Van Gogh hiding at the back of a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing

I noticed that as images of van Gogh's "Starry Night" kept cropping up recently in various unrelated media. All of them looked like paint-by-number pictures. The original has impasto brushtrokes and bold streaks of barely-mixed colour everywhere and you can spend hours finding joy in the implied detail and the movement and the expressiveness. The online versions inspire you as much as a single panel in a comic strip.

Internet scans do to visual art what mp3s and earbuds did to good music. The arts have morphed to fit the new media but the technology has caused a loss of ability to appreciate for what came before.

Check out some of the high-res 3D surface scans of paintings that were done by Hirox a while ago. They really give you the chance to see some of this work on a screen. Seeing the detail when zooming in is quite stunning.

This is "girl with a pearl earring": https://www.micro-pano.com/pearl/

I think I know what you mean, and surface texture effects on light/shadow are certainly lost in most captures. Even when effort is made to capture 3D/depth information it is difficult to show. In fact, I would say that the most likely point of loss is actually your monitor. Even if web formats (like "theartnewspaper.com") have tiny unexpandable images there's no reason not to have barely compressed images at much higher resolutions and high bit depth.

PC monitors are usually lower resolution than you can see, while their color accuracy and contrast range are notoriously poor. 8-bit sRGB is simply not able to carry visible color gamut and contrast without loss. I'd recommend only using TVs or very high end monitors for viewing something like art. The captured data is likely much higher resolution (e.g. >1000ppi) and scanned in Raw with 36bit (12bit RGB) color. It's possible to screw up, but there's not a lot of reason to.

The new 10 bit HDR standards (Rec2020 etc) are much better and can come close to human visible range without gamma compression. If you stand at the right distance from a 4k OLED or better a 6k XDR Pro Display rotated to the correct aspect ratio, you can approach what the eye is capable of... if view tracking and light source modeling were used you might even start to emulate some depth.

If you like Van Gogh's work, do not miss the movie "Loving Vincent": http://lovingvincent.com/

Thanks for the recommendation. Check out the brilliant "Loving Vincent" animated film and "Vincent & Theo" as well. Also, somewhat relatedly, Jeanne Calment (the oldest person to have ever lived) claimed to have known him in her youth.

I have also liked At Eternity's Gate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Eternity%27s_Gate_(film) so so much. If you can, first watch this, and then "Loving Vincent". I did this coincidentally and was amazed at how these two films enrich each other, in that order.