• June 29, 2009
• Vol. 71
• No. 25

A Night—or Anytime!—at the Museum

By Johnny Dodd

An Amazing Bit of Google Earth Lets Users Get Up Close and Personal with the Prado Museum's Masterworks

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From PEOPLE Magazine

Yearning to wander Spain's Prado museum in your pajamas? Need a fast, free staycation? Using Google Earth's map program, anyone with a computer can now view masterpieces by Rembrandt, Goya and others—and get close-up in a way even a live visitor with a fist full of Euros can't. "You're seeing things that just aren't visible in a gallery," says Nancy Thomas, deputy director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, marveling how a few mouse taps take one from outside the building down to individual brush strokes. "I could spend hours looking at Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights."

Unveiled in January, the 14 clickable paintings are composites of 8,200 ultrahigh-resolution images taken by a photographer and a team of four computer technicians in the evenings and when the museum was closed. No plans yet for the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art but, says Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz, "this is just a start."

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How Does It Work?

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1 Linked to Google Earth—which documents the globe's topography—the Prado program lets viewers move visually from outer space, down through Madrid's cityscape to the neoclassical museum and right up to the individual masterworks.

CHOOSE THE PAINTING YOU WANT TO VIEW

2 Among those on view are (clockwise from top left) Rembrandt's Artemisia; El Greco's The Knight's Oath; Fra Angelico's The Annunciation; and Goya's The Shooting of May 3rd.

GET CLOSE-UP!

3 The images are 1,400 times more detailed than those taken by a standard digital camera. Each picture is made up of thousands of smaller photos. The effect on the eye, however, is seamless.