Google introduced Art Project – virtual tours through 17 world museums

 Google yesterday introduced virtual tours of 17 world museums, putting high-resolution close-ups of masterworks by Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Botticelli on a new one-stop website dubbed Art Project.

Announcing the venture in a canvas-filled gallery of London’s Tate Britain, the search-engine company said Web users can now roam museums as they would neighborhoods on Google Street View, and eyeball 1,061 masterpieces. Each museum also has let Google digitalize one artwork at a resolution of 7 billion pixels, or 1,000 times the average digital camera.

“A project associated with Google is bound to reach audiences who haven’t necessarily thought about coming to an individual museum,” Tate Director Nicholas Serota said in an interview. “Here, they have an assembly of 17 museums across the world: A group of kids from Latin America will be able to go straight on the Web and look at a range of work.”