717 Gigapixel Image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch

Seeing Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum a decade or so ago totally changed my view of seeing things in a museum vs. seeing them online. I'm a child of the internet and had this view that seeing it on my screen was good enough, but wow is Night Watch incredible up close and in person. Overwhelming, almost. A totally different experience.

That said, this image is amazing, and lets you see a lot more detail than you can easily manage at the museum.

I noticed this most vividly when seeing Van Gogh's Sunflowers (the 4th, from the National Gallery in London). A high-res scan such as on Wikipedia [1] does no justice to just how textured the painting is. He's clearly applied quite thick strokes and, under proper lighting, the texture really pops in a way that screens simply cannot reproduce. It brings an entirely new dimension (pun intended) to the painting and really changes the whole expeirence.

Proper, museum/gallery lighting really transforms art in a way that even prosumer screens simply cannot replicate, because you can move around the piece and the interplay of light against it does so much.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflowers_(Van_Gogh_series)