Visit the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, The Netherlands, and you will have the chance to see Johannes Vermeer’s painting, ‘Girl with a pearl earring’, perhaps a few meters away – depending on the crowd around the famous piece. Or you can explore this site that provides access to a huge 10 billion pixel scan of the painting in more detail than the human eye could see in person.
The scan was created last year by Hirox Europe (a company that manufactures digital microscopes) with a resolution of 93,205 x 108,565 pixels, which is equivalent to 10,118,800,825 microscopic photos of the painting, each covering an area of only 4.4 microns. As with most gigapixel images, the digital copy of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ was created by assembling a collection of photos, all focused on different areas of the painting, which in this case totaled 91,000 individual photos taken along of a single night. Using custom software developed by Hirox, bringing all these photos together into one image was an automated process.
The scan provides an unprecedented view of the painting in more detail than any fan of art would care. But, more importantly, it gives art historians and preservationists a better view of the surface conditions of the painting, as well as the state of previous restorations, which will help inform and guide future attempts at restoration and preservation.
The Hirox digital microscope was not pushed to its maximum capacity, however. In addition to scanning the entire painting, the team created even higher resolution scans of 10 specific areas, where each pixel represented only a 1.1 micron particle of the entire piece. It was not just high-resolution fragments of the painting created during this additional digitization process, but also a 3D representation of its surface, revealing how small paint chips have warped and curled around the edges over time.
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It may seem obsessive, but understanding what happens to famous works of art like “Girl with a Pearl Earring” over time (the painting is now 355 years old at this point) at an almost microscopic level is a crucial part of ensuring that in another 355 years, future generations will also be able to enjoy the original. But if they can’t, at least now there is a perfect digital copy.