Some enterprising Italians, recognising the difficulty (in fact the impossibility) of getting all of Caravaggio’s works together for a single exhibition, have instead created excellent digital versions of them to be displayed both online and in specially designed galleries. I’ve never been to Italy and as such have no idea what the effect is like up close, as it were, but their website is simply wonderful.
Just click “enter” on the right, there, and it will open up the viewing window. You can navigate around the virtual gallery by clicking and dragging the mouse on the image that appears, or click on the “works” tab up near the top of the screen. In the virtual gallery you can just click on a picture you want to see to bring it up, and in the works tab there’s a list of (oddly blank) buttons on the left-hand side of the screen that correspond to each painting. They display the painting’s name and a thumbnail when you hover the mouse over them, though, so they’re not useless. Once you’ve got the picture you want, you can do all sorts of detail observation and some truly epic zooming. Check it out.
It’s pretty Flash-heavy, so be warned. It’s also entirely worth it.
