Google Earth is an amazing tool that just keeps getting better and it's still FREE. Over the years I have spent hours looking down on our fascinating little planet with Google Earth.
Now Google has made it even more compelling for artists to download as they're opening museums up and taking us inside. No longer content with looking down on art museums from above, they have zoomed in on paintings hanging on the walls. They have gone in armed with some amazing technology too, revealing every crack and brush stroke on each painting.
Here's a video of them capturing 14 masterpieces from the The Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain.
To find the images I opened Google Earth and did a search for "The Prado Museum Spain" then clicked Fly To. The 14 current images that have been scanned at the Museo del Prado include:
So, if you haven't downloaded Google Earth yet you're missing out! I really hope this is just the start of things to come and more great art museums invite the Google guys around to photograph their paintings.
As Google explains on their Earth and Maps blog: "The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento ) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias)."
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