Virtual tours of the best museums. Virtual excursions to world museums Virtual excursions to the Russian Museum

"Threatening Weather", René Magritte, 1929

Louvre (Paris)

“Liberty Leading the People” (La Liberté guidant le peuple) or “Freedom on the Barricades”, Eugene Delacroix.

The Louvre is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Like many national museums, it began with the royal collection. The collection was actively replenished by patrons of art from war trophies and works confiscated during the revolution.

Today, about 300 thousand exhibits are stored here. 35 thousand of them are presented in the online gallery. The most famous are “La Gioconda” by Leonardo da Vinci, “The Beautiful Gardener” by Raphael, “The Lacemaker” by John Vermeer, sculptures of the Venus de Milo and the Nike of Samothrace.

Prado Museum (Madrid)

Triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, Hieronymus Bosch, 1490-1500.

The Prado Museum (Museo del Prado) is one of the largest and most visited art museums in the world. Its collection contains the most complete collections of Bosch, Velazquez, Goya, Murillo, Zurbaran and El Greco. The total number of exhibits is about 30 thousand.

Photos of more than 11 thousand works stored in the museum have been published on the Internet. For easy navigation, there is a division by topic: nudes and saints, socialist realism and mythology. In addition, an alphabetical index with the names of artists is available. The “Masterpieces” selection will not let you miss the most important thing.

New York Museum of Modern Art

"Three Musicians" Pablo Picasso. Fontainebleau, summer (1921).

The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in New York (Museum of Modern Art, abbreviated as MoMA) is one of the first and most representative museums of modern art in the world. It is one of the three most visited museums in the United States and one of the twenty most visited art museums in the world.

MoMA has posted 65,000 digitized paintings online, dating from 1850 to the present. In total, the museum’s collection contains over 200 thousand works by 10 thousand artists. The online collection can be searched by a specific painting, by the name of the artist, and by specified filters.

Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)

"Night Watch, or the Performance of the Rifle Company of Captain Frans Banning Cock and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburg." Rembrandt Van Rijn.

You don’t have to come to Amsterdam to wander the halls of the famous Rijksmuseum. The updated interiors of the 19th century building and the 200 thousand masterpieces housed there can be found on the Google Arts & Culture project. Make the gallery closer smartphone and the Google Cardboard app, available for Android and iOS.

Along with the main collection of the Rijksmuseum, the digital recording includes five new exhibitions dedicated to the jeweler Jan Lutma, the artists Jan Steen, Jan Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn and, separately, the monumental painting “The Night Watch”, the pride of the museum.

Solomon Guggenheim Museum (New York)

Next to Jas de Bouffan (Environs du Jas de Bouffan). Paul Cezanne.

The permanent collection of the Guggenheim contains more than 7 thousand works. About 1,700 of them have been digitized. Each artist’s page on the museum’s website contains a voluminous overview of his work; many exhibits are supplemented by comments from art historians. The online archive covers the period from the late 19th century to the present day. There are works by Paul Cézanne and Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Bauhaus school teachers Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky and many other modern classics. There is a search and an alphabetical index of the authors of all works in the collection.

Getty Museum (Los Angeles)

Haystacks, snow effect, morning. Claude Monet.

The Getty Museum is the largest art museum in California and the West Coast of the United States. It was founded by oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty, who at the time of his death was the richest man in the world. Thanks to the bequeathed billions, the museum has become the most active buyer of works by the “old masters” and ancient sculpture at international auctions.

Now you can create your own selections of your favorite paintings, select exhibits to visually teach art history, post them on social networks, or even just “stick” to the Museum’s electronic library, looking at the magnificent paintings in every detail.

Hermitage (St. Petersburg)

Annunciation. Filippino Lippi, Italy, mid-1490s.

Russia's largest museum occupies five buildings housing more than 3 million works of art.

The museum arose as a private collection of Catherine II and, thanks to the empress, acquired a collection of works by outstanding Flemish, Dutch, Italian and French artists. The archive of digitized works of the Hermitage is divided by topic, there is a convenient search, it is possible to create your own collection and view the collections of other users. On the “In Focus” section page, you can study the exhibits in detail, read detailed information about them and watch videos with expert comments.

British Museum (London)

Large gold buckle; early Anglo-Saxon period, early 7th century; burial mound necropolis of Sutton Hoo.

The main historical and archaeological museum of Great Britain and one of the largest museums in the world, the second most visited among art museums after the Louvre, has posted more than 3.5 million exhibits online.

The colonial expansion of the British Empire contributed to the rapid expansion of the collection of the country's main and first public national museum in the world. Since the mid-18th century, it has managed to collect more than 8 million exhibits: from ancient Greek bas-reliefs to Hirst prints. It is here that the Rosetta Stone, thanks to which it was possible to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, is kept, the largest collection of Chinese porcelain in the West, and the richest collection of engravings and paintings of the Renaissance. The British Museum's online collection is also one of the largest in the world, with more than 3.5 million items on its website. An advanced search is available by date of creation, technique of execution and a dozen more parameters.

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)

Group of thirteen “beheaded” soldiers / author unknown (1910)

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, the largest art museum in the United States and one of the most celebrated museums in the world, has made publicly available a collection of nearly 400,000 high-resolution digitized works of art and vintage photographs. .

Anyone can look at the most interesting retro photographs from the museum collection. The images are not licensed for commercial use, but you can download the frame you like for your own needs, for example, to place it in a frame.

Vincent Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)

The Van Gogh Museum has made available online 1,800 posters, books and drawings from its collection. The management of the art institution published the works due to the fact that they did not fit into the permanent collection, which is why they remained inaccessible to the general public for a long time.

Today, I am pleased to present to you the best selection of domestic and foreign virtual museums and exhibitions.

A virtual museum is a kind of visual guide to a museum that allows you to visit the exhibition halls of famous museums without leaving your computer monitors.

Let's start, sir.

Thanks to this site, you can take a full tour with a guide around the Hermitage, without problems, moving from room to room, using easy and convenient navigation.

With the help of the soundtrack of our famous actor Alexei Batalov, you can take a tour of the Kremlin buildings. Also, you will be presented with beautiful views of the Kremlin from different points.

This is perhaps one of the most advanced virtual museums in the world, and is somewhat reminiscent of a 3D computer game. Using a virtual tour of the Louvre, you can receive comprehensive information about all the objects that interest you. Also, you can closely and carefully examine any picture.

On the White House website, by choosing a virtual tour, you can get acquainted with the interior of the building - the refuge of American presidents. Also, you will see photographs of the interiors, descriptions of all rooms, 3D images of the Oval Office.

An excellent site for those people who do not yet have high-speed Internet. Even with slow Internet, you can visit the halls of Egypt, Japan, Latin America, Asia and Europe of one of the most famous museums in Europe.

The New York Museum is one of the most famous museums dedicated to everything related to film, television and video games.

The history of television and radio is also the history of national culture, the history of our country, and therefore rich, interesting and attractive. The virtual museum “Radio and Television” is dedicated to these topics.

Without exaggeration, the most famous wax museum, Madame Tussauds, invites you to take a most interesting virtual tour of its halls. Here you will find figures of the world's most famous actors, singers, presidents and politicians.

Everything is moving, everything is moving forward. With the development of scientific and technological progress in our world, a huge number of all kinds of wonderful changes occur that shock society. Progress has also reached art. Today we will talk about virtual museums of the world.

What is a virtual museum?

It's actually easier to show than to tell. Take for example such a world-famous museum as. On our website you can read detailed information about this museum, but more accurate information will be provided by the official website of the museum, which you can visit at (https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/). We go to this site and find there such a link as “virtual visit” - it sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

After we follow the link provided above, we will be able to fully, virtually, enjoy any of the museum’s halls, and we will even be able to observe the view from the roof of this museum. Of course, many will ask how is all this organized? Is there really a big difference? The main thing is that now we can, anywhere in the world, calmly, using the Internet, enjoy beautiful paintings kindly provided by the developers of the Hermitage website.

Why are virtual museums needed?

Virtual museums there are a huge variety in the world, and if you are a creative person who appreciates art, then a virtual visit will save you both time and money, and you will get no less pleasure! Enjoy your virtual walks.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot when talking about virtual museums of the world, it would simply be stupid not to mention the project that was launched by the Google search engine itself. This is a truly brilliant project (https://artsandculture.google.com/). Be sure to visit this site. You can find almost any museum in the world there. It is possible to select a language. The project is very young and continues to develop. Google, as we all know, is a very serious company, and they took the time to devote it to such important topics as art and culture, for which we thank them very much!

The development of the Internet, databases and multimedia technologies has allowed the phenomenon of the virtual museum to occupy its niche in the world of culture and art in the intangible information space. Virtual museums appeared in the 90s of the last century and have been actively continuing their development since then. Online museums have some advantages over regular museums. The virtual museum is open around the clock on weekends and holidays, and you can use it absolutely free. There are no queues for tickets, and visiting time is not limited. Exhibitions in a virtual museum can last for years, and the exhibits retain their original condition and do not deteriorate under any circumstances.

In a virtual museum, exhibits from different real-life museums can coexist, and the number of exhibits is not limited by the volume of premises and storage rooms, as is the case in real museums. Visitors to such museums can take virtual walks through the halls of the museum, get acquainted with its collections, and in some museums they can view exhibits from all sides using 3D models, and guides are successfully replaced by audio recordings of excursions or information certificates. In addition, some museums contain large amounts of additional information (including films, audio recordings, animations) or links to it, which allows you to study the issue in more detail.

The main goal of a virtual museum is no different from the goal of a real museum - it is to educate people and familiarize them with the world heritage of human history and culture. Of course, it will be difficult for true connoisseurs to replace the original on the wall in a museum with a photograph on the Internet, but for many categories of people, a virtual museum is an opportunity to see masterpieces, at least through a monitor screen. We are talking about people who cannot afford to travel to another city or country to visit a museum, or about people with limited physical capabilities. Virtual museums are of great importance for scientists and researchers in the field of cultural studies, history, and art history, since they need constant open access to works, sometimes located on different ends of the planet.

Virtual museums, like “material” ones, store cultural heritage, only it is in electronic digitized form. Digitization sometimes becomes the only opportunity to see the original of an exhibit - some ancient and dilapidated objects are always stored in storage rooms protected from external influences, and copies are put on display for visitors. In addition, the digitized tome can be “flipped through” completely, and in the museum viewers will be shown only an open book under glass, without the ability to read other pages. Digitization serves another important purpose - the restoration and restoration of cultural heritage damaged or completely lost as a result of natural disasters, wars, and terrorist attacks. This applies not only to individual objects, but also to entire buildings, park ensembles and other larger categories of cultural and historical monuments.

The concept of “virtual museum” in a broad sense has two meanings:

Representation of a real-life museum on the Internet;

A true virtual museum, that is, a resource that stores and displays collections of works, materials, etc. for everyone to see. in the museum space, located exclusively on the Internet.

The first meaning is widespread throughout the world. Almost every famous museum has virtual tours of buildings, reviews of exhibits, virtual tours of individual exhibitions, that is, an electronic version of a real museum or part of it. As a rule, a virtual trip can be made directly on the official website of the museum. This way you can get acquainted with the masterpieces of the Paris Louvre, the New York Guggenheim Museum, take a virtual walk through the George Washington Museum Mount Vernon or get into the White House. There are excellent virtual tours on the website of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington and on the Hermitage website. Virtual collections of exhibits can be found on the website of the Moscow Kremlin museums, the Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin and many other Russian and foreign museums. In addition to virtual tours, official websites contain announcements of exhibitions, up-to-date information on ticket prices, museum hours and operating hours, an online store, a map and much more. In this context, the virtual museum serves to attract visitors to the real museum. There are also sites that host virtual tours, for example, for Russian museums these are the sites http://www.panotours.ru/ or http://www.culture.ru/.

Virtual tour of the Tsarskoye Selo Museum-Reserve. ( http://www.culture.ru )

The Google Culture Institute and its Google Arts&Culture project have made a global contribution to the development of electronic culture. The project started in 2011 and now provides access to a huge collection of exhibits from hundreds of private collections, archives and museums located around the world. There are 3 sections on the site - “Art”, “History” and “Wonders of the World”, so here you can not only see digitized copies of world masterpieces, but also virtually visit the most famous museums and historical monuments like Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids. Photo panoramas with a 360-degree view are made in excellent quality, which allows you to see the smallest details, and the filter system helps you find the necessary material according to various criteria - artists, movements, techniques, objects, and even the main color.

Prague National Theatre, Czech Republic. ( https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute )

“Virtual museum” in the second meaning does not have a real museum on the basis of which it could be based, but at the same time it has its own structure, collection of exhibits, catalogs and much more, that is, in fact, the structure of a virtual museum can serve as a framework for a virtual museum. material" museum. The virtual museum also has some idea or theme of the exhibits, on the basis of which it is “built” and developed. The implementation of a virtual museum is an information resource (usually a website, web page, disk) intended for the presentation of museum materials, which has expanded capabilities for their search and classification, additional interactive and multimedia means of demonstrating works. Such virtual museums are created by cultural institutions, schools, universities, libraries, and private commercial organizations. The topics of virtual museums can be very different - historical (Hampson Virtual Museum - virtual archaeological museum, Virtual Museum of the Gulag), artistic (Virtual Museum of Canada, Europeana - electronic collection of European art and printing, MOCA: Museum of Computer Art), educational (Virtual Museum computer science, Museum of Television and Radio on the Internet, Virtual Computer Museum, Thngs.co Museum of Things, NASA educational project), entertainment (Virtual Museum of Steam Locomotives, The Virtual Shoe Museum).

NASA Virtual Museum. ( http://www.nasa.gov )

Any virtual museum must provide good quality content (digitization, photography and video recording), meaningful exhibitions (the presence of metadata, information and historical references, audio guides), focus on the general public and ease of interface, navigation, and search for the necessary data. All these components transform an ordinary website with a set of photographs into a virtual museum. As for clear rules for organizing virtual museums, for example, in Russia in 2014, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation released “Technical recommendations for creating virtual museums.” They mainly relate to the representation of real museums on the Internet, but some of these recommendations can also be used when creating a museum based exclusively in virtual space. Thus, the recommendations establish the minimum acceptable resolution of photographs on the short side of 800-2000 pixels, the encoding format is JPEG or JPEG-2000, for panoramic photos the viewing angle along the horizontal axis should be 360 ​​degrees and along the vertical axis - 180 degrees, it is recommended to use integration with social networks and etc. The result of creating a virtual museum should be an information and educational resource that stores the historical and cultural heritage and presents it to visitors in excellent quality.

Virtual museums have great potential, which has not yet been fully appreciated in Russia. Digital cultural heritage is becoming increasingly important, and the time is not far off when it will become a separate art form, like cinema or computer games. And the latest technologies - virtual and augmented reality, panoramic video - will in the future make visiting a virtual museum almost real.

Google's Cultural Institute is an exemplary example of a modern virtual museum. Started in 2011 as a project dedicated exclusively to art museums, the resource now includes a section on history, as well as the most amazing places on the planet. In addition to viewing high-resolution pictures, the site offers a virtual tour with an impressive interface and audio guide. Here you can see sites such as galleryTate in London, galleryUffizi , Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Uzey Orsay in Paris, Royal Museum in Amsterdam and others. Recently Google digitized the last Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. A project about street art from around the world deserves special attention Street Art.

Guggenheim Museum

But most famous museums today consider it necessary to form a virtual collection on the Internet, once again confirming their ownership of masterpieces and distributing high-quality reproductions of their paintings. In particular, the Guggenheim Museum has created an online collection with a convenient category by name and direction, thus uniting the collections of all four cities where the museum is located, and other projects of the Guggenheim Foundation. The virtual museum includes many options: among other things, it is an informative site with lectures and videos on various topics.

Virtual tours of the Paris Louvre

The Louvre is not represented in the Google cultural project (discussed above); it prefers to develop its own online platform. On its website, the museum allows you to walk through several rooms. The foot of the walls of the royal palace on the first floor of the museum, the hall with relics of antiquity and Ancient Egypt can be seen in the form of a virtual panorama.

Oxford History and Science Museum

On the website of one of the world's most famous science museums you can see photographs and panoramas of the exhibitions. All this is part of one big virtual Oxford tour . One of the notable exhibits of the virtual museum is the board on which Einstein wrote during his famous lecture at the university in 1931. A whole nostalgic project has been created on the museum website Goodbye board! » , which featured British celebrities like Brian Eno and Robert May. It turned out nice.

Virtual George Washington Museum Mount Vernon

Free walk through the cradle of American democracy - the George Washington Museum Mount Vernon. The place where America's first president worked and lived has been digitized by the museum's creators with incredible care. A detailed online tour with photographs, information blocks, and an audio guide in English is also supported by a video with actors in costumes of the late 18th century. Everything to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of a historical place.

Virtual Museum of Things Thngs.co

The young project, which has already won recognition among IT industry specialists and ordinary users, will appeal to those who are interested in the history of things and are inclined to create their own collections. The authors themselves call their site a Facebook for things. Each item or category of items has its own timeline, where you can track the evolution of the object from a historical perspective. The viewer is offered only facts: year, place and appearance. The focus on objectivity and simplicity sets this project apart from others. In particular, it will help to verify this selection items of Soviet heritage. The project was launched recently, but promises to develop and grow rapidly.

Europeana Project

Rather, this is a project of an encyclopedic nature, but due to the emphasis on visual culture, it deserves the title of a museum. The resource allows the user to go on a real virtual tour of a subject that interests him, be it bicycles of the early 20th century, antique vases or postcards with views of St. Petersburg. You just need to enter the data, the era - and the resource will provide a list of images, texts, videos and audio tracks to help make the perception of the subject as voluminous and complete as possible.

World Digital Library

Similar to Europeana, but already Russified, the World Digital Library project can also provide useful facts and images on any topic. The site is aesthetically pleasing and easy to use, so you can get stuck for a long time studying legislation from the times of Kievan Rus or the chronicle of the 1947 US Baseball Championship out of simple curiosity.

National Museum of Natural History in Washington

The American National Museum of Natural History allows you to walk through the halls and examine in detail the fossils of ancient creatures, collections of insects and birds, and even Egyptian mummies presented in the exhibition. Basically, immerse yourself in the history of natural history, even if you don't have the opportunity to visit a museum in real life. The site also has a large section with interactive materials and videos on topics.

NASA Museum

Fans of space themes cannot ignore this virtual project dedicated to the history of the world-famous US space agency. The launch of the resource was timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the organization in 2008. In addition to the successes of the American astronautics, the technical details of spaceship construction and launching of spacecraft are quite clearly shown here, and a good-natured robot will show you what to click on next.