Steve Mould just released a video about the microscopy technique that was used to capture this 3D relief of the painting: https://youtu.be/o-dZKBwbsis
My first guess was that it’s a clean $30k. Now I’m going to add a digit and guess $100k.
If you really want to capture the full visual information of a painting, you'd need full PBR-style data — reflective, refractive, subsurface properties — essentially the response of the surface from any viewing angle in the hemisphere, lit from at least a few fixed directions (like in a museum light setup). Even limited to the visible spectrum, this would massively increase the amount of data needed to represent the image accurately.
The 2019 scan apparently deliberately removed reflections, even though they're an essential part of the artist's intended expression.
Are there models that simulate the actual physical properties of paintings — under artificial lighting, viewed from arbitrary angles? Seems like a worthwhile direction for preserving artworks beyond their flat 2D captures. It could also enable virtually accurate displays of art for single observers using head-tracked screens or VR.
Might also be a promising use case for NERFs or 3D Gaussian Splatting.