Art in the Time of Technology

There are many ideas on how new technologies and media change the way people view and understand art. Technologies such as cameras, computers and the Internet provide many people with opportunities to see works of art they did not have access to before.


Just this week, an Italian company put online high-resolution images of "The Birth of Venus" and five other masterpieces from the Uffizi gallery in Florence, including works by Caravaggio and Leonardo da Vinci.

The images have a resolution of up to 28 billion pixels, said Vincenzo Mirarchi, CEO of the Haltadefinizione company that digitized the paintings. That's about 3,000 times stronger than the resolution of an average digital camera.

The company put Leonardo's "Last Supper" online three years ago, but the technology has advanced since then. Today, it shows details up to a hundredth of a millimeter.

The technology entails taking hundreds of pictures of tiny portions of the artwork and then combining them to recompose the whole image. Lighting is crucial, says Mirarchi.

The reproductions can allow researchers and art-lovers to study an artwork from afar, but they also represent a historical document of how a painting appears at a given time.

Images from the collection can be viewed here