I have to confess: when my junior high art teacher brought in Georgia O’Keeffe prints to inspire the class, my reactions were 1) “It’s a flower”; 2) “It’s big”; and 3) “I don’t care.” (“I’m hungry” might have been mixed in there, too.) But oh, what a difference when the O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe, and I saw her work in person for the first time! How wrong I’d been to think of painting as a two-dimensional medium! The brush strokes mattered, the colors were irreproducible, and the paintings drew me in the way the flat, approximate images on the prints never had.
I’ve yet to find any substitute for confronting a work of visual art directly, but the free online resources available now are a big step up from the laminated prints of my third period art class.
The Prado Museum, for instance, recently became the first museum to allow Google to start mapping its holdings, with the happy result that we can now zoom in like crazy on fourteen gorgeous paintings. The paintings can be viewed in popups on their Google Maps site, or, if you download Google Earth, you can see them full-screen, along with a 3D image of the museum itself. So far, I’ve checked out Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (which is especially handy if you happen to be reading Terry Tempest Williams’s book Leap), Rembrandt’s Artemis, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, and Raphael’s The Cardinal. Titian and El Greco are next…
And at the online store Haltadefinizione, you can get closer than you ever could in person to the frescoes of Gaudenzio Ferrari and Andrea Pozzo, Alessandro Antonelli’s Basilica of St. Gaudenzio, and — wonder of wonders! — The Last Supper, by the one and only Leonardo da Vinci.
There are so many lovely online art history resources that I’ve decided to make this a two-part series. So tune in next week for more fabulous online art history info!
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Thanks so much for posting these–using the zoom function, I was able to look at a painting by an artist I’d read about last week. It’s a fun tool to play around with.
I recently heard a talk about efforts to digitalize medieval manuscripts, and there’s some really neat work being done in that area. However, it’s still (maybe because of the nature of the content) pretty restricted to academic audiences. I love that the Prado is using digital technology to help create broader, more truly public access to their collections, and in a way that really invites exploration.
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