The eerie secrets of masterpieces revealed - PHOTO

Nothing quite stirs the emotions like walking into a gallery to see an original masterpiece.Seeing that same piece on a digital screen may not have the same effect until now, but one Spanish group claims iPad art-viewing could give a greater insight than you might think.Madrid’s famous gallery, Museo del Prado, has released an iOS app that allows you to peel away layers of famous paintings to uncover the intimate, and often frightening, secrets lurking beneath.The app ‘Second Canvas Museo del Prado’ brings together ancient paintings with modern technology to explore 14 of the famous gallery’s most celebrated masterpieces. It aims to do away with the velvet rope holding people back in galleries allowing anyone peer into the depths of a canvas and see details that would otherwise go unnoticed.An X-ray function reveals the layers of paint and the construction of the canvases, while infrared vision exposes the artists’ sketches beneath, which can often be drastically different to the final painting.For instance, zooming into the face of Saint John the Evangelist from Rogier van der Weyden’s 'Descent from the Cross' reveals tears rolling down his cheeks.Looking at the painting through the infrared function shows a splash of blood across his throat that van der Weyden later removed.The X-ray vision function also reveals Velázquez originally painted María Agustina de Sarmiento, handmaiden of the Infanta Margarita in Las Meninas, had a much larger nose.In 'Descent from the Cross', painted for the chapel of the crossbowmen’s guild in Leuven, Belgium, zooming in to the highest level reveals tiny crossbows in the very top left and right corners.People have often thought that the shape of Christ’s body in the painting is positioned like a crossbow too, revealing intriguing hidden symbolism.The incredible skill of this painting is also evident when you zoom in, the tears on the Virgin Mary’s face look like water on the canvas.Meanwhile, 'Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes' had at one time been thought to picture Artemisia, Queen of Pergamon, about to drink the ashes of her dead husband.However, the infrared view reveals that there was originally another figure in the painting, waiting with a sack to for the enemy general’s head, identifying the main figure as Judith.The museum created giga-pixel images of the paintings five years ago including the Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch and Self-Portrait by Dürer.To do this they combined thousands of high-resolution images to create one giant image of 1,000,000,000 or more pixels. This means the user can see the image in unprecedented detail.The app lets users zoom in and out to read the explanations of the key symbolic details of each painting.As well as exploring the works of art, users can interact with them, choosing their favourite detail to share with friends online.Gabriele Finaldi, deputy director of the museum, believes it provides a new level of understanding of the artwork, but that the app is not intended to replace looking at the original.‘What we're presenting with this app is the opportunity to get right up close, taking you by the hand to show you details you might never notice,’ he said.‘Visitors in the gallery can spend a minute, even just half a minute, looking at a picture. With the app you can explore every centimetre of the work of art in your own time on your iPad, leading to a deeper understanding of how it was created and every detail the artist included.’Madpixel, the developers behind the app, hope to work with further galleries and museums to roll the technology out globally.(dailymail.co.uk)Bakudaily.az