The Google Art Project offers those who don't or can't travel an opportunity to visit some of the world's great museums. Even for someone like me who's visited seven of the featured museums, the site promises the kind of visit I typically cannot enjoy: a people-less long gaze.
At the Uffizi eleven years ago, my family and I could linger in the wide hall leading to the Ponte Vecchio, but when inside a room with a well-known work, like Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, we were penned into a one-person deep line moving at what felt like breakneck speed. Many years earlier, when I first stood before Van Gogh's Starry Night, other folks elbowed me constantly, as if I had no right to plant myself beside the painting they barely glimpsed.
In my experience, most museum-goers are like rubberneckers on the highway: they look at the work, read the maker's name, then move on to the next masterpiece. Not me. I linger and return to linger again before the works that capture my imagination. I study brushstroke, the play of light on marble, the angularity of a line. On seeing something familiar for the first time in the "flesh," I even gasp, as I did a bit too audibly when I rounded the corner at the Galleria Borghese into the visual embrace of Bernini, or cry as I did in his Cornaro Chapel.
I marvel at what others make, and now I can marvel from my desk chair, remembering visits in the flesh and imagining others to come. Thank you, Google, for the gift of extended pleasure you offer.
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