Recently from my sofa, I beamed 4,680 miles into Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for a group tour of its Gallery of Honors. The tour included a stop in front of Flores Claesz Van Dijk’s painting, Still Life with Cheese. There, the knowledgeable museum guide noted the painter had used an unusual pigment ingredient. The distinctive gray color of the uppermost round of the cheese stack, she explained, came from the juice of sheep feces. What? I zoomed in for a direct look and downloaded a free, high-resolution copy of the painting for closer study.
International Museum Day is May 18, an observance of the cultural role played by the world’s museums and a day that encourages people to pay them a visit. Fortunately, some of the great ones have gone digital, creating online virtual tours to substitute for or supplement in-person visits. Like me, you don’t even need to leave your sofa to meander through them.
The Rijksmuseum happens to be one of my favorites for a remote visit. An institution that believes in democratizing art, it’s in the process of digitizing its entire collection—a total of 1.1 million artworks and artifacts making it all available gratis on its website From Home.
The effort began in 2009 during the restoration of the museum’s centerpiece, Rembrandt’s 1642 painting, Night Watch. Using high-resolution photography, digital microscopes, molecular spectroscopy, and artificial intelligence, the restorers created in-depth images of every square millimeter of the approximate 12- by 14.5-foot painting. The advanced technology allowed analysis of Rembrandt’s underlying sketches, the type of paint he used, and the discovery that he used arsenic to create the painting’s sheen. The outcome of the still-in-progress effort is now available to the virtual public, allowing visitors to zoom into the painting’s minute details, watch updates of the restoration, and learn about the findings made possible by technology.
A virtual visit also takes you to Rijksstudio. There, 840,302 high-resolution, digital, downloadable and free images include not only the renowned paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt but also collection images of statues, ceramics, metalwork, tapestry, and furniture.
From Home also includes five-minute segments on specific museum themes such as flowers, LBGTQ portrayal, female leadership, and secret doors and basements in the building, each presented by a Rijksmuseum curator, department head, or tour guide as they point out examples found throughout the 12,000 square meters of exhibit space.
Viewers can take art classes from RijksCreative, where you can participate in museum classes on charcoal, painting, sketching, and creating a photobook, with each class displaying six easy-to-watch lessons.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has also gone virtual, uploading beautifully photographed images of 1.25 million objects in the museum’s collection, including manuscripts, photography, painting, and fashion. Additionally, V&A Academy Online offers live stream and recorded lectures, discussions, and workshops. This winter, I took a free online course about V&A’s large collection of hand-made Asian and African carpets.
Six of the 26 museums of Rome’s Vatican Museums can be visited via a self-guided 360-degree virtual video tour. Using a keyboard or mouse, you can wander the four-room apartment known as Rafael’s Rooms while scrolling in closely to study the mosaic tiles in the floor or stroll around the Sistine Chapel zooming in to study the fresco walls and Michelangelo’s handiwork in the ceilings. Similar 360-degree virtual tours of are available on the websites of the Louvre and Musee D’orsay in Paris and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. These four are part of the Google Arts and Culture website offering 60 museums of virtual tours.
If science is more your forte, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has you covered. Its website is chockful of information and high-resolution images. You can navigate a room-by-room tour of the exhibit spaces or select collections (fossils anyone?) and from there zoom in on specific artifacts or click links for more text information and explanatory videos. The website also allows you to take narrated tours with the museum’s scientists and visit its laboratories and research stations. Similarly, in Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum you can float through galleries, stopping to study exhibits like an iridium satellite or Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 lunar spacesuit.
All 21 museums of the Smithsonian are in the process of making their collections available online. At Smithsonian Open Access, visitors can view and download high-resolution images of 4.9 million artifacts in their collection including Charlie Parker’s alto saxophone and Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Vega B5. The Smithsonian is currently experimenting with 3D scanning digitization, allowing objects like the plaster cast of Abraham Lincoln’s hands and face to be viewed from different angles. Check out Smithsonian 3D for informative videos about the process.
A virtual museum visit is much like an in-person meander through a collection. Take the time to explore. Once online, click on all the links and sub links to stroll into galleries or listen in on tours. Make return visits to view newly curated exhibits or tours. You can do it without the cost of an airline ticket to Amsterdam or Paris. In fact, for no cost at all.
Ann Randall is a freelance writer, organizational consultant and independent traveler who loves venturing to out-of-the-way locales from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. Retired from a career as a teacher and union organizer in public education, she now observes international elections, does volunteer work in India and writes regularly for 3rd Act, Northwest Travel & Life, West Sound Home & Garden, Fibre Focus and Dutch the Magazine.
Get Started:
From Home: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/from-home
V&A Academy Online: https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/academy
Vatican Museums: https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/tour-virtuali-elenco.html
Louvre at Home: https://www.louvre.fr/en/online-tours
Google Arts and Culture: https://artsandculture.google.com/partner
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/visit/virtual-tour
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: https://airandspace.si.edu/virtual-tour
Smithsonian Open Access: https://www.si.edu/openaccess
Smithsonian 3D: https://3d.si.edu/labs