Looking at Google Looking at Art
Part 1: Art Up Close and In Depth
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face 1 Cor. 13:12

The Google Cultural Institute (GCI) partners with museums and other cultural organizations to bring the world’s heritage online. Starting in 2011, they launched a series of experiments and created tools and technologies that are free for their partners. I admire Google’s commitment to culture. I also suspect that they view the GCI as a laboratory for digital transformation and the customer experience.
This article evaluates two of GCI’s more successful offerings: Zoom Views and Digital Exhibitions. Through close inspection of these projects, we can pose mirror image questions:
How does the mode of presentation affect the way we consume visual information?
How do we choose the best way to produce and deliver content based on the type of content and our understanding of consumer’s needs and goals?
Zoom Views: Art Up Close

GCI’s Zoom Views is a collection of 1682 art masterpieces digitized using a gigapixel camera and presented in a viewer that allows extreme close-up inspection of the work. The Annunciation by Van Eyck from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC is one of the works in the Zoom Views collection.
The Zoom View is a genuinely new way to look at works of art:
- It eliminates barriers to the work such as glass cases, dim lighting, ropes, or alarms that museums use to protect their collections.
- You can see individual brushstrokes and even threads in the canvas, an extreme close-up view that had previously been reserved for art historians and restorers.
- The positioning of the art on your computer screen means you can see all corners of the work at eye level. The floor tiles in the Van Eyck, separated by signs of the Zodiac, depict Biblical stories that comment on and complement the meaning of the Annunciation. They are easily overlooked and hard to see clearly when the painting is viewed live.
- The ease of zooming in and out and moving around the picture promotes losing yourself in exploration.
As rewarding as it is to have this close inspection of a work of art, Zoom View is only one point of view and has its limitations.
- Even the flattest, least textured works are not two-dimensional. Paintings by Van Gogh, who layered his paint thickly, and certainly sculpture seen in the round must be experienced in space. Digital images of works will convey only some of their truth.
- A close-up, face-on view will not work for some works. Paintings in domes employ deliberate distortion of figures to be viewed from below. Works such as Monet’s Water Lilies yield completely different experiences viewed up close and at a distance, inviting us to walk away and approach again.
- The Zoom Views present the work without context. The Van Eyck panel was probably one wing of a triptych on an altar. When viewed in the gallery it is a surprisingly small painting whose full meaning is unfortunately lost without the other two panels.
The Zoom View is just the picture without any explanatory information. On the GCI page for the Annunciation, there’s a 280-word description of the work along with metadata about the title, dates, dimension, medium and the provenance of the work. The National Gallery of Art website has all the same information and more detail, including its exhibition history, a technical analysis of the work, links to a short video about the work with narration in several languages, and a bibliography.
While this supplementary information is a good starting point for understanding the work, the institutions holding a work of art and their audiences will sometimes desire an unmediated experience of the work and sometimes seek more context, more interpretation, and richer interactions.
Digital Exhibitions: Art in Depth

We are all familiar with ways of learning about artworks such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s masterpiece “The Fall of Rebel Angels,” in the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.
- Next to the painting is a label with basic information about the artist, title, and year of creation. Interestingly, the true authorship was only discovered in 1898 after Bruegel’s signature was found when the frame was removed during restoration.
- Tine Luk Meganck has written a book about this work, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Fall of the Rebel Angels: Art, Knowledge and Politics on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt, (Silvana, 2015).
- The museum has a special section of their website devoted to Bruegel and features two videos about this work. This material is found in somewhat different form on the GCI site. These sites include several videos both about the work and about a project to make it accessible in new digital formats, including Google Cardboard.
- The work has its own Wikipedia page and is referenced in many other articles and monographs as well as in online collections and websites about Bruegel.
To integrate exploration with explanations, Google Cultural Institute has created a publication template that they call Digital Exhibitions. “‘The Fall of the Rebel Angels’ A closer look at the masterpiece” is one of their most successful Digital Exhibitions. This work contains 48 panels with text, embedded audio, short videos, and animations that guide the viewer from the whole painting to details and from one section to another.
In an introduction and three chapters, this publication introduces the painting and its history; explores the Biblical inspiration and iconography; explains how Bruegel was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch; illustrates how the demons in the painting were constructed from strange New World beasts found in Cabinets of Curiosities; and proposes that this painting is also a commentary on political struggles of the time.
The Digital Exhibition is an interesting hybrid, drawing on aspects of books, time-based media, and animation.
- Like a book, it is organized in chapters and pages and designed to be read page by page from beginning to end.
- Animated transitions between some pages mimic the way you shift your gaze from the whole work to a detail and from one section to another. Those transitions are accompanied by text that illuminates the details.
- Translations are deftly handled. The text is all in English. The audio and video files are in Dutch but are accompanied by either an English transcription or English subtitles.
- The audio and video presentations play from beginning to end but they are short enough that you are not held captive the way you would be in a recorded lecture. Controls allow the consumer to pause, play, and advance audio and video.
Just as the design of Zoom Views will have greater or less success depending on the object being viewed, the design of the Digital Exhibit makes choices.
The template:
- Incorporates photos, videos and audio but no art (meaning drawings created using the template) or animation.
- Has narrative text but no narrator.
- Provides page-by-page navigation and a slider but nearly no use of hyperlinks to connect sections. Text and images accompany each other but there is little user interaction beyond navigation.
- Lacks a table of contents, index, or site map. There is also no search capability.
- Follows the model of a traditional publication. Once published, it is not updated. There is no dynamic content.
- Presents the authoritative views of its creator. The consumer does not have a voice.
Finally, execution matters, beginning with the selection to a topic.
Bruegel’s masterpiece warrants the creativity and scholarship that have gone into the creation of its Digital Exhibit. This short publication fills a gap between an unadorned presentation of the work in its gallery and the potential for much deeper exploration. The Royal Museum could produce an entire museum event inspired by the Digital Exhibit, bringing together related artworks, curious objects, manuscripts, music, books, lectures, and films.
This Digital Exhibitions template has delivered some excellent results but others are no more exciting than a PowerPoint deck.
GCI and its partners and consumers will continue to discover where these two ways of looking at art excel, where other approaches will be superior, and how they can evolve.
Zoom View is innovative mainly in how it presents different objects. Of course there’s no such thing as presentation without interpretation, but the main consideration in using Zoom View is the suitability of the object to the means of viewing it.
In contrast, Digital Exhibits is a means of framing objects and telling stories about them. Some stories will be told very well in the compass of this format. Others will not. Either way, the choices and skill of the storyteller determine how successfully Digital Exhibits are produced.
These projects are two examples of many new digital media. Whether you are creating or consuming these digital experiences, take a moment to reflect on the choices that change how we see, darkly, through a glass, or face to face.
End Notes
- My professional interest and expertise is in digital transformation and content management. My personal interest is in art history. When not looking at Google, I’m investigating a set of 100 Fine Art museums to reveal how organizations bring together content, metadata, and technology to deliver engaging digital experiences. You can read more of my work on Medium.
- You can see more Zoom Views at the Google Cultural Institute.
- Another excellent Digital Exhibit is Inside the Ghent Altarpiece.
