Taking a close look at a painting is teaching you a lot! Most often we see the paintings as a whole – if it is in a book or on our monitor – and we are amazed about the beautyful painting and wonder how the artist has achieved such detail.
But if you come very close to a painting you can see the artist’s brushwork and learn how certain details are built up.
A Google seach on high res pictures of your favorite painting will give you some good results – but for the more-than-close look you can use The Google Art Project where they employ the commonly known Google Earth technology. There are numerous paintings of numerous museums where you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in….
This is a screenshot of the largest resolution of Rembrandt’s “Nightwatch” that I found through a Google picture search:
And this is a screenshot of the same painting at the Google Art Project:
Here is another example – it’s a self portrait by Rembrandt
And here comes the Google Art Project picture of this painting:
You can see here that the resolution of a picture through the Google picture search is nearly the same in this case, but the quality of the Google Art Project picture is way better.
Another good thing about the Google Art Project is, there is no museum guard moaning.