Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum on Monday published the most detailed photograph ever made of the famous "Night Watch" painting by Rembrandt.
"Operation Night Watch is the largest and most wide-ranging research and conservation project in the history of Rembrandt's masterpiece," the museum said on its website. "The goal of Operation Night Watch is the long-term preservation of the painting."
The ultra high resolution photograph is 717 gigapixels in size. A total of 8,439 separate photographs were taken, using software specially developed for the purpose, each of them measuring 5.5 by 4.1 centimetres.
"The distance between two pixels is 5 micrometres, which means that one pixel is smaller than a human red blood cell," the museum says on its website.
"Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes," it adds.
Rembrandt's painting, which dates to 1642, measures 380 centimetres in height by 453 centimetres in width.
"We are now able to see each pigment in all the small cracks," Katrien Keune, Rijksmuseum head of science, told Dutch public broadcaster NOS. The image will form the basis for future restoration work on the painting.
"It's a very beautiful detailed snapshot by means of which we will be able to see how things change over the long term," she said.
Restoration work is to start in public on January 19. The museum is currently closed as part of the current partial lockdown in force in the Netherlands and is set to reopen on January 15.
