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Over 5,000 works from the Yale Center for British Art are now just a mouse click away.
The New Haven Museum has joined 150 other art museums worldwide in the Google Art Project, an ambitious collaboration to create a unique interactive online art experience. Besides works of art, the project also gathers important manuscripts, photographs, maps, video and audio guides and other artifacts into the site.
The collaborating museums choose the material to be presented on the website, and provide high resolution photographs of the material, which is then enhanced by Google technology, allowing users to zoom in and get closer to Van Gogh's The Starry Night than would ever be possible in person at the Museum of Modern Art.
"Each one of the museums provided already very high resolution photographs but we actually went in and did gigapixel photography," said the Google Art Projct's Piotr Adamczyck. "What gigapixel does is takes very tiny little photographs of each of those paintings that the museums have been able to provide and the brushstroke level detail for masterpieces in 46 different museums."
You can view the Yale Center for British Art collection at googleartproject.com.
