From Google Earth, super-vision
I’d like to think the terrific use that art lovers have made of Google Earth has prompted the remarkable innovation launched this past week with the Prado in Madrid. Users can now examine 14 of the museum’s masterpieces in minute detail, getting even closer to them than the artists did themselves.
This is the conservator’s-eye view through a powerful magnifying glass. The ultra-high resolution pulls in up to 14 gigapixels — that’s 14 billion pixels, which is about 1,400 times better than your basic camera can manage. The artworks were photographed section by section and the images stitched together digitally.
The free Google Earth software lets you swoop around and inside the Museo Nacional del Prado and zoom in on the paintings, scrolling across the surface of works by Bosch, Velazquez, Goya, Tiepolo, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, José de Ribera, Rogier van der Weyden, Fra Angelico, Durer and, as re-created here, Juan de Flandes, whose “Crucifixion” from about 1515 is zoomed at the top of this post and seen in whole below. The original is 1.7 metres wide.
Not only can you track the tiniest brushstrokes, you get a hair-raising idea of how much damage these paintings have sustained over the centuries.
Below, a pair of jungle pals by Hieronymus Bosch, and below that, in the red circle, where they frolic in the four-metre-wide “Garden of Earthly Delights” …
Of course it’s not the same as viewing the original, as Prado director Miguel Zugaza rather pointlessly (if poetically) acknowledged. “This shows you the body of the painting,” he said, “but what you won’t find here is the soul.”
Yes, but that won’t dampen the enthusiasm of armchair art fans like me, who can only pray that Google signs identical deals with the Louvre and other repositories of great art.
Below, one of Princess Margarita’s ladies in waiting from Velazquez’s “Las Meninas”, a work properly known as “The family of Philip IV of Spain” and also referred to as “The Hand Maidens” …
The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones did a bit of moaning over the hi-res Prado announcement that can only be termed elitist, as much as that word is lately prey to misuse.
“There are so many things about the Prado that cannot be rendered digitally,” he wrote on Tuesday. “The world’s greatest museum bar, for one thing, and the atmosphere of its galleries, where (as I remember it) a low, silvery light provides perfect viewing conditions for such sombre masterpieces as Velazquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ and Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’.”
Jones says the Prado is unique in the way it “preserves the taste of the royal collectors who amassed its treasures so exactly” with their access to the masterpieces of Flanders, which Spain ruled in the 16th century.
He dismisses German critic Walter Benjamin’s lament that the mechanical reproduction of artworks erodes their mythic “aura”.
“The more art is reproduced, the more widely the inherent value of the masterpiece is perceived,” Jones says, and then he backs up.
“But what happens when techniques of reproduction become so superb and their dissemination so universal that anyone on earth can examine, from their own home or street corner, the cracks in the surface of these paintings?”
What happens, I think, is that people get closer to an iconic work of art than they ever thought imaginable (in fact closer than ever was imaginable), and take it deeper into their own hearts, with all of its mythic power not only intact but growing.
This is a revelation for me and will be for millions of other Internet browsers who can’t afford a trip to Madrid or whose jobs don’t involved being assigned to visit the Prado. It’s a stunning development in the melding of art and technology.
This is Princess Margarita herself from “Las Meninas”, in all her five-year-old, posed-one-too-many-times-for-you-Señor-Velazquez petulance.
