigapixel photo-capturing technology.
The project, unveiled at Tate Britain in London is an extension of
Google Street View in which real views of streets from across the
world are captured and displayed on screen.
With the Google Art Project, anyone with access to a computer can
take a virtual 360 degree tour of galleries in 17
major museums across the world,
without queuing and without other people getting in the way – and
look in superb detail at one work from each.
The museums include the National Gallery and Tate Britain in
London; the Met, MoMa and Frick in New York; the Uffizi in
Florence, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam and Reina Sofia in Madrid. They have all signed up to the
unique project developed over the past 18 months, which allows
unprecedented access to 385 rooms and about 1,000 artworks.
Serota called the project "another great step forward. It gives
people an unrivalled opportunity to come really close to great
works of art."
The galleries are already digitising their collections and offering
whizzy websites, but Google's project offers something new, Serota
said. "This is a second generation view of the way museums will use
the internet. Ten years ago museums were obsessed with getting
thousands of objects on the screen, now we're interested in getting
depth of understanding of the works."
Nelson Mattos, Google's vice-president for engineering, said the
Google Art Project had started off as one of the company's "20%
projects" which allows employees to take a fifth of their time away
from their regular day job, to work on innovations. "What has been
accomplished is fantastic, really amazing. We hope it will provide
a very different and new way to interact with and explore art,"
Serota added.
Other tricks on the website, include the ability to
save artworks such as Rembrandt's Night Watch or Van Gogh's The
Starry Night, then create your own collection and email it to
friends.
Among the 17 paintings captured using technology that is 1,000
times more powerful than an average digital camera, are Manet's In
the Conservatory, Bellini's St Francis in the Desert and Holbein's
The Ambassadors, from the National Gallery.
Tate Britain's choice – Chris Ofili's No Woman, No Cry – is the
only one by a living artist. One reason for its inclusion is the
large, hidden ultraviolet message the website reveals (RIP Stephen
Lawrence), which can only be seen in the dark.
Google and the museums believe the website will prove popular, as
well as provide encouragement and inspiration for people to travel
to the galleries and see the paintings up close in person.
The plan is to keep expanding the project, paid for by Google, with
new museums, galleries and paintings.
At the launch at Tate Britain the absence of institutions such as
the Louvre and the Prado were noted. But project leader Amit Sood,
said Google wanted to get the scheme up and running, so included
the 17 museums who signed up straight away.