Visit the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, the Netherlands, and you’ll be able to see Johannes Vermeer’s painting, “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” just meters away, depending on the crowd around the famous piece. Or you can explore this website which provides access to a massif 10 billion pixel scan of painting in more detail than the human eye could ever see in person.
The scan was created last year by Hirox Europe (a company that makes digital microscopes) with a resolution of 93,205 x 108,565 pixels, which equates to 10,118,800,825 microscopic snapshots of the paint with an area of only 4.4 microns . As with most gigapixel images, the digital copy of “Girl with a Pearl Earring” was created by bringing together a collection of plans focused on different areas of painting, which in this case amounted to 91,000 individual photographs. captured over a single night. Using custom software developed by Hirox, gathering all of these captures into one image was an automated process.
The scan provides an unprecedented view of the painting in more detail than any art fan would care. But more importantly, it gives art historians and conservationists a better view of the state of the painting’s surface and the state of previous restorations, which will help guide and guide future attempts to restoration and conservation.
However, the Hirox digital microscope was not propelled to its maximum capabilities. In addition to scanning the entire paint, the team created even higher-resolution scans of 10 specific areas where each pixel represented only a little over 1.1 microns of the entire piece. Not only were high-resolution fragments of the paint created during this additional exploration process, but also a 3D representation of its surface that reveals how small splinters of paint have deformed and curled at the edges along of time.
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It may sound 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) on an almost microscopic level is a crucial part in ensuring that in other 355 years, future generations will also be able to enjoy the original. But if they can’t, at least now there’s a flawless digital copy.