Dear Watser?, Pan Narrans, Vivisectus and any other Nederlanders in the house,
I wish to relay my compliments, gentlemans, to the fine museums of your fine nation for consistently having gigantic fucking huge resolution photographs available for free on their websites. We live in a fallen world where most museums are either too broke, too penny-pinching or too old-minded to make proper photographs of their collections freely available. Unless it's the Getty or the Met, you'll be lucky to scrounge a 500-pixel glorified thumbnail from an American museum's website. Other countries, including ones that should know better like France and Italy, are even worse. Many important museums and collections have websites that doubtless stunned in 1996. Some collections are barely digitized at all.
Here, for example, is the
Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, probably the most famous painting in the world and certainly the most famous one in the Louvre. There are several photographs available for perusal online, none of them bigger than 600 pixels on the long side, all of them embedded in some absurd Flash applet which doesn't even have a zoom function.
Now let's pop over to the Vatican for a little visit with their online collection. First, let's take a moment to enjoy the
homepage. Ahh, invigorating. After
picking our language, we move on to our example: the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, just for the record, is 133 feet long and 44 feet wide. The image of the Sistine Chapel ceiling available on the Vatican Museums' website is 500 pixels wide.
But then there is the Rijksmuseum. Here is
The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, better known as the
Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn. Want to zoom in on this 15-feet wide masterpiece of the Dutch Golden Age? Go nuts! Want to download it for use on, say, a blog entry? You got it. For the price of a free registration, you will get a 14,168 x 11,538 pixels image to use as for any non-commercial purpose your heart desires.
Perhaps you're in the mood to enjoy a little extreme closeup Vermeer. The Mauritshuis is here to
make that happen for you. Maybe you're in more of a modern state of mind. The Van Gogh Museum
can help you with that.
I have faced more than my fair share of frustration and rage dealing with art and history websites over the year. The Dutch cultural institutions are the sweetest, most soothing balm for my rashy soul. Thank you for them.