The Prado Musem (Museo Nacional del Prado) in Prado, Spain, now has a virtual presence in Google Earth as well as the ability to view several of their pieces of art via Google Maps, although the full screen, extremely detailed fourteen gigapixel images of the artwork is only available by using Google Earth. Fourteen gigapixel is 14,000 megapixels or 14,000,000,000 pixels. Imagine the detail of your typical high end DSLR camera with a 14 megapixel censor and then imagine that a thousand times more detailed and you'll start to understand how insanely detailed this is. With pictures this detailed of masterpieces of art, viewers can zoom in to details that one normally wouldn't notice, especially from regular online viewing, let alone in person. As noted by Google's LatLong blog:

With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento ) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias).

In addition to zooming in and out of the various masterpieces on display at The Prado Museum, you can also take a 3-D virtual tour of the museum via Google Earth. In order to view The Prado Museum layer in Google Earth, you will first need to install the program, and then check the 3D buildings checkbox in the bottom left layers panel panel of Google Earth and type 'Museo Nacional Del Prado Masterpieces' in the 'fly to' search box, and choose Museo del Prado, Paseo del Prado. Alternately, if you already have Google Earth installed, you can view the different pictures via Google Maps and select the "See in full screen with Google Earth" link in the bottom right corner of each available image (if you have the Google Earth plugin enabled in your browser).

If you don't have time to give it a whirl for yourself right now, make sure you view the video embedded below. 

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