You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Ver­meer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the paint­ing in per­son at the Mau­rit­shuis. You may have zoomed into the ten bil­lion-pix­el scan we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture in 2021. But if you haven’t spent time with the new 108 bil­lion-pix­el scan, can you real­ly claim to have seen Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring at all?

At that 108-gigapix­el res­o­lu­tion, notes Jason Kot­tke, “each pix­el is 1.3 microns in size — 1000 microns is 1 mil­lime­ter.” You can learn more about the tech­nol­o­gy behind the project in this mak­ing-of video pro­duced by Hirox Europe, the local branch of the Japan­ese dig­i­tal micro­scope com­pa­ny respon­si­ble for both the ten bil­lion-pix­el scan and this 108 bil­lion-pix­el one, which neces­si­tat­ed 88 hours of non-stop scan­ning this rel­a­tive­ly small can­vas of 15 inch­es by 17.5 inch­es, a process that result­ed in 41,000 3D images.

Yes, 3D images: though Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring, known as “the Mona Lisa of the North,” may be known far and wide in flat rep­re­sen­ta­tions on pages, screens, posters, and T‑shirts, it is, after all, a work of oil on can­vas.

Ver­meer achieved his ultra-real­is­tic effects not just by putting the right col­ors in the right places, but apply­ing them at the right thick­ness­es and with the right tex­tures — all of which have been repli­cat­ed in a “mega-sized” phys­i­cal 3D print, 100 times larg­er than the orig­i­nal work, com­mis­sioned by the Mau­rit­shuis for its Who’s that Girl? exhi­bi­tion.

You can per­form your own topo­graph­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of sec­tions of the paint­ing — the eyes, the lips, a fold of the tur­ban, the ear­ring, and even the reflec­tion on the ear­ring — by click­ing the “3D” but­ton at the bot­tom of the scan’s view­ing inter­face.  A look this close reveals much about how Ver­meer cre­at­ed this world-famous image, as well as how it’s weath­ered the past 360 years. It does not reveal, of course, the answers to such long-stand­ing mys­ter­ies as the iden­ti­ty of the sub­ject or the moti­va­tions behind her strik­ing pre­sen­ta­tion. Whether or not the girl with the pearl ear­ring even exist­ed, we can, at this point, be sure of one thing: she must feel seen. Enter the new 108 bil­lion-pix­el scan here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

If you hap­pen to go to the Lou­vre to have a look at Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get espe­cial­ly close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cell­phone pho­tog­ra­phers, and more so to the paint­ing’s hav­ing been installed behind a wood­en bar­ri­er and encased in a stur­dy-look­ing glass box. These are suit­able pre­cau­tions, you might imag­ine, for the sin­gle most famous work of art in the world. But there was­n’t always so much secu­ri­ty, and indeed, nor was Mona Lisa always so dear­ly prized. A lit­tle more than a cen­tu­ry ago, you could just walk out of the Lou­vre with it.

You could do so, that is, pro­vid­ed you had a knowl­edge of the Lou­vre’s inter­nal oper­a­tions, the nerve to pluck a mas­ter­piece off its walls, and the will­ing­ness to spend a night in one of the muse­um’s clos­ets. Vin­cen­zo Perug­gia, an Ital­ian immi­grant who’d worked there as a clean­er and reframer of paint­ings, had all those qual­i­ties. On the evening of Sun­day, August 20th, 1911, Perug­gia entered the Lou­vre wear­ing one of its stan­dard-issue employ­ee coats. The next day, he emerged into an almost emp­ty muse­um, closed as it was to the pub­lic every Mon­day. You can find out what hap­pened next by watch­ing the Pri­mal Space video above, which visu­al­izes each step of the heist and its after­math.

Why did Perug­gia dare to steal the Mona Lisa in broad day­light, an act wor­thy of Arsène Lupin (him­self cre­at­ed just a few years ear­li­er)? Dis­cov­ered a cou­ple years lat­er, hav­ing hid­den the paint­ing in the false bot­tom of a trunk near­ly all the while, Perug­gia cast him­self as an Ital­ian patri­ot attempt­ing to return a piece of cul­tur­al pat­ri­mo­ny to its home­land. Anoth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty, elab­o­rat­ed upon in the video, is that he was noth­ing more than a pawn in a larg­er scheme mas­ter­mind­ed by the forg­er Eduar­do de Val­fier­no, who planned to make sev­er­al copies of the miss­ing mas­ter­piece and sell them to cred­u­lous Amer­i­can mil­lion­aires.

That, in any case, is what one Sat­ur­day Evening Post sto­ry report­ed in 1932, though it could well be that, in real­i­ty, Perug­gia act­ed alone, out of no high­er motive than a need for cash. (In a way, it would have been a more inter­est­ing sto­ry had the cul­prits actu­al­ly been Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire, whose unre­lat­ed pos­ses­sion of stat­ues stolen from the Lou­vre drew police sus­pi­cion.) How­ev­er the heist occurred, it would­n’t have hap­pened if its object had­n’t already been wide­ly known, at least among art enthu­si­asts. But soon after La Gio­con­da was returned to her right­ful place, she became the face of art itself — and the rea­son muse­ums do things much dif­fer­ent­ly now than they did in the nine­teen-tens. The Lou­vre, you’ll notice, is now closed on Tues­days instead.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Bare­ly Known, to Sud­den­ly the Most Famous Paint­ing in the World (1911)

What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing: A Deep Dive

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Hierony­mus Bosch’s mas­ter­piece of grotes­querie, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, con­tains a young God, Adam and Eve, over­sized fruits and musi­cal instru­ments, owls, tor­tured sin­ners, some­thing called a “tree man” whose body con­tains an entire tav­ern, a defe­cat­ing avian dev­il eat­ing a human being, and “frol­ick­ing, obliv­i­ous fig­ures engaged in all sorts of car­nal plea­sures,” as art his­to­ri­an Beth Har­ris puts it in the new Smarthis­to­ry video above. Through­out its fif­teen min­utes, she and her col­league Steven Zuck­er explain as much as pos­si­ble of this jam-packed trip­tych — not that even a life­time would be long enough to under­stand it ful­ly.

“Bosch con­founds our abil­i­ty to even talk about what we see,” says Har­ris. “His imag­i­na­tion has run wild. He’s just invent­ed so many things here that we could nev­er even have thought about in our wildest imag­i­na­tions.” Zuck­er cites one art-his­to­ry the­o­ry that this trip­tych rep­re­sents Bosch’s attempt to “ele­vate the visu­al arts to the lev­el of cre­ativ­i­ty that was per­mit­ted in lit­er­a­ture.”

Even in Bosch’s late fif­teenth and ear­ly six­teenth cen­turies, writ­ers had an envi­ably free hand in choos­ing and pre­sent­ing their sub­ject mat­ter; because the direct­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive form of paint­ing, by con­trast, “had always been at the ser­vice of reli­gion, it was inher­ent­ly more con­ser­v­a­tive.”

It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble — and oth­er analy­ses pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here at Open Cul­ture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was work­ing at the ser­vice of reli­gion. But it could also be that The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, in its vast mid­dle pan­el, tells “an alter­nate sto­ry,” as Zuck­er puts it. “What if the temp­ta­tion had not tak­en place? What if Adam and Eve had remained inno­cent, and had pop­u­lat­ed the world? And so, is it pos­si­ble that what we’re see­ing is that real­i­ty, played out in Bosch’s imag­i­na­tion?” Not that such a vision would have read­i­ly been accept­ed in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his inten­tions alone could lead us to a com­plete inter­pre­ta­tion of his work. As any nov­el­ist knows, some­times your char­ac­ters sim­ply take over, and it could hard­ly have been with­in even Bosch’s pow­ers to deny the desires of a cast so teem­ing and bizarre.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights,” Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Spell­bind­ing Trip­tych The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.