this is Collection of Beauty, a walkable, multi-floor 3D museum, based on a collection of art that I handpicked with 4000+ works.
History: I've spent some time earlier this year just browsing Wikipedia public domain art for literally hours on end, downloading everything that I liked or appreciated, just asking myself do I find this beautiful on some level?
The result is this... Well, not quite ^^
In the end I had a large folder with a bunch of images in it that begged the question: can I make this more useful somehow? Like, it's nice to have all these images sitting on my hard disk somehow but I want to share this with other people as a Collection of Beauty. But they were just images, nothing else.
A bit of wrangling with AI later and now this website exists. It has a 3D museum you can walk through, with multiple floors. The images are displayed at their real sizes relative to one another and the room layouts etc. And yes, the Mona Lisa is that small ^^
Luckily Wikimedia file names can be reverse searched and therefore I had access to the entire Wikimedia metadata against each of the images to sort them and create a metadata catalogue that allows for different ways of slicing through the images, like showing things like: "similar artists", "other artists the artist knew personally", or just "epoch/style" related ideas. I also sorted paintings by color on one of the sub pages, because I thought that would be nifty.
If you find something that is clearly in the wrong epoch or by the wrong artist or the wrong size, has a wrong title or whatever, please file an issue on GitHub (https://github.com/trebeljahr/collection-of-beauty).
Also I know of this other project that did something similar (though they mapped literally all art that ever existed), but I swear I had this idea on my own, sometimes different people come up with the same stuff. https://artmuseum.artfrompixels.com/ When a friend sent this to me, I took some inspiration though and made the frames and lighting and general 3D experience much more beautiful as well. I also had to facepalm myself and whisper: "why didn't I think of this myself," and then added some (public domain or freely licensed) music playing in the background as you look at the paintings.
The whole thing is deployed with Cloudflare workers because it's 90% static and Cloudflare has very very generous free tiers.
Also credit where credit is due, the set of flowers from Redoute is from https://www.c82.net/redoute/ one of my favorite websites of all time ^^
Under the hood the image rendering in the 3D walkthrough does something cool with LOD texture variants where rooms determine when to load each painting's resolution based on a bunch of heuristics, keeping the experience relatively lightweight and fast (hopefully). It should load the really big scans only if you jam up your nose right into a painting.
If some beautiful but more modern art is missing (MC Escher?!) then this is because of copyright issues. There are quite a few artists whose work I would love to include in here but where there is still copyright on the images and therefore I can't afaik.
Also, if you have more Public Domain art, that you personally really like, please share that with me too, would love to include more stuff in here (if I like it ofc ^^). Link to Wikipedia, name of the artist to check out, name of the painting, etc.