Google brings masterpieces from Prado direct to armchair art lovers

By fikreta - Posted on January 14th, 2009

Velázquez's Las Meninas can be seen down to the individual brush strokes online Photograph: Bridgeman Art Library

Armchair tourists who are used to travelling the globe with Google Earth can now use the same technology to crawl all over the masterpieces in one of the world's most famous galleries: the Prado.

The Madrid museum and the internet search giant today unveil the first use of Google's mapping programme to allow art lovers to get so close to their favourite paintings that even the brush strokes are visible.

"It allows people to see the main masterworks in the museum as they never have done before," the museum said. "You can see details that the human eye alone is unable to see."

Fourteen of the Prado's masterpieces – including works by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez and Hieronymus Bosch – can be seen online in almost microscopic detail. 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.

These include the cavorting nudes and the eye-poppingly painful tortures in Bosch's 16th-century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is one of the best-known paintings at the Prado.

Velázquez's portrait of the family of Philip IV of Spain, Las Meninas, can also be viewed in the kind of detail that would otherwise require art lovers to glue their noses to the canvas. Other works available include Goya's El Tres de Mayo, Rubens's The Three Graces and paintings by Titian, El Greco and Rembrandt.

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.

Some of the original masterpieces, such as the 3.3- by 2.8-metre Titian portrait of Emperor Charles V, are so large that it is impossible to get close enough to see minute details in the original. "You would need a three-metre-high stepladder," said Clara Rivera of Google.

The Prado's director, Miguel Zugaza, said that among other things, he had used the images to check the quality of restoration work. He added that Google's gigapixel gallery was especially useful for paintings such as The Garden of Earthly Delights, which contained so much detail it was difficult to take it all in, even after seeing the painting many times.

Zugaza conceded that a photographic image, however precise, could never replace the original. "This shows you the body of the painting, but what you won't find here is the soul," he said. "You can only find that by looking at the original."

People wanting to see the masterpieces must have first installed Google Earth, which can be downloaded from the Google website. The pictures can be found in the preview section of the geographic web part of the layers menu of Google Earth.

Google Earth and the Prado are due to launch a formal presentation of the project in Madrid later today. Google has no plans yet to extend the programme to other museums.

Google Earth is a virtual globe and map programme that uses satellite information, GPS technology and aerial photography to build a photographic map of the world. It allows users to indulge in virtual travel around the globe – and the occasional bit of snooping on the houses of friends living in far-off continents – without having to shift from their chairs.

The Guardian, 14 Jan. 2009

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Submitted by fikreta on Wed, 14/01/2009 - 02:54.

There are so many things about the Prado that cannot be rendered digitally. However amazing it may be to flit across a masterpiece from your own desktop, there's a lot you miss. The world's greatest museum bar, for one thing, and the atmosphere of its galleries, where a low, silvery light provides perfect viewing conditions for such sombre masterpieces as Velázquez's Las Meninas and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

The service has other limits. Only 14 masterpieces have been selected so far. A truly scholarly tool would need to offer pretty much the entire collection. Other museums place more stress on completeness. You can see the entire collections of London's National Gallery and New York's MoMA on your computer. Smaller, though.

The first thing Google Earth offers is a 3D model of the Prado itself. Then a panel appears offering a choice of the supreme paintings in this charismatic collection. Pick your masterpiece and you soar in through the doors to the requested painting, displayed against black. A control at the side allows you to select the level of magnification and another panel enables movement from one detail to another, as well as ensuring that however vast and strange the details become, you can still work out roughly where you are.

That was useful, because I homed in on details of The Garden of Earthly Delights until I could no longer be sure what I was looking at: cracks, pigment, a level of detail that normally only the conservators in the lab would get to see. At this level a reproduction starts to feel solid and textured in a way that belies its ethereal electronic nature. It's a joy if, like me, you want to understand Bosch's stupefyingly abundant dream picture in microscopic detail.

Then Google Earth crashed.

The German critic Walter Benjamin once argued that the dissemination of mechanically reproduced works of art erodes the "aura" of art, the magic sense of uniqueness that creates the myth of the masterpiece. He was wrong: the more art is reproduced, the more widely the inherent value of the masterpiece is perceived. But what happens when techniques of reproduction become so superb and their dissemination so widespread that anyone on Earth can examine the cracks in the surface of these paintings?

So you don't get the sense of walking the galleries, of feeling your body's tiredness or energy; it's a cleaner, less real experience. And as with any reproduction, you cannot judge the scale of the original work, or be sure you are looking at its true colours.

And yet if you are trying to understand a painting, or simply have a true picture of it to remind you of a visit, this level of clarity is marvellous. Great art becomes the world's treasure in a new way. Does it cheapen art? No, it offers insight. You can now spend hours at home examining Bosch or Velázquez to your heart's content.

But I still miss the Prado coffee.

Jonathan Jones (The Guardian reviews)

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