Priceless artefacts, up close and personal

Often times, visits to the museums of Qatar – for both people who live in Qatar and the tourists – doesn’t allow for an actual up, close, and personal look at the objects due to constraints related to time or purely the physical distance from those artefacts.With the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art being part of the fascinating Google Cultural Institute’s Google Art Project, the rarest, most precious objects in these museums’ collection can be viewed endlessly in stunning detail on your laptop.A technological revolution that has democratised the world’s culture to everyone who is culturally curious, The Google Cultural Institute develops projects in partnership with hundreds of museums, cultural institutions and archives to host the world’s cultural treasures online. An art digitisation scheme by the Institute, the Google Art Project, it says, is “a unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art institutions to enable people to discover and view artworks online in extraordinary detail.”Exactly four Aprils ago, Qatar joined the online platform with the inclusion of more than 250 works from the MIA and Mathaf. Today, with the addition of more features and more works, exploring the museums via the Art Project is a sheer delight. While the ultra-high resolution allows you to discover the tiniest details, options such as the Museum View lets you take a walk around inside the museum and its farthest corners – and you don’t have to worry about bumping someone along the way.“Set in the MIA Park on the waterfront, the museum building stands out as an architectural gem. Once inside, you will see masterpieces of Islamic art, including metalwork, ceramics, jewellery, woodwork, textiles and glass, collected from three continents and dating from the 7th to the 19th century,” the Art Project introduces MIA, before handholding the viewer into the Museum View and a close look at the objects.There is the visually resplendent Gem-Set Gold Coffee Cup Holder (1800-1900) from Turkey, for instance. A testament to both the jeweller’s craft and the patron’s wealth, the coffee cup holder stands out for its “lavish use of rubies”, which indicates a patron of considerable means and suggests that the piece must have been made to order.“The sheer amount of wastage involved in cutting and re-cutting each individual stone shows that the patron had money to burn. Added to this, every stone must have been cut according to the final shape and placing of the previous ones. This would involve the piece being passed between stone-cutter and setter innumerable times, the whole process probably taking several months to complete,” the description alongside the picture of the object on the Art Project says, “The Ottomans tended to drink coffee out of thimble-shaped, handle-less porcelain cups. As these vessels would become very hot once the coffee was poured in, a zarf (envelope) would be required to protect the delicate fingertips. In contrast to the plain cup, the zarf would often be extremely ornate, reflecting the owner’s wealth and good taste.”Be it an illuminated page from the Jahangir Album from the 16th or 17th Century Iran, an Engraved Gem Set Gold Box from 16th Century India, a Figurine of Cow and Calf from early 13th Century Iran, or a Mosaic Tile Panel from 14th Century Spain, the stories jump out in all their vividness on Google Cultural Institute’s virtual hosting of MIA objects.When she was down in Doha last month for a panel discussion at The New York Times ‘Art for Tomorrow’ conference, Giorgia Abeltino, Director of Public Policy, Google Cultural Institute, told Community that the visitor is at the centre of this project. “Any person in the world, even if he or she is unable to travel to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam or the Uffizi Gallery museum in Florence, will be able to access that content, see the paintings and objects in amazing detail, and enjoy it,” she explained, “Of course, the museums will stay where they are but the point here is to allow people access to those content from wherever they are. As a result of this, people will be willing to travel to Florence and to Amsterdam. But those who won’t be able to travel will at least have the opportunity to access culture.”