On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence, you can look at Botticelli's Birth of Venus almost inch by inch. It's nothing like standing before the real thing, but you can pore over the surface with an adjustable magnifying rectangle . This feels like an eerie approximation, at a clinical, digital remove, of the kind of intimacy usually granted only to the artist and his assistants, or conservators and preparators.
There are high-resolution images of more than 1,000 artworks in the Art Project (www.googleartproject.com) and virtual tours of several hundred galleries and other spaces inside the 17 participating institutions. In addition each museum has selected a single, usually canonical work—like Botticelli's Venus—for star treatment. These works have been painstakingly photographed for superhigh resolution.
The Museum of Modern Art selected Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' and you can see not only the individual colors in each stroke, but also how much of the canvas he left bare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's star painting is Bruegel's 'Harvesters' with its sloping slab of yellow wheat and peasants lunching in the foreground.
In the case of Van Gogh's famous 'Bedroom' , the star painting chosen by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam , I was able to scrutinize the five framed artworks depicted on the chamber's walls: two portraits, one still life and two works, possibly on paper, that are so cursory they look like contemporary abstractions.
Google maintains that, beyond details you may not have noticed before, you can see things not normally visible to the human eye. The most unusual aspects of the experience are time, quiet and stasis: you can look from a seated position in the comfort of your own home or office cubicle, for as long as you want, without being jostled or blocked by other art lovers.
At the same time the chance to look closely at paintings , especially, as made things, really to study the way artists construct an image on a flat surface, is amazing, and great practice for looking at actual works.
Another innovation of the Art Project is Google's adaptation of its Street View program for indoor use. This makes it possible, for example, to navigate through several of the spacious salons at Versailles gazing at ceiling murals—thanks to the 360-degree navigation—or to get a sharper, more immediate sense than any guidebook can provide of the light, layout and ambience of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
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