A Dutch friend has just sent me this amazing link to Rembrandt’s Night Watch, it’s an enormously magnified photo of the painting. one can zoom in, not merely to the individual faces, but to Rembrandt’s individual brush strokes and even further to the finest details of minute craquelure. It’s a bit like using Google Earth where one can go from outer space to the surface of a local pavement.
'This is the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of a work of art. It is 717 gigapixels, or 717,000,000,000 pixels, in size.
The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres (0.005 millimetre), which means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell.
The team used a 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos measuring 5.5cm x 4.1cm. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.’
The zooming in and out reminded me of this film that I first saw in art school fifty years ago
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That’s an extraordinary work of art - I’ve been following the restoration’s progress via the museum. It’s great to be able to see it in greater detail than is possible to we plebs at the museum.
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Yes, and it’s also interesting to see the photo reconstruction of the original with the sections that were cut off to make it fit into its present location.
I’ve changed the link to a tiny URL one, but it’s still not working, suggest copying it into another browser tab.
I once wrote a review sketch about installing that painting, told from the perspective of the carpenters who were told to “saw a bit of each side”. It was very Pete’n’Dud…
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I wonder whether this sort of technology will satisfy people……it’s wonderful but I have been yearning to go and revisit the restored and rehung Rijksmuseum. And trying to resist as Amsterdam has too many tourists, so not sure this will help stop me hopping on that train one day soon’ish. Fun for a wet evening tho”.
Perhaps one should regard it as a valuable addition to existing modes of viewing that can heighten appreciation of the work by allowing one to explore it intimately and leisurely, without the difficulty of peering through crowds of people trying to video the painting by waving their phones in the air!
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allowing one to explore it intimately and leisurely, without the difficulty of peering through crowds of people trying to video the painting by waving their phones in the air!
That would be a great thing to do in virtual reality… instead of playing Beat Saber, crazy golf or table tennis like I do currently with mine.
