Chicago's Art Institute offers super-zoomed look at iconic paintings

If you love fine art but can't visit the Art Institute of Chicago in person, you can still see iconic paintings by the greats up close. Very close. 

One of the oldest and largest art museums in the US, the Art Institute of Chicago revealed a new website design that puts more than 52,000 high-resolution images from its collection online. The museum houses some of the most famous paintings from artists including Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Katsushika Hokusai, Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper. 

The Art Institute's new website lets online visitors zoom in to see things they might have missed if they walked through the museum in person. 

"We've ... enhanced the image viewing capabilities on object pages, which means that you can see much greater detail on objects than before," Michael Neault, executive creative director of The Art Institute of Chicago, said in a blog post. "Check out the paint strokes in Vincent Van Gogh's The Bedroom, the charcoal details on Charles White's Harvest Talk or the synaesthetic richness of Georgia O'Keeffe's Blue and Green Music." 

He's right. Just zooming in on the high-res image of van Gogh's 1889 painting The Bedroom, I can see every single vibrantly colored brushstroke. I can also practically smell the oil paint.

The images are available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, and can be downloaded for free. 

Art lovers can also read digital catalogs of past exhibits, reference materials, and other resources including artists' and architects' papers.

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