Now, a 360° virtual tour of Victoria Memorial

KOLKATA: From Thursday, just a click of the mouse will take you inside Victoria Memorial, the marble masterpiece that stands as a monument to British rule in the Indian subcontinent. From the farthest corners of the world, visitors will be able to stroll the elegant museum's familiar galleries and halls, stop, read up and move on.

Kolkata's must-visit tourist attraction will go completely digital on May 18, the day the worldwide community of museums will celebrate as International Museum Day.

The project is the result of a tie-up between Victoria Memorial and Google. The latter is bringing alive a virtual 360-degree walk through the memorial's galleries in Google Street View mode. It will be part of

Google Arts

and Culture, the inter net giant's online platform that allows visitors to access high-resolution images of artwork housed inside partner museums, either by walking through the museums or just static visits to designated collections.

The ministry of culture has given formal permission to the Victoria Memorial authorities to allow Google to de sign this virtual tour, paying attention to every detail of artwork on permanent display and even those that are preserved in the reserve collection of the museum.

Google has finished digitizing all six famed groundfloor halls -Portrait Gallery, Entrance Hall, Central Hall, Prince Hall, Durbar Hall (famous for its larger-than-lifesized oil paintings) and Calcutta Gallery -and is ready to go live on Thursday. This will be the third museum in the country run by the ministry of culture to go virtual, the first two being the

National Museum

and the

National Gallery of Modern Art

, both in New Delhi. Along with the digital walk on the ground floor, there are three prized collections of Victoria Memorial that have also been digitized and will be on view at Google Arts and Culture -paintings by Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore and those by Thomas and

William Daniell

, famous across the world as Company paintings. Victoria Memorial has a collection of 72 Daniells, the largest in the world.

“These are iconic paintings because they were done between 1770 and 1850. These were pre-camera era. Naturally, we get to see a large part of India that exists no more through these paintings. Take for example the painting that shows a panoramic view of the place we now know as Esplanade, complete with the

Raj Bha van

as it originally looked, without the dome,“ said memorial curator Jayanta Sengupta, adding that nearly 300 Abanindranath and 200 Gaganendranath paintings will also be on virtual view.

Coveted paintings of Aban Tagore like `Bharat Mata', the `Passing of Shah Jahan', the `Chandi Mangal' collection and `Krishna Leela', which are considered to be gems from the

Bengal

school, will now be viewed at will, just as masterpieces of Gaganendranath who brought concepts like cubism and satire to life through his paintings. “Victoria Memorial has a vast collection of which we can keep just 13% on display because of lack of space. The remaining stays in our vaults away from view. With this facility, now our entire collection will gradually be on virtual display,“ Sengupta said.