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Prado Museum Googlemaps their Masterpieces

Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights - Prado Online Gallery

The Prado museum in Madrid and Google Earth have come together to produce the first ever googlemapped art collection.

By satellite imagery and aerial photography Google Earth allows you to view anywhere on Earth from the comfort of your own sofa. The Prado museum houses major masterpieces of European art including The Annunciation by Fra Angelico; The Decent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden, and The Three Graces by Rubens.

The marriage of the two – technology and art – means that fourteen of the museums masterpieces can now be seen online and in finite detail. The resolution of the images is so high that canvases can be visually scanned in far more detail than the naked eye could ever afford. Indeed the clarity is so, that a photograph from your standard 10 megapixel camera just wouldn’t compare to the 14 gigapixels at which the images have been painstakingly built up from.

To explore the museum and paintings, Google Earth must first be downloaded for free, before navigating to the Prado layer.

In a time when pennies are tight, this is a great – albeit short lived – way to experience a part of Madrid without the cost of a flight. Although the Guardian reported that Google had no plans to extend the programme to other museums it will be interesting to see if academics harness the idea as a way of viewing great pieces that used to only be visible from one location.