Dresden Gallery - The Inside

Gulp! I'm almost speechless... but that's not much use to you, gentle reader, if you want a blog post to read. Following on from my last post, this is the inside of the Dresden Gallery in Second Life.

The inside is even more stunning than the outside. The detail of the rendering is amazing, and its blending with SL objects is seamless. First off, let's look at the interior architecture:


Gob-smacking.... to employ the common parlance. I had had doubts that they have squeezed all 750 art works into the building - but I am not so sure now. The building is stuffed full of art works, many of them familiar, and spanning centuries of painting - no sculptures as far as I can tell. And as with the architecture, the level of detail is incredible. First, here's a couple of general views of a couple of the rooms:


Now let's look in a bit more detail:


Each painting has a notecard, with the name of the artist and the work, along with the dates. Many have an "audio" logo (see middle picture). If you click on this, it brings up a webpage that streams an English language description about the work selected - just as if you had an audio guide in a RL gallery.

Even the freeloaders are not forgotten - with 2 t-shirts available. One is of the Raphael angels, a detail from his Sistine Madonna. You know the one... often seen in a photoshopped form, with one of them smoking a cigarette? Oh, come on... you do know it.

In general I am not a huge fan of recreations of existing buildings in Second Life. But this is one, of many, for which I will make an exception. I think this is just stunning. It is the high level of detail that is crucial here. It is high enough to allow you to get a good feel for the paintings, indeed you can get closer to them than you probably can in RL. As such, I strikes me that this provides a powerful education resource - as well as being a pleasure simply to wander around. Nothing modern I'm afraid - but then, that's what the RL gallery is like, I assume.

My only regret is I didn't find the Caspar David Friedrich paintings that I believe are hiding in here somewhere.