With the rise of online entertainment, especially during the pandemic, many doors were open for cultural institutions to expand its activities to the virtual space, the answer that many museums around the world found is that of making online visitations available to the worldwide public.


Some museums and famous tourist attractions around the world offer virtual tours with 360º technology through the capture of satellite images, but everything has become even more realistic and accessible with the partnership with Google. They have developed a specific culture and art platform, Arts & Culture, which uses street view technology to provide free virtual tours to art galleries around the world. In addition, the site also provides information on art history, compiles works by famous artists and divides the collections in a thematic way.


This week, THE GUIDE brings to you a brief summary of some of the museums around the world available in the Arts and culture platform.




Bode Museum, Berlin:


The Bode-Museum, formerly called the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (Emperor Frederick Museum), is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin and part of the UNESCO World Heritage. It was built from 1898 to 1904 by order of German Emperor William II. Currently, the Bode-Museum is home to the Skulpturensammlung, the Museum for sculpture, coins and medals, and Byzantine art.


The museum is specially known for its byzantine art which fill almost every hall in the museum, it is also known for its Coin Cabinet, considered one of the world’s biggest numismatic collections.




National Museum, Jakarta: 


The National Museum of Indonesia is an archeological, historical, ethnological, and geographical museum located in Jalan Medan Merdeka Barat, Central Jakarta, right on the west side of Merdeka Square. Popularly known as the Elephant Museum after the elephant statue in its forecourt. Its broad collections cover all of Indonesia’s territory and almost all of its history. The museum has endeavored to preserve Indonesia’s heritage for two centuries.


The museum is regarded as one of the most complete and the best in Indonesia, as well as one of the finest museums in Southeast Asia. The museum has preserved about 141,000 objects, ranged from prehistoric artifacts, to archeology, numismatics, ceramics, ethnography, history and geography collections. It has comprehensive collections of stone statues of classical Hindu-Buddhist period of ancient Java and Sumatra, as well as quite extensive collections of Asian ceramics.




Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:


The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) in Boston, United States, is the 14th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. It is home to 8,161 paintings, surpassed among American museums only by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 52nd most visited art museum in the world as of 2019.


The museum holds an impressive collection of art from around the world, with art representative of multiple artistic movements thorough human history.


You can view the museums at the “Street View” section at: https://artsandculture.google.com/