Metropolitan Museum of Art Has Released High-Definition 3D Scans of 140 Famous Art Objects

From Open Culture:

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We can go through most of our lives holding out hope of one day seeing in person such works as Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Monet's Haystacks, a clay tablet containing actual cuneiform writing with our own eyes, or the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. We can actually come face to face — or rather, face to surface — with all of them, temple included, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains all these and more artifacts of human civilization than any of us could hope to examine closely in a lifetime. Now we can get closer than ever thanks to the Met's new archive of high-definition 3D scans.

"Viewers can zoom in, rotate, and examine each model, bringing unprecedented access to significant works of art," says the Met's official announcement. "The 3D models can also be explored in viewers' own spaces through augmented reality (AR) on most smartphone and VR headsets."

Among those objects scanned are a marble sarcophagus with lions felling antelope (3rd century); a statue of Horus as a falcon protecting King Nectanebo II (360–343 BCE); Kano Sansetsu's Old Plum (1646); a house model by Nayarit artist(s) (200 BCE–300 CE); an eighteenth-century tile depiction of Mecca; a nineteenth-century marble sculpture of Perseus with the head of Medusa; and a suit of armor belonging to King Henry II of France.

Browsing this archive you'll find pieces from Japan like seventeenth-century screens by the artists Kano Sansetsu and Suzuki Kiitsu. These must have been priorities for the Met's institutional partner in this project, the Japanese television network NHK. 

It came about "as part of the public broadcaster's initiative to produce ultra-high definition 3D computer graphics of national treasures and other important artworks." 

To use the archive, click the "View in 3D" button below the image on the page of your artifact or artwork of choice.

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Fair warning: there goes the day.