Virtual tours: Art and culture for home: With just a few clicks through the best museums in the world
When we can travel again is in the stars, and the museums will remain closed until further notice. This does not mean that we have to acidify in our own four walls: on the Internet we can go on a discovery tour in the world's most famous museums.
The trip was planned for a long time, the hotels booked, the tickets paid – and now you are not sitting in the evening light on the Seine and mocking the visitors of the Louvre, who are in the crowd for the best selfie with da Vinci's Mona Lisa to step. Thanks to Corona, we can only imagine ourselves on vacation instead. Or let us take you virtually on a trip to the most exciting museums in the world.
FOCUS Online presents a number of museums that bring distraction into your own four walls and so can satisfy the wanderlust a little.
1.) Louvre and Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The third largest museum in the world, the Louvre in Paris, offers visitors various virtual tours, for example through the Small Gallery, which houses works by Delacroix, Rembrandt and Tintoretto. The Egyptian pharaohs collection with its Sphinx statue and the Apollo gallery with the French crown jewels can also be admired from the screen.
Art lovers can also click through the museum's extensive digital archive on the louvre.fr website. And via the Youvisit platform, exhibition rooms, halls and the exterior architecture of both the historic building and the famous glass pyramid can be admired in 360 degrees.
The virtual tour of the is also worthwhile Musée d'Orsay at the former Gare d’Orsay station. The 16,000 square meter exhibition house boasts the largest impressionist collection in the world: there are more than 4,000 exhibits from the period between 1848 and 1914 on display. The art project "Google Arts & Culture" takes you past originals by van Gogh or Monet. Of course you can also see the famous station clock from 1900.
2.) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or Met for short, is a must on any New York visit. The Met offers the best virtual museum tour there is. Your award-winning project "Met 360 Degrees" takes Internet users, whether on a laptop or smartphone, in six videos with them through the impressive halls and galleries of the Art Museum – more than eleven million people have already called them up. It starts in the magnificent entrance hall of the Met, designed in 1902 by the architect Richard Morris Hunt.
3.) British Museum and National Gallery, London
Two million years of cultural history in one place: That British Museum Central London is one of the most important cultural history museums in the world. There are 45 online exhibitions and three museum views to explore at Google Arts & Culture. To see among other things: The heart of the collection – the world-famous Rosette stone, which has been preserved in the British Museum since 1802.
The National Gallery London's busy Trafalgar Square contains more than 2,300 works of art, including classics by Paul Cézanne, Jan von Eyk, Hans Holbein, Rembrandt and William Turner, one of the most important English Romantic painters. Those interested can view twelve online exhibitions, for example on “Monets London”, at Google Arts & Culture. Or you can go on a discovery tour yourself.
4.) Vatican Museums, Rome
It has seven tours that can even be experienced with VR glasses Vatican Museum on offer in Rome. It starts with the Museo Pio Clementino, which contains the original core of the papal collection of classical sculptures. Art lovers can also explore the Raphael rooms in the Apostolic apartments, the Nicolino chapel with its famous frescoes, the Chiaroscuri hall in the former Borgia apartments and the Museo Chiaramonti with its approximately one thousand sculptures, imperial portraits and sarcophagi.
The virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo's world-famous frescoes, including the "Creation of Adam", should not be missing.
Visitors can easily enlarge pictures of the frescoes or statues on the computer and thus recognize details that are difficult to notice during a real visit.
5.) Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The Uffizi, Medici family treasury, contain one of the oldest art collections in the world. Classics from the 13th to the 18th century can be discovered in 50 halls, including works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Tizian and Caravaggio. The Uffizi have made photos of the exhibits in high resolution with a lot of information accessible in online exhibitions (for example on Easter history) on their website.
6.) Albertina, Vienna
The Vienna Art Museum Albertina in the Archduke Albrecht Palace has one of the largest graphic collections in the world. The roughly one million works that provide an overview of the history of art from the 15th to the 21st centuries include Dürer's famous sheets “Brown Hare” and “Hands folded in prayer”.
With the help of the free app Artivive art lovers can now experience the Albertina collection from home – there are 225,000 works to discover in the online collection. If you want to learn more about a particular work, you just have to point your smartphone in front of the picture and then you will be shown further information.
Every week, FOCUS Online provides you with the most important news from the travel department. Here you can subscribe to the newsletter.
7.) Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum is the Dutch national museum and houses the most extensive art collection in the country. The focus is on the works of Dutch masters. The best known include "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt and Vermeer's "Maid with milk jug". There are a total of 80 galleries with 8,000 exhibits that show 800 years of Dutch art history, and through which visitors can stroll virtually.
8.) Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City
Also Frida Kahlo's place of life and work La Casa Azul ("The Blue House") in Mexico City, now an art museum, is worth a tour. At the click of a mouse, interested parties can get an impression of the place where the painter, who had contracted polio at the age of seven and later had a serious accident, lived, worked and finally died. Google Arts & Culture takes you virtually through your garden, your kitchen and your studio.
9.) Bode Museum, Berlin
Museums in Germany are also open for virtual tours. The Bode Museum in Berlin, which is home to the Byzantine Museum and a large sculpture collection of the State Museums Berlin, has been offering a 360-degree tour of its own rooms since the end of 2015.
Users move through the magnificent rooms of the house, over red carpets and marble floors to almost all exhibition rooms. With a click of the mouse you get more information about the individual rooms and exhibits. All 850 sculptures and paintings on display can be seen here online.
10.) Städel Museum, Frankfurt
The Frankfurter offers a comprehensive insight into the exhibitions and the collection of its own house Städel Museum. In the digital collection, interested parties can stroll through 700 years of art history or search specifically for a work of art.
With the so-called digitorials, which provide background information on the art and cultural-historical context, past special exhibitions (for example "Making van Gogh") can be explored again. There is also an online course where participants can refresh their knowledge of art history.
11.) German Museum, Munich
There is a lot to discover here: The Deutsches Museum shines with interactive audio tours through ship, air and space travel with 360-degree photographs. Round trips through space and lessons on Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Earth satellites are on offer.
maki