Visit the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, The Netherlands, and you’ll have the chance to see Johannes Vermeer’s painting ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ from perhaps a few meters away – depending on how busy around the famous piece. Or you can explore this website that gives access to a huge Scan of 10 billion pixels of the painting with more detail than the human eye could ever see in person.
The scan was taken last year by Hirox Europe (a company that makes digital microscopes) with a resolution of 93,205 x 108,565 pixels, representing 10,118,800,825 microscopic snapshots of the painting, each covering an area of just 4.4 microns. As with most gigapixel images, the digital copy of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ was created by putting together a collection of photos that all focused on different parts of the painting, which in this case amounted to 91,000 individual photos taken overnight were created. Using custom software developed by Hirox, it was an automated process to merge all those shots into one image.
The scan provides an unprecedented look at the painting in more detail than any art lover. But more importantly, it gives art historians and conservators a better view of the condition of the painting surface and the condition of previous restorations, which will aid in future restoration and conservation efforts.
However, the Hirox digital microscope was not pushed to the limit. In addition to scanning the entire painting, the team created even higher-resolution scans of 10 specific areas, with each pixel representing just a 1.1 micron dot of the entire piece. During this additional scanning process, not only were high-resolution fragments of the painting created, but a 3D rendering of the surface that shows how small paint chips have warped and curled at the edges over time.
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It may sound obsessive, but understanding what happens to famous artworks like ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ over time (the painting is now 355 years old) on an almost microscopic level is a crucial part of making sure that in another 355 years, future generations will also be able to enjoy the original. But if they can’t, at least there is now a flawless digital copy.