See Paintings Like Never Before With Google’s New Art Camera

If you can’t travel the world to see paintings by your favorite artists in person, this Google project offers the next best thing. The Google Cultural Institute on Tuesday published 1,000 gigapixel images (over a billion pixels each) of paintings from museums around the world, including works by Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Rembrandt van Rijn. You can magnify the images so much that it’s possible to see individual brushstrokes and lovely transparent layers of paint.

These 1,000 images join Google’s existing 200 art scans, which were created in the first five years of the Google Cultural Institute. The new robotic Art Camera uses lasers and sonar to systematically scan artwork, allowing museums to create a gigapixel image of a painting in just 30 minutes, Marzia Niccolai, technical program manager at Google Cultural Institute, told The Verge.

Here are some of our favorites from the collection.

Just look at those brushstrokes! You can browse the full art library here.