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Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

rijksmuseum.nl

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Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#81
post #50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> (upper) middle class people It reflects a great change in Western society, which really began to flourish first in the Netherlands, where the merchant and industrial classes began to be dominant, and were growing sick of pretending it wasn't true. Mostly in Britain these days, we see the final pretenses of the nobility on display.

Holland is really where the wealthy merchant class first became dominant in Europe--and was generally not subservient to the nobility as in other other countries.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#82
post #15

> To create this huge image, the painting was photographed in a grid with 97 rows and 87 columns with our 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera. Looks like they had the ability to move the camera precisely to one of 97x87 grid positions. I wonder if they had any headroom in the precision of that movement. Could they have used a lower resolution but much cheaper camera and compensated by taking, say, a 200x200 gr…

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.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#83
post #48

First time I visited the Rijksmuseum I was of course excited to see the night watch. I found it on a side wall, 20x15 cm and was really surprised. I was expecting something more grandiose. But never mind, I love paintings from that era so I went on admiring the others. At some point I was in the middle of the central corridor and it then hit me... Wow. Before getting to the main part of the museum, there were two tem…

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

That's the point - As a sibling comment says - there is a small replica and then suddenly I saw the whole painting at the end of the central corridor. This was a "wow" moment, and an unexpected one

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#84

Oh wow, that is so cool. I thought I was at max zoom, normal blurry tiles. Then BOOM! It came into focus and I saw tiny cracks, smallest areas of paint, no loss of clarity. It's like you're standing right up next to it. That's incredible! Wow, all I can say. That's insane, that is totally insane! I would love if there were a depthmask or something and a synthetic "keylight" feature you could drag around to really get…

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

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#85

First time I visited the Rijksmuseum I was of course excited to see the night watch. I found it on a side wall, 20x15 cm and was really surprised. I was expecting something more grandiose. But never mind, I love paintings from that era so I went on admiring the others. At some point I was in the middle of the central corridor and it then hit me... Wow. Before getting to the main part of the museum, there were two tem…

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

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#88

I worked at this museum a few decades ago on a contract job, it was cool to walk around among so much history. 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…

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.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#89

There's something oddly satisfying in that you keep zooming in impressively close, and the image remains clean and non blurry.

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.

Now if it would just support mousewheel zooming... Thats my only problem with the viewer.
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