This 44.8 Gigapixel Scan of a Rembrandt Contains Staggering Detail
...you can now view Rembrandt's 'The Night Watch' in unprecedented detail thanks to a hyper-resolution scan
May 14, 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...can-of-a-rembrandt-contains-staggering-detail
Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online
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.
“The Rijksmuseum’s imaging team led by data scientist Robert Erdmann made this photograph of The Night Watch from a total of 528 exposures,” the Rijksmuseum said in a blog post.
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.Scanning the painting was a lengthy and laborious process using a technique called macro-XRF scanning. According to Annelies Van Loon, one of the research scientists working on the restoration project, each individual scan observed only a 58cm by 78cm portion of the painting. Scanning a single row of the painting took 21 and a half hours. “It takes two months to scan the entire surface with the macro-XRF,” Van Loon said on Instagram.
