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.
