Museum of museums

The Google Art Project offers 32,000 artworks and a virtual visit to tens of museums across the world

For the past year or so, tens of museums across the world were being taken over by unusual groups of men and women. They would come after closure, once the visitors left. You could find them peering through their cameras for hours on end at paintings, sculptures and artifacts. Given a chance, they would spend night after night in the museums, recording, taking notes and zooming in to capture the minutest details of the works.

This week, Google launched the fruit of their labour: the humungous ‘Google Art Project’. Put together by teams of Googlers from across the world, the project, which is a virtual museum of museums, can now be visited at googleartproject.com. At the click of the mouse, it allows you to view 32,000 artworks by some 6,000 masters, old and new, from across 41 countries. But the other, and more dramatic thing, it does is that it takes you ri ght into these museums, galleries and buildings and allows you to view the artwork as it is placed in that space. For example, if you wish to see where the 1970 painting of a pensive John F Kennedy standing with his arms folded across his chest is placed in The White House, the ‘museum view’ icon on the site will take you to the red carpet corridor on Level 1 of the residence of the president of United States. If you wish, you can also take a virtual tour of The White House, going from room to room, getting a 360-degree view of the place.

You could also step into the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), National Gallery (London), Palace of Versailles (France), Museum of Islamic Art (Qatar), Altes Museum (Berlin), or our own National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) and National Museum in Delhi. In all, the site allows visits to 151 places across the globe. Amit Sood, head of the Google Art Project, says this street-eye view was made possible by a special trolley which captured 360-degree images of the interiors of 385 rooms of various museums and galleries. These images were then stitched together to allow smooth navigation from one room to the other.

The scale of the project is gigantic. Still, it was completed in less than a year. Speaking from London, where he is based, 30-something Sood says the first step was to convince the authorities about the project. Pravin Srivastava, director general of the National Museum, says initially they “simply couldn’t fathom why Google, which is about the world of today and tomorrow, would want to have anything to do with museums, which are conservative spaces about the past”. Now, 142 artworks from National Museum and 94 from NGMA feature on the site. Among them are the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Raja Ravi Varma, Tayeb Mehta, Nandalal Bose and Souza, Mughal miniatures as well as sculptures and artifacts dating back to 300 AD.

After capturing the street-eye view, the Googlers set up their cameras in front of paintings. Using gigapixel imaging technology, they captured details of the paintings which are not visible to the naked eye, such as every blade of grass on the hill behind the Young Knight in Vittore Carpaccio’s 1510 Young Knight in a Landscape. “Each painting took six to seven hours,” says Sood. The final stage involved putting together the artworks and the associated data. The level of coordination can be gauged from the fact that all 151 spaces across 40 countries were launched collectively at a precise moment on the set day.

The Google Art Project was a result of Google’s “20 per cent time project rule” which allows Google employees to spend one of their five work days in a week on anything of their interest. Eight years ago, on April 1, 2004, another such 20 per cent time project had taken the world by storm: Gmail.