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The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced made more than 400,000 images of art in the Museum’s collection free to download. Before that, we also witnessed other major art museums launching their own open art initiatives: 87,000 images from the Getty in L.A., 125,000 Dutch masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, 35,000 artistic images from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and 57,000 works of art put on virtual display by Google Art Project.

“Art Project,” which gives you access to more than 1,000 works of art appearing in 17 great museums across the world. Using Google’s Street View technology, you can now tour collections at the MoMA and Met in New York City, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery in London – just to name a few museums now virtually open to you. And you can visit countless paintings, some rendered in super high resolution. (We’re talking 7 billion pixels!) Take for example, Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl (see above) or Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. When you view Van Gogh’s painting, make sure you zoom in and look at the brushwork.