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We admire Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring for many reasons, not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he […] A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece...

Peter Paul Rubens’ zaftig beauties and plump little angels burst with health. His “powerful and exuberant style,” notes one analysis of his technique, “came to characterize the Baroque art of northern Europe.” Rubens’ name became synonymous with figures who were “realistic, fleshy and indeed corpulent… set in dynamic compositions that echo the grand organizations of […] Rubens’ Cupid Escapes His Painting & Flies Around...

We can spend a lifetime reading histories of ancient Rome without knowing what any of its emperors looked like. Or rather, without knowing exactly what they looked like: being the leaders of the mightiest political entity in the Western world, they had their likenesses stamped onto coins and carved into busts as a matter of […] What Did the Roman Emperors Look Like?: See...

Denis Shiryaev is an AI wizard who has liberally applied his magic to old film—upscaling, colorizing, and otherwise modernizing scenes from Victorian England, late Tsarist Russia, and Belle Époque Paris. He trained machines to restore the earliest known motion picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene and one of the most mythologized works of early cinema, the Lumière […] Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7...

I live in Seoul, and whenever I'm back in the West, I hear the same question over and over: what's Gangnam like? Presumably Westerners wouldn't have had anything to ask me before the virality of "Gangnam Style," and specifically of the music video satirizing the image of that part of the Korean capital. In Korean, […] This Huge Crashing Wave in a Seoul Aquarium...

When we think of the most technologically inclined artists of all time, we don't necessarily think of Vincent van Gogh. Though he wrote of his determination to create "the art of the future," when he got down to painting he did so with traditional tools. Whatever Van Gogh's own feelings about technology, technology certainly seems […] Experience the Van Gogh Museum in 4K Resolution:...

Limitations stimulate creativity. While that phrasing is credited to business-management scholar Henry Mintzberg, the idea itself has a long history. We know we work more fruitfully when we work within boundaries, and we've known ever since our capabilities were limited in ways barely imaginable today. With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic having temporarily redrawn the boundaries […] Customize Your Zoom Virtual Background with Free Works...

It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early 60s. Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery is in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962. Although the program's handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any way, […] NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell...