This isn’t comics but the BBC has an article on a fascinating new take on one of the world’s great works of visual art, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. The incredibly delicate painting hangs in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, where it is viewed by some 350, 000 visitors each year. Now an extremely high resolution version has been put online to allow millions to view it in amazing detail – the image was taken at a remarkable resolution of 16 billion pixel images, making it 1600 times more detailed than a normal 10 megapixel digital camera. The idea is to allow anyone with web access anywhere in the world to not only look at an image of one of the world’s great artistic treasures (there are, after all, plenty of images of the painting online already) but to be able to zoom in very close to see minute details without the pixellation you normally suffer when zooming a picture online. “You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can’t ordinarily see. You can also note the state of degradation the painting is in,” curator Alberto Artioli.
(a detail from Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, from the high resolution version on haltadefinizione.com)
It isn’t the same as actually standing in front of the real painting, of course, but for those of us who don’t have easy access to Milan it is quite amazing and I have to say I heartily approve of using digital technology like this to make such an important work more accessible to more people. The Haltadefinizione site has the Last Supper and also very high-resolution images of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Vita di Cristo and Andrea Pozzo’s Gloria di Sant’Ignazio for you to get lost in – just be aware if you zoom too much you may have to wait a few minutes for the image to fully update, which is understandable given the volume of information it is processing. The only down side to this I can see is that conspiracy theorists will use the detailed zoom to explain more fully their theories while waving copies of Dan Brown’s book around.
October 21st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Thank You for posting this. I was researching the movie “Forbidden
Planet” and I came to this site. I’m glad I did.
I actually bookmarked Haltadefinizione as I am thoroughly im-
pressed by the work I see there in the arts and in technology.
To be able to pick any image and zoom with no restriction is the
proper way to utilize the internet. It’s encouraging to see
someone doing it.
Again, thank you for this post. It’s things like this that
make a difference.