Media Vault Program Ending

The three-year, grant-funded UC Berkeley Media Vault Program comes to an end this month. Although the program officially comes to an end very soon, they will be extending online access to our Portfolio website through the end of January 2011. At the end of January, the site will be removed and you may no longer access our collection images through this portal.

A new service, dubbed the Research Hub (was originally named Media Hub), will be introduced soon. The Research Hub team is currently working on pricing and terms of service for their limited release this fall. For the most recent news (as of this date) on the program, see their news site.

Super High-Resolution Images from the Uffizi Gallery

Have you every wanted to see Caravaggio’s Bacchus so close up that you could see the dirt under his fingernails? Or see the individual characters on the pages of text in Leonardo’s Annunciation?

Well, now you can, thanks to HaltaDefinizione’s propriety technology Real High Definition (RHD). HaltaDefinizione is an Italian company with an agreement to photograph 24 masterworks from the Uffizi Gallery’s collection. Leonardo’s Annunciation, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, Caravaggio’s Bacchus and Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleonore of Toledo (1545) are some of the works available for viewing on the HaltaDefinizione website.

These images are of such high-resolution that you can zoom into the image to see every little brushstroke and crack of the paint. In fact, their image of Botticelli’s Primavera is so high-res that it contains 28 billion pixels which is about 3000 times the resolution of a typical digital camera.

You can read more about it in the posting on Wired.com, featuring commentary by UC Berkeley’s Associate Professor of Art History, Todd P. Olson.