zirconium

Holland Cotter in the NYT on getting close to paintings (in this case, those of Piero di Cosimo):

Over the years, I had passed by some in museums, only half noticing them, and seen others in books and online. They registered in my mind as polished but somewhat impersonal variations on standard themes, distinguished mainly by an incidental wealth of fine realistic detail. Piero, it seemed, had brought formal finesse to his altarpieces but left himself out.

I had a different impression standing in front of them in Washington. For one thing, details that I'd been able to make out only with the aid of a zoom function online--feather-perfect birds, botanically correct flowers, glinting gems--were now clear to the eye and not incidental at all: They were integral to the compositions they appeared in. Pieros paintings were holistic in a way I hadnt guessed from afar.

And there, underneath the formal polish, was his hand in action. In one area, hes laying on color in chunky strokes, paint-by-numbers style. In another, he’s adding thin, raised lines of highlight with a calligraphers precision. Elsewhere, hes impatiently smooshing pigment around with his fingers. You can't see all of this by standing directly in front of a picture. You have to move around, adjust your position, bend down and look up, catch the surface in different angles of light. In other words, to see a painting, you have to do a little dance with it, and take your time. From a digital distance, you see an image. In person, in a gallery, you feel that image breathing.