GET too close to a painting at Madrid's famous Prado museum and you'll likely get a firm rebuke from a museum guard. But in the online application Google Earth, you can get as close as you want. So close, in fact, that you can see a tear in the eye of a subject in Dutch Renaissance painter Rogier van der Wayden's Descent of Christ from the Cross. The tear is nearly impossible to see when looking at the painting in person. The Prado museum has put high-resolution reproductions of 14 of its most famous works online. This effort is part of a joint project with Google that could eventually expand to other museums around the world. "An image is no substitute for the direct experience of the work, but these actual-sized reproductions offer prodigious realism," the museum's director, Miguel Zugaza, told The Independent newspaper. Google took more than 8,200 photographs of the paintings and stitched them together digitally. "In the museum we cannot get this close to a painting; if we did we'd need a three-meter-high ladder to get these views," Google Spain's Clara Ribera told the newspaper.