Let’s get very, very close.
One pixel.
0.005 mm of paint.
Scroll from the whole painting into a single square millimeter.
Start with
the whole thing.
The Night Watch, by Rembrandt. There’s a lot to look at. We’re heading for a very small part.
Overview reproduction
1 mm × 1 mm
This tiny patch.
40,000 pixels.
At the museum’s image resolution, 200 pixels fit along each edge. That’s 200 × 200.
Enlarged scale diagram begins here.0.005 mm × 0.005 mm
And this?
One pixel.
Each pixel in the museum photograph represents a patch of paint just five thousandths of a millimeter wide.
Magnified diagram, not a paint photograph.A very big photograph.
For very small details.
717 billionpixels in the photograph
8,439photographs stitched together
The zoom moves from an overview reproduction to mathematical diagrams. It does not display the museum’s full-resolution scan.
The receipts
Rijksmuseum, January 2022 ↗
The museum reports 717 gigapixels, 8,439 photographs, and 0.005 mm per pixel side. Calculation: 1 ÷ 0.005 = 200 pixels per edge; 200 × 200 = 40,000 per square millimeter. Overview reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. The diagram colors do not represent sampled paint.