View Priceless Art In The Modern Age With Google Earth

Museo Nacional del Prado art

As technology continues to advance, the end result can often times be as overwhelming as it is amazing. Using Google Earth, beyond just looking at where you live, you can now actually study art.

I visited a museum in Spain today. What is very neat is that I reside in North America and did not need to fly there! That’s correct. Thanks to the smart people at Google, Google Earth can help you visit special and historic locations around the world.

When first introduced, this satellite imaging tool was credited with helping adversaries of the Iraq War be successful by giving real time access of sensitive information to the wrong element. So it went from a real time visual resource to some pictures stored at sometime into a database.

It was still a fun tool if you wanted to take a look what your own back yard looked like a few months ago, but not really that interesting for exploring every day.

Google Earth offers a flight of discovery and I used it to fly to the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain. Housed within its immense collection, The Prado houses many of the world’s largest painting with more more than 1,300 of them are on display. The Google Earth tour of the Prado exemplifies how art, history and technology have reached a nexus in the modern world.

On display in high definition are:

Artemis “Rembrandt Self Portrait” Albrecht Drer The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid “Goya The Nobleman with his Hand on His Chest” El Greco The Cardinal ” Raphael Descent from the Cross “Roger Van der Weyden Emperor Carlos V on Horseback” Titian The Garden of Earthly Delights “Hieronymus Bosch Jacobs Dream “Jos de Ribera Inmaculada Concepcin” Giambattista Tiepolo The Annunciation” Fra Angelico Crucifixion “Juan de Flandes Las Meninas — Diego Rodrguez de Silva y Velzquez The Three Graces” Peter Paul Rubens

Google Earth technology allows the viewer to zoom from one country to the next, down to a street view that includes traffic and then up to a 3-D rendition of buildings and places. Zooming into the Prado was interesting. I didn’t have to wait in line and I was able to be at my chosen destination in seconds.

Unlike being at a real museum where the visitor still stands many feet away from the exhibit, I was front and center and so close to the pictures that I could see the brushstrokes and the cracks on the restored canvases. Digitally photographed at 1,400 megapixels, I could see the finest details of The Cardinals face, and the minutia tucked inside The Garden of Earthly Delights. I can return tomorrow or next week and make another discovery again and then again.

A virtual tour can never replace the feeling of visiting a museum in person. To digitally capture art requires incredible effort but is worth the results of allowing everyone else to be able to enjoy them in the future. Learn all about the artist and their work from a new and different point of view. It will offer art and culture to all even if just a few enjoy it. Other people will try to get more.

Inspired by the joy they see online, some people go to see the originals in real life. People that work hard and accomplish the right things become symbols for future generations to enjoy. Infinite accessibility to art will only aid in advancing humanity. It is a possibility they only will write down the failures.   Author: The Art Fanatic

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