[ethbr1]

> One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it's huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it.

Famous art that's stunningly bigger in person than I expected:

   - The Raft of the Medusa (Géricault)
   - Guernica (Picasso)
   - The Hallucinogenic Toreador (Dalí)

Cannot recommend seeing art in person enough.

Aside from the scale, it's also impossible to fully capture color or translucency in screen/page-presented imaging.

And so much of the European painting mastery in the 1400s+ is the manipulation of non-opaque paint to create a desired effect.

[SamBam]

And famous art that's much smaller in person than I expected: The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. For such an epic image, it's only 25x37 cm / 10x14".

[MarceColl]

Japanese woodblock prints were not considered art at the time, they were for the day to day. From advertisment to low cost decoration. Japanese Woodblock prints do not really have an original other than the woodblocks themselves (or the original painting the wood was carved from).

[hyperbovine]

It’s carved wood — hard to scale up!

[jfil]

Maximilian I's 9ft x 11ft Triumphal Arch would like a word with you:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_Arch_(woodcut)

[trox]

Aside from color and translucency, an original artwork shows also the relief. It can tell much about the creation process of a painting and adds additional texture. Furthermore, some pigments were expensive and hard to work with prior to the 19th century such that artists used it very sparingly.

[disillusioned]

This stood out to me the very first time I saw Starry Night at MoMa. The paint is so thickly layered, and you can see the individual brush strokes in stark relief.

[Guillaume86]

It makes me wish for a VR app with ultra HD reproductions, you could have normal maps and other 3d techniques to add another level of fidelity, the scale is also not a problem in VR.

[throwup238]

Add to that the Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough at the Pasadena Huntington and anything by Hans Holbein the Younger such as the portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell at the Frick Collection.

The former uses a brilliant blue paint that is simply impossible to convey via RGB display or CMYK printing color spaces and the latter look like giant printed photographs, down to the stubble on More's face, even though they were painted in the early 16th century.

> And so much of the European painting mastery in the 1400s+ is the manipulation of non-opaque paint to create a desired effect.

I'm sad that people don't bother with that as much today. I went on a shopping spree a while ago buying a bunch of Williamsburg and Old Holland oil paints and their colors are absolutely amazing, especially the old school heavy metal paints which come in a variety of opacities. Blending them is an art in its own right. Sadly I don't have any skill at painting so it's mostly abstract experiments with color.

[dexwiz]

Napoleon Crossing the Alps Is also much bigger than I expected.

[thesz]

Have you seen Suvorov Crossing the Alps [1]?

[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%85...

[dexwiz]

No, but now I do.

[MeteorMarc]

Add Birth of Venus (Botticelli)