[imagesource: Rijksmuseum/ detail]

Museums and art galleries are on the list of things that I miss most about ‘the before times’.

They fall somewhere between wine, cigarettes, and going outside.

Not all is lost, though.

A number of famous museums like The Louvre have moved online with virtual tours of their art collection.

Then there’s the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which looked at virtual tours, and said: “houd mijn bier vast”.

(Hold my beer.)

Per VICE:

A museum in Amsterdam has uploaded a scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch painting that’s so detailed you can see individual brushstrokes and cracks in the paint. Thanks to the hyper-resolution scan, anyone can pull up the painting online and zoom in on individual features.

Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Painted in 1642, The Night Watch is a massive 11 feet tall and 14 feet wide. The hyper-resolution scan is part of an ongoing restoration project of The Night Watch assisted by machine learning software.

The scanner at work:

Here’s an example of just how close you can get to the painting:

The scan was created using a total of 528 exposures, said the Rijksmuseum.

“The 24 rows of 22 pictures were stitched together digitally with the aid of neural networks. The final image is made up of 44.8 gigapixels, and the distance between each pixel is 20 micrometres. This enables the scientists to study the painting in detail remotely. The image will also be used to accurately track any future ageing processes taking place in the painting.”

The macro-XRF machine used to generate the scan uses a variety of imaging techniques, including x-rays which penetrate individual layers of paint.

The restoration of the painting will take up to three years to complete. You can keep up with its progress on Instagram.

Let’s hope it doesn’t go the same way as the creepy sheep in the restored Jan Van Eyck painting, ‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’.

If you’d like to get lost in this masterpiece, head here for the hyper-resolution scan.

[source:vice]