Kolkata :
The Victoria Memorial Hall’s collections will find a place in the largest-ever digital repository of exhibits and collections on a global platform created by Google. Apart from Victoria, some others on the list are Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, British Museum, National Gallery and Tate Gallery in London, Musee d’Orsay in Paris, Acropolis Museum in Athens and Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
Victoria Memorial curator Jayanta Sengupta told TOI that the museum and its finest collection of art and artifacts are expected to join the Google Cultural Institute, a cyber platform created by Google Art that enables users to view high resolution images from various museums and even compile their own digital collection. It is fast emerging as an invaluable resource for researchers as they can have access to objects from museums across the world and learn about art objects, their history and artists at the click of a mouse.
“A team from Google will reach Kolkata with sophisticated video and still cameras to film the museum and photograph the 120-odd highlights. Of these, they will select one item and photograph it with high-definition gigapixel camera so that it can be magnified online without distortion. Once the exercise is over in a couple of months, a virtual tour of the galleries at Victoria Memorial will be created and the images uploaded on Google Cultural Institute,” said Sengupta.
Victoria Memorial signed a memorandum of understanding with Google Art in February 2013 and has been communicating with the team since. The museum has sent the list of 120 items it considers the best among its collection of 33,000+ objects of art apart from the 10,000+ small objects like stamps.
Though the Google team is at liberty to select any one of the 120 objects listed by Sengupta’s team as the museum’s highlight for the gigapixel photography, the curator has suggested a painting titled ‘General Claude Martin & his Friends’. The painting that has an alternative title ‘Colonel Polier with his Friends’ depicts Colonel Antoine Polier, Claude Martin, and John Wombwell with the painter himself, Johann Zoffany (1733-1810), in the background, being waited on by Indian servants, probably in Lucknow around 1786-87.
“We have suggested the painting by 18th century German neoclassical painter because it is intricate. There are six paintings within the painting that can be enlarged and viewed in detail when photographed in a gigapixel image,” explained Sengupta. Other paintings that make the cut are ‘Bharat Mata’ and ‘Passing of Shah Jahan’.
Among the other objects in the highlights shortlist are oil paintings by Thomas and William Daniel, Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore, a 1964 copy of the Ain-e-Akbari manuscript, Persian translation of Aristotle’s treatise Six Principles of Ethical Life and commentary by Dara Shukoh as well as his Persian translations of Gita and Upanishad, Aurungzeb’s personal Quran, Tipu Sultan’s dagger, Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s sword and Queen Victoria’s piano.
“Once Victoria Memorial Hall joins the others on the Google Cultural Institute website, all objects that comprise the museum highlights will be there for the world to see and experience online. We have been working on documenting each object, detailing the history, the artist and its relevance. We are currently in the final lap of that exercise and expect to be on the website by this yearend or early next year,” said Sengupta.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Kolkata / by Subhro Niyogi, TNN / September 07th, 2014