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Spain’s Prado Museum and Google offer close-up views of art treasures

MADRID (AP) – Spain’s Prado Museum has teamed up with Google Earth in a unique project that allows art enthusiasts to zoom in on the gallery’s main works.

The initiative involves 14 paintings, including Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas, Francisco de Goya’s Third of May and Peter Paul Rubens’ The Three Graces.

The project is the first of its kind involving an art museum. It allows a viewer from anywhere in the world to focus tiny sections of the works and even detect details not immediately discernible to the human eye.

Google Spain director Javier Rodriguez Zapatero says the images are 1,400 times clearer than what would be rendered with a 10-megapixel camera.

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