APPLICATIONS (4)
There are an amazing amount of on-line virtual museums. In most cases, these are low-resolution, and zooming in does not produce higher resolution scans. For art history classes, however, where the paintings need to be analyzed in greater detail, these scanned paintings can be put on the Internet to improve the quality of teaching. There are a few museums that have selected paintings on-line with high resolution to enhance certain parts of the painting for analysis. As this product becomes more available, the number of these may increase.
The Viseum project was formed to develop advanced Internet applications for museums. An ATM network was used to connect Vancouver, Berlin, Paris, and London, allowing for fast interconnectivity and high resolutions of the art. This system is on the WWW, and requires authorization to use it.
High resolution analysis can also be used in real museums, where a monitor can be hooked up next to a painting, describing the painting and allowing the viewer to zoom in on specific parts and develop a greater appreciation for artist style. Just as a poem can be analyzed word by word and line by line by anyone with a book of poetry, anyone with access to the Internet will be able to study paintings in great detail without having to have an art historian’s special access to the painting. Showing details, eliminating foreground, eliminating background, studying the different colors all will be useful tools for truly learning the artist’s style.
The MARC book (and future books which are developed) can be a reference that links museums across the world. A person in New York can hold a picture of a Reubens painting from Germany in the MARC book up to a Reubens painting on the wall, and do a comparison to find out what relative shape the painting is in.
A painting that has been damaged can be compared to a scanned painting by the same artist in order to make an analysis of how to repair the damage. If the damaged painting is scanned by the MARC system, the low resolution image can be used along with a drawing software package to estimate the repair that will need to be done to the painting.
The following pictures are from the Harvard Fogg museum website, and show a low-resolution and a corresponding high-resolution image.
