Art Project, Powered by Google

Google recently launched its Art Project, a collaborative venture with art museums from around the world. The project aims to provide both virtual tours of museum galleries using Google’s street-view technology as well as high-resolution photography of artworks, allowing for remarkable zoom capability. The site also encourages visitors to sign in and create collections of favorites to share with friends.

For more information, visit the Art Project’s FAQ page.

Uffizi Images in High Resolution

Via Open Culture:

This past week, an Italian web site (Haltadefinizione) placed online six works from the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence, all in super high resolution. Each image is packed with close to 28 billion pixels, a resolution 3,000 times greater than your normal digital photo. And this gives art connoisseurs everywhere the ability to zoom in and explore these paintings in exquisitely fine detail – to see strokes and details not normally seen even by visitors to the Uffizi.

These digital reproductions will be available online for free until January 29, 2011.