Abyss Gallery

Credits

Every pixel of a painting is another painting, and each of those is made of the rest: 24,907 works by 1,978 artists, all the way down.

Made by

Humberto Gesser, Berlin, 2026: idea, direction and design. Built with Claude (Anthropic).

The works

24,907 paintings, frescoes, prints and drawings (and a few hundred photographs kept aside for now), every one in the public domain: 24,047 public domain, 817 dedicated CC0, 43 marked public domain by their owners. A work is here only when its maker died by 1955, or, with no maker on record, it is older than 1900, and its image on Wikimedia Commons carries a public-domain or CC0 mark.

Images: Wikimedia Commons and the museums and photographers who released them there. Facts (titles, makers, dates, movements, collections): Wikidata, CC0. The text on each work's card: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, quoted with a link to the article. Every work's Wikidata item and Commons page is listed in credits.json.

The 24 collections group the works by the movements Wikidata records for them and their makers; a few are hand-picked. Errors in attribution are Wikidata's to correct, and ours to follow: tell us.

How it is made

A WebGL2 infinite zoom, written for this site with no framework. Each picture's pixels are chosen from the collection by a colour planner running in the browser (error diffusion over the works nearest each colour, the same work never within eight pixels of itself, the same artist kept apart), so every work keeps its own colours. Subjects are found with Apple Vision so square crops keep the face or the scene.

Type and hosting

Times New Roman where your device has it, otherwise Tinos by Steve Matteson (SIL Open Font License), served from this site; the index set in Newsreader by Production Type (SIL Open Font License); Helvetica Neue. Hosted on Vercel.