Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in a new gigapixel image
openculture.com
openculture.com
This made me laugh. I wasn't aware of its history. It's amazing how much effort has gone into preserving it over the centuries.
Much like the Amphitheatre Nimes is not closer to the original Colosseum, even though it suffered much less damages over the centuries and had virtually no visible restoration (some of the Colosseum ones are quite bad honestly)
The last supper importance is not just the painting itself, but also who originally made it and the history behind it.
The copy was made at roughly the same time of the original, so it is a great reference for how it should look, but the techniques used for the original Last supper are so different that they are very different in terms of its importance and the difficulties to preserve it and the fact that Leonardo made it explain why the original suffered more damages throughout history (it was simply more famous)
Like the Amphitheatre of El Jem, that was used to film The Galdiator, and the original Colosseum.
We're lucky we have an almost exact copy to look at, that's for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Copy_(film)
British writer James Miller (Shimell) is in Tuscany to give a talk to a group about his new book, titled Certified Copy, which argues that, in art, issues of authenticity are irrelevant because every reproduction is itself an original, and even the original is a copy of another form.
(As to the film itself, it got a little too serious for me.)
The original is badly damaged. Thankfully, we have this copy, and now that it's been recorded electronically in theory we will at least have this version forever. But in practice, I fear that a lot of data will disappear. Modern hard drives and ssds have a frighteningly short lifetime. There are some organizations that are trying to record some of this, such as the internet archive, but it is not clear to me that they are going to last in the long term.
I would like to be more confident that much of the works of the present and past (like this) will survive into the future.
I think the single most important thing is to make sure to have many copies around the world and not just to rely on one or a few (even if they are well protected and properly conserved).
By stripping away everything but the original paint (of which often not much is left), irreplaceable information is lost, because the retouchers had often seen the original or more of it, and restored detail that had been damaged.
What remains after these extreme cleanings is too often little more than the underpainting and initial sketch. It's a great loss and a great pity.
In this copy you can see details now not visible in the original, such as this overturned salt-cellar next to Judas’s right arm. Spilled salt was commonly considered a bad omen in 16th-century western Europe. You can also see Jesus’s feet, which were lost in the original when a door was built into the wall that the work is painted on.
- https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/blob/master/dezoomers/g...
- https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/blob/master/dezoomers/g...
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-last-supper-attr...
See "Stitching flat scanned images": http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/scans/en.shtml
Stitching flatbed scans is not the best use case for Hugin and it shows.
I used the same tutorial linked by Op http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/scans/en.shtml
Note that Hugin requires overlap between scans. I would test MS ICE first if I were you (less powerful, but way simpler) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computation...
It takes a while and I think it works best in Google Chrome.
- dezoomify (https://dezoomify.ophir.dev) is a web application. It is super easy to use, but the final size of the image is limited by the browser. No browser can create gigapixel canvases.
- dezoomify-rs (https://lovasoa.github.io/dezoomify-rs/) is a command-line desktop application for Linux, MacOS, and Windows that does the same thing. It has no limitation (other than the one imposed by the file formats themselves) on the final image size.
- dezoomify-extension (https://lovasoa.github.io/dezoomify-extension/) is a browser extension to extract zoomable image URLs from webpages. It is less relevant for google arts and culture, where the zoomable image URL is the URL of the viewer page itself.
If someone is interested by how the zoomable image format used by google arts works, the source code of dezoomify-rs is quite understandable: https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-rs/tree/master/src/goog...
In the case of this image, I'm not sure the highest zoom level saved as a single PNG makes a lot of sense. No image viewer will accept to open a PNG file of this size. For JPEG, the format does not even allow images of that size.
"The Royal Academy of Arts and Google teamed up on a high-resolution scan of a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper painted by his students."
Also, the apostole on the Jesus's right is clearly a woman...
Good culture > open culture
Thanks Omar!
1: http://www.openculture.com/2020/06/an-immaculate-copy-of-leo...
2: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/explore-the-last-sup...