Roughly a year ago, Google announced access to international art through an online virtual museum was going to be one of the company’s new services.
Its art project now counts on a stock of 32,000 artworks from 151 museums and foundations. With this new version at www.googleartproject.com, opened on April 3 in Paris, web surfers can now browse and take a closer look at some of the most outstanding pieces of universal art, as well as tour galleries harboring those works of art, like the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Versailles Palace in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art of New Delhi, among others.
“The hardest and most toilsome thing to do was to make our teams get high-resolution images and arrange the virtual tours around the museums,” Google Maps’ director of Strategic Alliances David Robles told Spanish newspaper La Razon. At the same time, each institution has chosen a masterpiece that, based on a complex photographic technique and digitalization process, could be scrutinized down to the tiniest details.
However, two great absents are the collections at the El Prado and Louvre museums, that turned down the cyber initiative, as well as the works of Picasso because his family owns all copyrights through the year 2050.
The project’s profile includes a social function and users could create their own galleries and share them online.
Excerpted from: ALVARO DEL RIO, Arte mirado con lupa http://www.larazon.es/noticia/3166-arte-mirado-con-lupa
