Google's Art Project Growing

Google continues to grow its art project of digitizing images of artifacts from the worlds best museums.  Google is now working with over 150 museums, taking digital images of works at 7 billion pixels, the equivalent of over 1,000 times more powerful than an average digital camera.  The high quality digital images allows for great clarity and study or signatures and brushstrokes.

Click HERE to visit the Google art project and see the images. If you have not visited the Google art project site I recommend you do, and explore and zoom in on the images.  If you have a high resolution monitor, the images are extremely impressive and worthy of study.

Bloomberg reports

Internet browsers can tour the galleries from 40 countries as they would neighborhoods on Google Street View. Google is seeking more new partners in the U.S., Europe and emerging markets. It says the service won’t generate revenue, including through advertising, though it gives no figures.

“Everyone asks me if we have Leonardo’s Mona Lisa,” Amit Sood, who heads the project, said at a news briefing in Paris. “We’re talking to people from the Louvre. Maybe they’ll be part of the next phase,” he said of the world’s most visited museum, which hosted 8.8 million people last year, according to its website.

When contacted by telephone by Bloomberg News, a spokeswoman at the Louvre press office declined to comment and wouldn’t give her name.

The Israel Museum has already put the Dead Sea Scrolls online and they were seen by 1 million visitors from more than 200 countries in about three days. The next step in collaboration was “almost a marriage of the moment,” James Snyder, director of Israel Museum, said in an interview.

Orsay’s Monet

Among the museum’s items now online is the interior of an 18th-century Italian Vittoria Veneto Synagogue and some of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. The French announcement was made in Orsay, with its Monet-filled walls.

“Google is committed to bringing art and culture online and making them universally accessible,” said Yossi Matias, managing director of Google’s R&D center in Israel.

The site started in February 2011 with works from the Tate Britain, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and 15 others from nine countries. More than 40 of the museums have now allowed Google to digitalize one artwork at a resolution of 7 billion pixels, or 1,000 times the average digital camera.

The Mountain View, California-based Internet company has sent robot-like devices equipped with cameras to roll around museums from Sao Paulo to Istanbul over the past year, snapping pictures of as many as 30,000 works.

Source: Bloomberg