Museums of the World in Your Lap

The good folks at Google continue to amaze with their efforts to bring the world to our homes. First came Google Earth, which allows you to zoom in on any spot in the world via satellite imagery. Now, Google offers the Art Project, aimed at putting the great artworks of the world on your laptop. The Google Art Project lets you get up close to the world's great artworks at museums around the world. For homeschoolers with an interest in art, history and foreign cultures, the Art Project is a gold mine. While today was the first official day of the project, it already has thousands of artworks online, with links to some of the world's greatest collections and countless videos explaining the history behind the art and the museums themselves. Beyond a doubt, though, the coolest feature of the Art Project for young artists is the up-close views of many of the most famous paintings in the Google collection. Through stunning digital photography, you can get closer looks at many of the paintings than would be possible even in real life. Thanks to digital technology, you can zoom in to admire not just the artists' brush work, but individual strokes, including that single dab of gold in the eye of Marie Antoinette's daughter. You can also find hidden details, like the skinny dippers in the background of Pieter Bruegels' "The Harvesters." The small square at right shows how close up you can get to the paintings in Google's Art Project. The Art Project also includes links to participating museums, where you can find other eye-popping, brain-stretching information, like the Palace of Versailles' video "L'Androide de Marie-Antoinette," which shows examples of 18th century automatons, mechanical figures whose complexity of movement can put many of our modern robots to shame. Not everything on the Art Project is clickable yet, but there's more than enough for homeschooled and other students to sink their teeth into, and Google plans to add much more. This seems bound to become an invaluable educational resource. For more information, just go to the Google Art Project and see for yourself.