“Much of the beauty of art and its strength lives in the details – wrote Ben St. John, an engineer at the Google Cultural Institute some time ago – Only when you are so close to a masterpiece that your nose almost touches it can you fully appreciate the genius of artists like Monet or Van Gogh ”. There is a problem: getting so close to a painting inside a museum it would probably set off an alarm or at least cause the caretakers to intervene. Without considering that in front of the most important works there is such a row that approaching a few centimeters is not even to be taken into consideration.
Finally, of course, there is the Covid-19 pandemic, which made it extremely difficult to go to museums or art cities and discover these masterpieces. It is above all for this reason that in recent times we have returned to talk about one of the most interesting philanthropic projects of Google, the Arts & Culture initiative, and in particular of the more than 1800 paintings of classical and modern art that the Mountain View company has digitized at gigapixel level, making them available on the dedicated app and website, precisely, to art and culture.
First of all, gigapixel means a very high definition digital reproduction, created by combining several photographs into a single, single image. In this way it is possible to create images from a billion pixels, a resolution higher than that of normal professional cameras. Carry out this work by hand is practically impossible, in fact, the so-called Art Camera was used to give life to the collection found on Arts & Culture.
How the Arts & Culture project works
The exhibition
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Thanks to this tool, ultra-high resolution scanning of frames was automated using a robotic system that moves the camera along the whole picture, allowing her to take hundreds of close-up photographs and using lasers and sonar to make sure the focus is always right: “Once all the details have been captured, our software takes these hundreds of close-up shots and stitches them together into one image, ”St. John also explained.
Through computer, tablet or smartphone you can thus admire the most intimate details Venere by Botticelli, the Starry Night at Van Gogh, the Babel tower by Pieter Bruegel and other classic masterpieces (as well as lesser known works, for those who want to discover something new). Not only that: using the Street View mode you can see your favorite works in a virtual gallery, while thanks to augmented reality you can place them digitally (but temporarily) on the walls of the house, also getting an idea of their original size.
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Not only that: the Arts & Culture project also allows you to safeguarding works of art subject to inevitable deterioration for posterity and also to give the right visibility to executives who do not always have the notoriety they deserve (such as Temptations of St. Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck) or to authors who have fallen into oblivion (such as the Danish Kristian Zahrtmann). All this is obviously not able to replace the live experience, which is made up of many other factors (for example, the selection and the path chosen by the curator of an exhibition) and thanks to which it is possible to admire the paintings even in those aspects that digital cannot reproduce, starting from the thickness of the brush strokes and the original colors.
Probably, however, it is also by viewing these works in digital format that you will want to go and discover them in person.
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