Stuck at Home? Try some Virtual Art Tours

Enjoy Botticelli's La Primavera from the comfort of your home

Among the many industries strongly affected by the Coronavirus is the arts industry. Most museums around the world are closed, as well as theaters and concert halls. At the same time, many people are staying home to prevent the spread of the virus and have more free time than usual on their hands. While our options to enjoy some arts and culture are clearly limited, there is one alternative widely available to us: virtual museum visits. And as Amuze creates audio tours for art museums around the world, we notice the demand for this. We receive a lot of feedback and requests about virtual art tours via email, Instagram, and Twitter.

Over the last years, museums and institutions have slowly developed their offering to enjoy art from the comfort of your home. Google Arts & Culture is a wonderful initiative that allows you to explore arts from around the world. And many museum websites have plenty of interesting content available for you during this downtime. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, is closed now, but they encourage visitors of their website to explore their museum online. Do you want to learn about their collection of British or Abstract art? Or about the works of Mary Cassatt? Just get started online.

In the Amuze app, you can also visit some of the best art museums in the world from the comfort of your house. While we designed our app to enhance your museum visits, we have adapted our content such that you can now also enjoy it outside the museum. Just download our app in the iOS or Google Play stores and get started in seconds. And it is all free. We just released a Virtual Tour of Renaissance Art, containing some of the absolute highlights of this very popular art movement. ​

Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico

Madonna and Child with Two Angels by Lippi

​Taking this tour will allow you to travel from the Vatican Museums to the Uffizi to the National Gallery of Art in seconds. It starts early in the Renaissance, and you will learn about the innovative works by artists like Fra Angelico, Donatello, and Filippo Lippi. Their innovations inspired the next generation who developed some of the most exquisite works of art ever made. Two of those works are by Sandro Botticelli: La Primavera and The Birth of Venus.

The Birth of Venus by Botticelli

​His works were followed by the works of the three greatest Renaissance artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Their frescos, paintings, and sculptures reached such a level of perfection that many generations after them did not even try to improve on them. They decided to change their style and introduce the distortions known as Mannerism. This led people like Parmigianino, Titian, and Veronese to develop their unique works that found a new audience. It is still considered Renaissance art, but there are clear differences between their works and the art from the High Renaissance.

Madonna with the Long Neck by Parmigianino

The Wedding at Cana by Veronese

In times of crisis, art can be a welcome distraction. It can provide comfort and inspiration. And the great thing is that you can enjoy it from the comfort of your home for free. So, I encourage you to explore the virtual content that are available, whether it is are provided by a museum itself, a company like Google, or us. Let me finish with a selective list of online resources I recommend:

• Google Arts and Culture includes tours of multiple museums
• Guggenheim in New York
• National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
• Rijksstudio by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• Virtual tours of the Louvre

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Cheers, Eelco