Digital Process: Pintoricchio Magnified
Pintoricchio Magnified: An Immersive Conservation Experience is a first-of-its-kind immersive conservation experience that invites visitors to move through layers of history and examine a painting in a way never before possible.
On view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from August 10, 2025, through August 23, 2026, the experience allows visitors to use their own movement to reveal and explore the conservation of Pintoricchio’s Virgin and Child. AI-based visitor tracking lets your movement guide the conservation story. You can step forward to move deeper into the painting, or step back to toggle between before and after treatment stages. In the final interactive zone, 3D photogrammetry transforms the painting, allowing visitors to rotate it and see both the front and the back. Visitors can then return to the physical artwork with a deeper understanding of its structure and the conservation process.
At the intersection of conservation and digital innovation, Pintoricchio Magnified demonstrates how the use of technology within these respective fields came together to bring this conservation story to life.
Why This Painting?
Over the centuries, the painting’s appearance has transformed with evolving conservation practices. In the most recent treatment, our goal was to bring the painting closer to the artist’s original intent.
For almost 50 years, Pintoricchio’s Virgin and Child (c. 1490–1500) was in storage at the Cleveland Museum of Art, its last original layers of blue paint hidden beneath a mask of restoration treatments undertaken in the 1900s. Although considered one of the most significant paintings within the early Italian collection, its complicated restoration history and physical state rendered it largely unexhibitable. In the most recent conservation treatment, original paint layers were revealed, allowing unparalleled access to Pintoricchio’s original composition, freed from past interventions.
The abundance of research, imaging, and conservation analysis during the treatment made this story uniquely suited to a digital experience. Conceived as a way to translate this scholarship into an interactive experience, where visitors could explore the conservation themselves, Pintoricchio Magnified tells the story of a painting that would be difficult to fully convey through text or static images alone.
How Does the Experience Work?
The interactive experience reveals the conservation story across a sequence of zones. As visitors move through the gallery, the immersive display dynamically responds to their position, revealing different layers of the painting’s conservation and technical imaging. Each return to the beginning introduces a new set of magnified details, encouraging repeated exploration and discovery.
Zone 1: Attract Loop
The experience begins with an attract loop designed to introduce visitors to the idea of moving through layers of the painting.
Two visual sequences, “Treatment Stages” and “CT Scan Imaging”, animate across a three-dimensional plane as separate layers of the painting expand and compress. These visuals establish the core concept of the experience: paintings are complex objects composed of many layers, both visible and hidden.
Zone 2: Takeover
As visitors approach the physical painting in the space, the immersive display transitions to a muted background, creating a moment of visual quiet that allows close observation of the physical painting installed in the gallery, surrounded by a fully glass case.
A prompt then appears, encouraging visitors to move beyond the painting and begin exploring the conservation layers.
Zone 3 -8: Zoom Details
As visitors move through the gallery, beyond the painting, they encounter a series of magnified details of the painting.
Each step forward reveals a new layer of the painting at high magnification, alternating between before and after inpainting stages, and mimicking the conservators’ experience of viewing the painting underneath a microscope. Using their movement, visitors can toggle between the stages.
At this scale, the lines and dots used during the inpainting stages become visible, offering a rare glimpse into the precision of the conservation process. Contextual hotspots of text appear throughout the experience, providing additional information about the techniques and decisions involved in the treatment.
Zone 9: Photogrammetry and CT Scanning
In the final zone, the painting transforms into 3D created through photogrammetry, and rotates, allowing examination of the back side of the painting. Visitors then seamlessly travel through the CT scan layers that reveal the internal structure of the painting from the cradle on the back to the surface of the painting.
How Was It Made?
Immersive Display
The immersive environment is driven by a large-scale LED display that renders the painting with exceptional brightness and color fidelity. This level of quality was critical when presenting highly detailed conservation imaging and subtle difference between treatment stages.
Unlike projection-based installations, the LED panels prevent the casting of shadow, ensuring every detail is visible to the viewer. Their modular design also allows the panels to be reconfigured and reused for future projects.
AI-Based Visitor Tracking
The experience leverages machine learning-based computer vision to track visitors’ movement within the gallery and translate that movement into precise interactive control that will improve as underlying models evolve.
Six cameras mounted to the ceiling process the tracking data locally, running the core AI model on-device. This distributed approach to the most computationally intensive part of the computer vision pipeline allows the system to efficiently scale up without overloading network bandwidth or centralized processing.
When multiple people are in the space, the person closest to the immersive display controls the interactive content.
Digital Team and Partners
Creating Pintoricchio Magnified was a highly collaborative effort across the museum and with external partners.
The digital experience of Pintoricchio Magnified was developed by a cross-departmental team and external collaborators led by Jane Alexander, chief digital information officer (digital lead), in close collaboration with Julianna Ly (conservation lead/curator), Jim Engelmann (exhibition designer) and external partner Eric Mika (interactive experience designer).
Throughout the process, the team worked closely together to balance scholarship, technology and physical exhibition design, ensuring that the digital experience deepened visitors’ understanding of the painting and encourage them to look closer and dive deeper into its conservation story.
From the Cleveland Museum of Art
Digital Innovation and Technology Services: Jane Alexander (Chief Digital Information Officer), Seta Nagbe (Technical Project Manager), Jeff Judge (Director of Digital Program Management and Media Services)
Curatorial, Conservation, and Collections Management: Julianna Ly (Associate Conservator of Paintings), Dean Yoder (Lapis Senior Conservator of Paintings and Head of Paintings Conservation), Gerhard Lutz (Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art)
Design: Jim Engelmann (Exhibition Designer), Peter Kratcoski (Graphic Designer)
Interpretation: Stephanie Foster (Senior Manager, Interpretation)
External Partners
Contractor: Eric Mika (Interactive Designer)
Zenith Systems: Doug Fortney, Dominique Boaeuf, Jeremy Weatherford (AV Planning and Installation)