For the moment, you can’t see Rembrandt’s famous Night Watch painting because the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is locked down by the pandemic, but you can get an extreme close-up on line.
Four times sharper than the image posted 18 months ago, this one is 717 gigapixels (that’s with nine zeroes) totaling 5.6 terabytes of data. Each pixel is smaller than a human blood cell. The image was made with a 100-megapixel Hasselblad camera that took 8,439 photos, each 5.5×4.1cm. They were then stitched together by an artificial intelligence program to form the final image.
Of course, impressing viewers was not the actual purpose of the project; it is part of a multi-year research project that has given restorers and art historians new insights into how Rembrandt worked and with what materials, and how the painting has been affected by time and other factors, including previous restoration work.
New restoration work will be guided by the new information. At present, one three-month project is using a system of weights to undo the bending that took place due to a bad hanging while the painting was stored during a multi-year renovation of the Rijksmuseum’s buildings.
