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.

Dresden Gallery

I was planning on writing about a truly extraordinary (or certainly strange) piece of German art, to be found on the ZKM sim... part of a group of sims celebrating the German region of Baden-Württemberg, which includes the cities of Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Ulm and Freiberg (in the Black Forest). However, as happens from time to time, I found myself unable to come up with the verbal goods to provide an adequate explanation. But while I was in the neighbourhood, I did spot the Dresden Gallery cluster of sims, so went for a poke about.

Only one of the cluster is actually built on as yet. However, as the website informs us, this is a chance to "visit one of the world’s most famous museums, the Old Masters Picture Gallery of the Dresden State Art Collections. There you can view great masterpieces of key importance for the history of art, such as Raphael’s 'Sistine Madonna' or Giorgione’s 'Sleeping Venus'. All the rooms of the museum have been reconstructed true to scale on the Dresden Gallery island and all 750 masterpieces in the permanent exhibition are on display."

I have not yet had an opportunity to explore the inside - but to whet the appetite, here are some pictures of the grounds:


I have to say, it's an impressive build, with a lot of effort having gone into the photo-rendering of the building facades. Real textures and virtual objects are blended very subtly here, to great effect. But next, I plan to try and find the 750 art works!

Interesting that they've opted for a 1:1 scale. SL Architect chums inform me that this is not a good idea, as we tend to be bigger in SL, and make more room for one another than in real life.

As for ZKM, the sim I mentioned at the start of this post, I really think you should give it ago - as long as your idea of Art is not limited to, say, Raphael or Giorgione.