This is really nice to use. Is this how this wing of the gallery actually looks?

Works better than the one mentioned in the title, this one let you zoom in and out with scroll weel.

Technically it is an interesting project.

But anyone who has visited the museum will find it weird. It is very different. The building architecture is very different, there are thousands more works in the exposition, and the order of the works is very different, ...

This is super cool. Thanks for sharing the link

> One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it's huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it.

Famous art that's stunningly bigger in person than I expected:

   - The Raft of the Medusa (Géricault)
   - Guernica (Picasso)
   - The Hallucinogenic Toreador (Dalí)

Aside from the scale, it's also impossible to fully capture color or translucency in screen/page-presented imaging.

And so much of the European painting mastery in the 1400s+ is the manipulation of non-opaque paint to create a desired effect.

Rembrandt could put life into rich people's portraits in ways few were ever able to match.

Besides the Night Watch, this one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_De_Staal...

known in English by various names, such as Syndics of the Drapers' Guild. These portrayals are anything but stuffy.

One writer said, if you take Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, for music, Rembrandt was more than that for painting.

> One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it's huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it. In contrast, the Mona Lisa at the Louvre was disappointingly tiny.

I had the same experience seeing a print of Hokusai’s Great Wave. For whatever reason it was built up in my mind as a huge piece, but in reality it’s the size of a standard sheet of paper.

I agree with you on the subjects are boring rich people, if we judge it with today standards. For the time it was actually quite unique that (upper) middle class people could get their portrait done, and not just nobles.

I like to think of it as part of a period of history where the merchants start to gain power from the aristocracy and that shows in what gets passed down to us.

I remember what I liked about Rijks upon visiting was that it was organized by decade, and had not only paintings, but various historical artifacts as well. Like state corporation sealed opium, which offered a context for the contemporary relaxed attitude of the Dutch towards drug consumption. And in general offered many windows into how the country grew up to be what it is. So yes, much history!

I was walking around the Rijksmuseum just yesterday and had the same thought. Except: Rembrandt’s paintings stood out to me among those of his peers. His subjects didn’t feel posed and his lighting and setpieces felt soft and naturalistic, not artificial. Each canvas gave the impression of an intimate peek into someone’s life. The style almost reminded me of late Romantic paintings (e.g. Peredvizhniki) that came 200 years later.

Recommend Peter Greenaway’s film „J’Accuse” about Rembrandt and that painting. It shares your criticism and argues that in it’s own time, that painting did as well.

For me, it took going to Van Gogh’s museum in Amsterdam to really get it. The way they contextualize and explain his work and the actual lighting of the museum is something to experience first hand.

What is so incredible is the technique they used, the level of detail and how lifelike they are.

> Though I never really could appreciate the "old masters" from the Dutch Golden Age. Their work was part art and part record-keeping for which nowadays we have photography and video. The subject of many of these works are stuffy rich people posing for the "family album". Artfully done yes but boring subjects in my personal opinion.

That's actully what I like about the Night Watch, and how it's displayed. It's in a room with other paintings from the same period in the same genre (group portraits of guilds or militia units), so you can see what Rembrandt's clients were expecting and how the Night Watch is different.

If you want a really interesting version of the work, go to the Royal Delft factory. They made a reproduction in their famous blue tile. It's about the same size as the original.

What I do like about those paintings is the techniques used: relief to give some parts more volume, simple strokes to portray glass or metal reflections, other kind of simple strokes for textiles. As you say, now we have photographs, but it amazes me how what they could do without that technology.

When I visited I think I spent more time looking at the architecture of the building than the collections. It's very nice. Similar story with the Louvre I suppose - I never went in, but enjoyed walking past the pyramid exterior in the evening

Art’s impact often depends on context

Yeah, it's not really fair to associate quality with size but... Thomas Cole's huge works. Most of Rembrandt's famous works are fairly large. Etc. I admit to not being an especial admirer of the Mona Lisa but certainly larger works grab our attention more.

well now most people look at pictures of stuff rich ppl on their phones all day. maybe they were ahead of their time :D. wish there were old masters who made pictures of cats. id visit that museum for sure.

[flagged]

Sounds like you have been to the Rijks and nowhere else. Lots of old paintings of all kinds of scenes hang in lots of museums all over this country. Not a huge museum goer but this lacks nuance.

Another similar scan is the Ghent altarpiece[0], and you get to compare the pieces before and after a restoration.

[0] https://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home

Enhance, but actually :)

Would love a VR version with the features you mentionned, looking at details with my nose on it...

Yeah I noticed this too, incredible, I was thinking "how did they do this?". It's zoom like it should be.

Wikimedia has a slightly higher-res image more easily accessible: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Nightwatch_by_Re... (14,168 × 11,528 px)

I'm on mobile; I scrolled to the bottom and clicked the image of the painting and could zoom in to my heart's content - did it ask you for an account?

the account might be a combination of "deter abusive downloads" and "help, we have not enough members" combined.. now thinking, the result of account gets sent to administration and then funders, too, as a report result. not defending the practice, but the institution has to defend and maintain, too.

There’s a trade off between sharpness and noise, the GFX have an intentionally lowered fill factor to, essentially, produce a sharper image. Meanwhile noise is one of the most important things when marketing mainstream cameras (next to AF), so they go for gapless microlenses etc.

The reason this impacts sharpness is because a lower FF gets you closer to Shannon’s ideal point sample, while a 99% FF is like a pitch-sized box filter.

I had the fortune of taking Erdmann's Python class at the University of Arizona 15 years ago --- a Python/Pylab/data engineering class aimed at materials science engineering students.

He was already getting into this kind of art spectroscopy at the time, and the things he'd showed us at the time that they'd already discovered were wild. IIRC, they had laid out many Rembrandts on the same large "scroll" of canvas, identified where they were painted relative to one another on the scroll, and even identified some paintings of unclear authorship by thing them to that same scroll.

It was not at all surprising to see him move to Amsterdam and keep working with the Rijksmuseum. I smile every time I see this work pop up.

Watching that seriously intensifies my imposter syndrome.

I assumed it was mostly distance from painting surface to camera that needed to be controlled for.

A camera+lens set up to 5 micron/pixel will have a shallow depth of field.

I looked up some numbers: The pixels of the camera are 4.6um, so the likely used a 1:1 makro lens (likely the HC 4/120mm). You will capture a 53x40mm region at once. The working distance for this lens goes down to 40cm for 1:1 magnification (might have been 40-45cm). Aperture 4 (as little diffraction as possible)

If we put that in a calculator, depth of field is only 240um. This is the working range where the object needs to be to be in focus.

I'm surprised the painting is that flat over a single image. Even a high spot on the canvas or an extra dab of paint will be higher. Maybe they took multiple images and focus stacked them?

The camera is manual focused, so 1/8mm would make it out of focus.

It's interesting that while standing in front of the painting, someone would be looking at their phone, and that they would look at a photograph of the painting.

Hacker News in one eye and the painting in the other?

Get off yo phone!!! ;)

I got to watch them do some of the scanning when I walked through the museum on a trip a couple years ago. Very cool setup.

Enjoy the moment and soak in all the details

[flagged]

I loved the M.C. Escher museum. The art-deco decor of the building is on display nearly as much as Escher’s work.

I also highly recommend going to Rembrandt’s house/studio in Amsterdam.

Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is very nice. The inside is basically a palace.

The sad reality is that if one is _already_ in Amsterdam, he or she has to spend a week or two more there just to be able to get into the VanGogh Museum.

Ah, Frau Antje [0], still shaping the image most Germans have of the Dutch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frau_Antje

The map or whatever they use to achieve the online widget is extremely impressive. I’ve never seen such a clean implementation of a progressively loading zoom tool like that before, apart from in map applications and even they often suffer from buffering.

I think it’s a way of keeping the museum’s single most popular piece of art on display whilst working it. I think most museums would remove it for a while, but so many people come specifically to see this painting that they want to keep it viewable, so they make a little show of its restoration.

I dunno; I’ve been through that floor 5 or 6 times since they started work, and people always seem to love the spectacle of it.

I always find it fascinating! Much like it is important in a museum of natural history to note "science isn't finished, some of these things are still under research" it's important to contextualize the painting you see today.

The painting today is different than it was fifty years ago or a hundred years ago or from the day it was completed.

It's common for paintings to be modified after completion, either by the creator or by the current owner. Whose version are you seeing? What are the possible versions?

Anyway, the best part of a museum is you don't have to look at the things that bore you

I suspect there's selection effects in play: museum curators who don't aggressively make the case for more museum funding, don't end up curating the most well-funded museums.

Why not? It's an old work of art, if you're going to make changes to it you better do the best equivalent of `git commit` that you physically can, to preserve how it was before your change.

Sometimes I find these things more interesting than the painting. I think it's good to also highlight what the museum is working on. Otherwise people would think it's just a room where they hang up new paintings once in a while, the restoring and research part would then be even more invisible.

This particular piece of work is damn near 400 years old. When one is tasked with participating in preserving such an item so the next twenty generations can also enjoy it, it pays to take notes on what you’ve done with your small part of that chain.

Preserving and restoring an oil painting that old and large is a minor achievement, especially considering how many people have tried to destroy the painting in the last hundred years.

I'm sure they registered the images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_registration

Lower resolution yes, but one thing with the 400MS or any multishot back is that it can shift by one or 1/2 pixel to collect full RGB color info for each pixel, very important for conservation work.

It should be much easier to take overlapping pictures and "seam" them together.

I assume there are software tools for that.

I thought the same. But try to zoom in on the eyes, you’ll notice fascinating details.

Some of the magic happens at a distance

The Nights Watch takes up nearly an entire wall, not sure what you saw but it wasn't the actual painting.

Since it was not clear from my comment: "At some point I was in the middle of the central corridor and it then hit me... Wow" was when I discovered the real painting on a whole wall at the end of the central corridor. It was amazing

You saw the small replica Rembrandt made for the dude who commissioned the painting. He wanted one to hang in his home. It’s much smaller than the actual piece, which covers a whole wall.

And indeed, the large one got a chunk cut off at some stage as they had to move it. This was long ago when Rembrandt was not particularly in vogue.

There is fairly significant difference in radio observations and visible spectrum imaging though. You aren't going to get 5m resolution visible light image of the Moon any time soon.

I do not know of course, but black oil painting cracks more than other colours. I think it is common to mix black colour with a bit of dark blue to avoid excessive cracking. That could be a potential explanation.

A next step could be to "restore" those cracks in the image, and get an image of how it looked when new.

It's basically the same technique. Same as Google Maps too

It was actually cropped on all 4 sides: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/operation-night-watch-1982...