Alexander von Humboldt and "Heart of the Andes": An Immersive Journey

Frederic Church painted "Heart of the Andes" as his final homage to naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. This immersive 2.5D digital experience offers extreme close-up views of Church's South American landscape. The video is narrated by SAAM curator Eleanor Jones Harvey, who takes viewers on an immersive journey to discover the connections between Humboldt's ideas and Church's ambitious painting. Discover more about Humboldt's influence on American art with the SAAM exhibition "Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture".

[@guilhermeleite3470]

Windows showed me this picture on my notebook and i thought it was very beautiful, so I came here to learn more about it. Really interesting!

[@carlseaquist8723]

Great! Thanks!

[@garnet63]

How did the 3-D effects on this painting happen? They're brilliant!

[@tlooknbill]

The C-SPAN walk through interview of Eleanor Jones Harvey, the woman talking in this video stated they didn't have this painting in the Smithsonian American Art Museum so they took HD camera shots by permission of the owner of the painting and used 3D pan and scan software to stitch it all together for this video. She didn't elaborate exactly how it was done. I'm assuming a lot of the effect comes from high frame rate style motion smoothing similar to HDTV's 60 frames a second for zooming and panning.

[@matthewboyce5839]

I was wondering the same thing. They may have used software to put elements from foreground through the background into different layers and then gave them parallax when moving throughout painting. The movement really brings it to life!