Imagine being so close to Botticelli's Venus that you can see the
strands of her blond hair, the shades of pink in her cheeks, the cracks
in the centuries-old paint.
That sensation is now just a click away.
This week, an Italian company put online high-resolution images of 'The Birth of Venus' and five other masterpieces from the Uffizi gallery in Florence, including works by Caravaggio and Leonardo da Vinci.
By zooming in with the click of a mouse, the smallest details can appear—even ones that aren't typically visible when viewing artworks at the distances required by museums for security.
Mario Resca, a Culture Ministry official who worked on the project, says it's like looking at a painting 'with a giant magnifying glass.'
The images have a resolution of up to 28 billion pixels, said Vincenzo Mirarchi, CEO of the Haltadefinizione company that digitized the paintings. That's about 3,000 times stronger than the resolution of an average digital camera.
The reproductions can allow researchers and art-lovers to study an artwork from afar, but they also represent a historical document of how a painting appears at a given time.
Officials also hope to bring tech-savvy youths and other potential viewers closer to art by making it accessible on their laptops. They say a virtual visit will encourage—rather than dissuade—many of them to make an actual visit to a museum.
'All that is put online helps promoting the knowledge of great masterpieces like those in the Uffizi,' Resca, the Culture Ministry official, said Friday in an interview.
'New audiences are important to us: youths, families, people who work,' he said 'Some of them will get passionate.'
The images are staying online, free of charge, until Jan. 29. After that, Haltadefinizione says it might digitize more artworks and eventually create a virtual museum.
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