Google Arts & Culture - a project of the Google Company, an acknowledged leader in the market of multimedia technology, includes a selection of high quality images of works of art from famous museums and art galleries around the world. The project enables users to take virtual tours round the museum’s rooms and the high quality digitising of works of art allows users not only to view but also to explore in detail masterpieces of the art world.
The State Russian Museum in 2012 became one of the first Russian Museums taken part in the Google Arts & Culture along with the State Hermitage, The State Tretyakov Gallery, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum named after Nicholas Roerich. Every year the number of participants is growing. More than a thousand museums and archives are taking part in the project, more than 300,000 works of art are presented and from the collection of the Russian Museum there are 51 masterpieces.
As part of the Google Arts & Culture in the Russian Museum panoramic photography was carried out in 36 rooms of the main museum’s exposition in the Mikhailovsky Palace, in the Summer Garden and the Mikhailovsky Garden, Cour d'honneur of the Mikhailovsky palace, the inner yard of St. Michael’s Castle and Klenovaya avenue. In February 2012 the staff of the Google company took a gigapixel photography of Karl Brullov’s painting «The Last Day of Pompeii».
Gigapixel imageThe projects of the Google are vivid and advancing, they are discovering not only enormous material for specialists and lovers of art all around the world but they are also becoming a platform of communication about the main direction of museum’s activities in the popular project Google Art Talks. In 2013 the Russian Museum took part in the video conference «Art Talk with the State Russian Museum». The topic of the video conference was «Computer technologies in the sphere of culture: breaking the virtual field of the painting».
The head of the department and the employees of the department of the development of the project «The Russian Museum: the Russian Museum» as well as the heads of the virtual branches of the Russian Museum of the St. Petersburg State University and the Turku Adult Education Centre all took part in the event.