“Water Lilies” is the second-most-popular cellphone wallpaper sold by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which opened a new digital-images shop in September. This so-called ‘On the Go’-service is only the latest future-shock innovation at the museum, a civilized institution that has nonetheless adopted what one tech reporter scarily described as a policy of “aggressive digital-capture.”

Having taken high-resolution photos of 350,000 works in its collection, and having magnanimously made almost all of them all searchable on its Web site, the M.F.A. now has one of the biggest image databases of any art museum in the world.

Read article (New York Times, December 2, 2007)

Since October, The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous, probably the most discussed and most controversial work of the Italian master, declared a World Heritage work of art and registered at the UNESCO worldwide sites, can be seen by all, in all its details, on the website of HAL9000, an organization providing tools for works of art restoration and viewing.

The online visualisation system of the highest definition photograph ever in the world (16 billion pixels) in fact lets viewers enlarge and observe any portion of the painting, giving them a clear view of sections down to as little as one millimetre square.

Go to the website of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, which houses The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci.