The National Museum in Warsaw is now at Google’s Cultural Institute

Internet users are able to view nearly a thousand works of art from the National Museum in Warsaw thanks to a unique collection the Museum made available on the Google Cultural Institute platform. A virtual visit to the Museum is also the one and only opportunity to see a panorama of Warsaw painted by Canaletto in an over 1GB resolution.

Last fall the modernist building of one of the oldest art museums in Poland was visited by the Google Street View, which used its special Trolley to take precise photographs of the Museum’s interiors. Following that visit each online user can take a virtual walk called Museum View and see what the National Museum in Warsaw looks like inside. As part of the Google Cultural Institute the Museum developed topical exhibitions and detailed descriptions of the artefacts. Some of them can only be seen online.  Hence the Museum joined the group of over 130 most recognisable institutions across the world that can be accessed through Street View. The museums that had made their interiors available before include New York’s MoMA and Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The work that desires special attention among the National Museum in Warsaw’s photographed collections is View of Warsaw from the Royal Castle Terrace of 1773 by Bernardo Bellotto also known as Canaletto. It is one of the best landscape paintings of Warsaw during the Enlightenment, in which the artist presented in detail the everyday life of Stanislaw August Poniatowski’s royal court as well as the capital’s architecture. After the World War II, which resulted in almost total demolition of the city, this very picture was one of models for the reconstruction of destroyed buildings. With a gigapixel resolution, web users will be able now to admire even the finest strokes of the famous painter’s brush.
 

Museum View and a gigapixel image of the painting are part of the Google Art Project, whose aim is to make art widely available on the internet.

With the help of Museum View, web users from any corner of the world with an internet connection will see nearly 3,550 m² of the building and 983 artefacts presented in the Museum’s galleries, including over 600 showpieces in Professor Kazimierz Michałowski’s Faras Gallery. The exhibition’s modern arrangement let present some of the most beautiful treasures of the Nubian civilization, which developed over 1,500 years ago on the territory of today’s northern Sudan. The portrayals of saints, archangels and Nubian bishops come from a cathedral church in Faras discovered by Polish archaeologists. The Polish researchers’ discovery was hailed as a Faras miracle – 67 out of 120 painting images saved by the archaeologists can be seen in the National Museum in Warsaw and now also in Museum View pictures and as part of the virtual exhibition.

Another exhibition made available to online users presents the history of commercial art development in Poland and Central Europe until the World War II.  Kaleidoscope. Posters from the collection of Poster Museum in Wilanow is the biggest representation of Polish posters from Polish and world collections. Some of the showpieces exist only in the Poster Museum, MNW branch’s and therefore the whole collection has an indisputable artistic and scientific significance. Poster works by Stanisław Wyspiański, Włodzimierz Tetmajer, Wojciech Kossak or Julius Klinger create an invaluable and surprising spectre of the visual culture of their times.  

The third exhibition called Between objects. Correspondences, confrontations presents the corresponding pairs of objects chosen from the MNW Modern Design Centre’s collection. A plain carpet has been compared with an interactive fabric, where added value comes from the element of fun and free design creation. The famous bentwood chair from the Jasienica plant, manufactured in mass quantities from the end of the 19th century until now, has been shown next to artists’ projects – Stefan Sienicki’s table from 1929 and Marian Sigmund’s chair from 1956. Toys from 1940s, a symbol of post-war poverty and market shortages, where the simplicity of form and manufacture was dictated by harsh conditions, have been confronted with modern toys whose minimalism is the result of a chosen concept. All of the pairs make us more familiar with Polish design of the 20th and 21st century.

The Trolley made it possible to collect pictures of interiors of over 250 Google Cultural Institute’s partnering institutions, including over 100 museums and other indoor attractions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Musée d’Orsay in Paris, National Museum in India,  National Museum in Tokyo or the White House and Eiffel Tower.

The list of Polish buildings that can already be admired from the inside thanks to Street View pictures includes the Copernicus Science Centre – the most modern facility for science promotion as well as historical interiors of the Książ Castle in Wałbrzych and the Kórnik Palace. Poland’s first Museum View has been carried out recently at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and now you can take a tour of the permanent exhibition 1000 years of the history of Polish Jews on the Google Cultural Institute’s site. The National Museum in Warsaw has just become the second Polish museum opening its virtual doors to art and culture lovers from around the world.
 

Explore our collection on the Google Cultural Institute platform!