The Rijksmuseum has published the largest and most detailed digital image of an artwork ever taken. Released on the Dutch museum’s website, the scan of Rembrandts The Night Watch (1642) is 717,000,000,000 pixels, in size.
As part of an ongoing investigation into the iconic work of the Dutch Golden Age, a team of conservationists used a 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos of the paintings, which is over four metres in length and three metres in height. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these individual 5.5cm x 4.1cm photographs together to form the final large image, which ended up with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.
The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres (0.005 millimetre), which, the museum helpfully explains, means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell.
The image has been released as the actual painting, a huge draw at the Amsterdam institution, is taken out of public view for restoration work, including being remounted to iron out ‘deformities’ in the canvas, particularly the ripples currently visible in the upper left corner.
