Great art is better seen on TV, Royal Academy head says

FROM Michelangelo’s David to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, visiting a museum to see a world-famous work of art is a pilgrimage for many.

According to the artistic director of the Royal Academy, however, you may be better off staying at home and watching television.

Tim Marlow is presenter of a new ITV series, Great Art. It filmed some of the world’s best-known paintings and sculptures in detail – and Marlow believes it is a better way to view them. “This might sound like shooting myself in the foot,” he said, but “seeing something filmed in high-definition, without crowds of people and as close up as you can get – in some ways you get a more intimate experience. Because when you go to The Hague to see Girl with a Pearl Earring, you are literally fighting groups of people, for whom I’m afraid it is simply a sense of being able to say you once stood in front of it.”