Dragon: Real Life, Only Better.

I read in Jonathan Jones’s column in today’s Guardian about Google Art Project. It works like the 3-D street-view part of Google Maps, except that you’re walking around some great art museums. In addition, you can zoom in on the paintings; you can get a 15 cm-wide image of Captain Koch’s eyeball in The Nightwatch. If you find that gratuitous, then zoom in on Lt. van Ruytenburch’s eyeballs, as I did, and see by comparing them how Rembrandt thought about drawing anatomy (or, at least, eyeballs). That’s something you wouldn’t be able to do at the Rijksmuseum; the Nightwatch is so huge you’d need a stepladder to get anywhere near the figures. Google has only catalogued a handful of museums so far. I miss being able to take a butchers at the Velázquezs in the Prado, though Google will presumably be expanding their collection at a comparable rate to the maps’. The Uffizi is already available; Jonathan Jones nudges us towards Piero di Cosimo’s painting of Perseus & Andromeda (above), which really is worth a detailed examination.

Update: I realise that if you blow up a detail of a painting, you can then take a screenshot to download it. The resolution seems good; this is the tiny facet-headed sundial in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, at the National Gallery in London:

pinhut says:

2 February 2011 at 3:24 pm

Now they need to add an IM widget to it, so you can meet smart lonely girls.

dearieme says:

2 February 2011 at 4:04 pm

Thank you. How splendid.

Now then, what you want to do for a wee break next January is to hie you to Edinburgh to see the Vaughan Bequest – a bunch of Turners shown only in January so that the light won’t damage them. Wonderful.

http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/online_az/4:322/?initial=T&artistId=5582&artistName=Joseph Mallord William Turner&submit=1

Julia says:

2 February 2011 at 4:12 pm

Yes, it’s fabulous, I read it in today’s newspaper. But I’m lazy and hadn’t tried it until now. You guided me perfectly.

2 February 2011 at 4:26 pm

I managed somehow to exit the Smithsonian and wind my way through a road tunnel. It’s so good, it made me stop and think, “The world is amazing.”

A. J. P. Crown says:

2 February 2011 at 4:30 pm

But did you meet any smart lonely girls?

2 February 2011 at 4:41 pm

No. I already have a smart girl, but she visits so rarely, that it’s me that’s lonely. Please, don’t weep for me…

2 February 2011 at 6:04 pm

Why you have to take away such a pleasure? Weep for someone else makes us forget why is that we want to weep for ourselves.

2 February 2011 at 6:57 pm

Don’t cry for me, Argentina…

(Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

catannea says:

2 February 2011 at 7:04 pm

And that’s the compas, inset at the top of the sundial? So you can orient it properly? Wow! What a terrific view of the craquelure.

2 February 2011 at 7:22 pm

You can make it even bigger than that if you need to.

2 February 2011 at 7:47 pm

Talking of Argentina, I read an article in the New York Times’s wine section about torrontés. It’s like a muscat: “Dip your nose into a glass, and you don’t know whether it ought to be sold as a wine or a perfume”, says the article. It said that Argentina makes great wines from obscure types of grape, which made me want to try some; but they didn’t have any torrontés at the norskevinmonopol, so I had to settle for an Argentine red wine made from the equally unusual malbec instead. I’m drinking a glass now, and it’s really excellent.

2 February 2011 at 10:45 pm

:-)

I’ll bring some bottles of torrontés the next time we meet.

Ø says:

3 February 2011 at 2:33 am

Oh, I had never heard of malbec until last year. (I am no more knowledgeable about high wine culture than about high musical culture.) But my wife bought a bottle on the recommendation of a wine-store employee last summer, and we liked it enough to buy more.

3 February 2011 at 4:27 am

I just visited the Hermitage and was stuck behind a party of digital schoolchildren for an hour.