Seeing a painting on the Internet is not the same as seeing it in a museum, but there are exceptions, and today I will talk about one of them.
In the video you see below I show you an example of what can be done with a website that has spent years publishing works of art with an abysmal resolution:
This is haltadefinizione.com, a project that has been capturing images of famous paintings since 2005 so that it is possible to zoom in until you can see all the details of the brushstrokes, the cracks in the canvas, the passage of time in the sculptures… everything .
We just have to choose the work, or search for one from the main page, and start zooming until it is not possible to enter any more. The zoom varies from one work to another, but it is always enough to see details that we could not see from a museum, since they would never let us get so close.
On this website it is possible to read articles explaining the digitization process, and how they use their technology to make copies that are used when a painting is loaned for a temporary exhibition somewhere in the world.
They tell the example of what they did with a physical replica of a work of art made with their technology. Ultra-high-definition digitization and 3D mapping of the painting’s surface allow the complete reproduction of every part of the material substance of a work, making it possible to reproduce details of a painting’s surface by making a three-dimensional model of it that shows its material composition with extreme precision.
This means that a replica can take the place of an original whenever it is not available.
Haltadefinizione’s latest digital imaging and printing technologies are also applied to monitor the state of conservation of a work, and the data collected during digital acquisition is used in research, scholarship, management, and direct study of the work.
