I think it's really funny that the always-pedalling Dutch included a bike lane through the museum [1], that feels very right and also quite unique.
[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/the-bicycle-pa...
Absolutely. I'm not hugely into paintings as such. But when I visited the Rijksmuseum, the sheer craftsmanship displayed by so many of the paintings just blew my mind.
Photographs does not do the paintings justice. Even this one. The 3d nature of the paintings and the complex way the structure and paint interacts with the light cannot be reproduced by a photograph. To view them is an experience, and is well worth the visit.
For most artists who are known as great masters (such as Rembrandt), it really does only take seeing a few in person to be like, “yep, s/he is clearly among the best.”
The "vertical-horizontal illusion" is an optical illusion where a vertical line appears to be longer than a horizontal line of the same length. It turns out that this illusion is more pronounced in larger images, even if the image has the same content. In fact, some researchers used monocular VR to show that your perception of horizontal vs. vertical scale can be altered just by making you believe that the image you are viewing is scaled to a TV vs. a movie theater screen -- even when you are constrained to view exactly the same pixels in both cases.
I have a pet theory that this may be why film stars thought that TV cameras "added ten pounds"... Viewing a face at smaller-than-life size could make you perceive it as a little more squat than it really is.
(I learned this from a talk by Dennis Proffitt... might be from this paywalled article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p3053 )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical%E2%80%93horizontal_il...