Google Earth’s Virtual Prado Museum

Google Earth’s Virtual Prado Museum.

Madrid’s Prado Museum has long been a destination for art lovers. In the company of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre Museum in France, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Prado is home to countless masterpieces of western art. Unfortunately, the options for viewing its contents have always been either hopping a plane to Madrid, or thumbing through printed reproductions that pale in comparison to the original works. Luckily, there’s now a third option with Google Earth’s Prado Museum feature, which offers ultra high resolution photos of 14 of the museum’s masterpieces.

While the project isn’t an acceptable substitute for seeing the works in person, it is an exceptional upgrade to the sorts of reproductions to which we’ve become accustomed. The images of the 14 works, which include Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, are 14,000 million pixels in size – that’s 1,400 times larger than an image that could be captured by a standard 10 megapixel camera!