Girl With The Pearl Earring: Discover The Secret of Vermeer s Artwork on 10 Billion Pixels Published January 24th, 2021 - 09:56 GMT
An outstanding close up of Vermeer s Girl with a Pearl Earring through the lens of a Hirox 3D microscope (Twitter)
Highlights
The 3D scans also revealed Vermeer painted eyelashes on the woman, which was not previously known, and identified pigments used.
Johannes Vermeer s Girl with the Pearl Earring is one of the most famous paintings in the world for the use of light and captivate look on the woman s face, but a new project depicts the Mona Lisa of the North in an entirely new way.
“Girl with a Pearl Earring” is an iconic 1665 oil painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer. Throughout the years, the painting has been called many different names before landing on its present title, pointing out the large pearl earring worn by the woman, some time in the 20th century.
In 2018, Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier from Hirox Europe, with the support of Abbie Vandivere, carried out a close-up examination of the painting in which they used a 3D microscope to create an incredible 10-billion-pixel panorama of it.
“Girl with a Pearl Earring” is a 1665 oil painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer
Girl with a Pearl Earring at a mind-boggling 10-gigapixel resolution, as spotted by
Petapixel. Over 9,100 photos were captured by the company’s Hirox 3D microscope down to a detail of four microns per pixel, revealing every crack and drop of paint with unprecedented detail. The group also created a 3D map of the canvas, revealing what looks like the surface of a strange planet.
The painting is one of the most famous in the world, in part because of Vermeer’s uncanny ability to capture light in a realistic way, and hangs in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hauge. Curators launched the project as part of
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Iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer has been transformed into a massive 10 billion pixel panorama, enabling viewers to see the masterpiece in unprecedented detail. The scanning process was recently showcased in a new video from Hirox.
The panorama was made possible using the Hirox 3D Digital Microscope RH-2000, which features a CMOS sensor capable of capturing up to 50 frames per second at 1920 x 1200 resolution. The microscope connects to a computer over USB 3 and includes notable features like auto- and multi-focus, HDR and multiple lens options for different projects.
Using this technology, Hirox Europe s Vincent Sabatier and Emilien Leonhardt scanned the full painting and transformed it into a panorama with a resolution greater than 10,000MP. One pixel in the new panorama is equal to 4.4 microns, according to Leonhardt, who went on to explain: