You can visit Google Arts & Culture as a website on your laptop or desktop, but the project is at its immersive best when engaged via the Google Arts & Culture app, which you can download for free on your smartphone or tablet.

The great joy is its ability to transport you into the textural world of a piece of art. Zoom in to brushstrokes, skate across oceans of colour or tap on the screen and explore the universe contained in the blue-green pigment of a single painted eye.

Images are accompanied by explanatory text, and you can spend days diving into the collection of any given partner institution.

It’s worth noting that the websites of US institutions like the Getty Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County promise robust online options to help us in our coming weeks of collective isolation. But for now, here are our favourite virtual exhibits from Google’s platform.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

You can see amazingly detailed images of more than 160 artworks, including sunflowers, self-portraits and his famous The Bedroom.

You also can click into the story “Which Books Did Vincent van Gogh Read?” and scroll through Van Gogh paintings inspired by the literature he favoured. These include The Vicarage at Nuenen, which captures the moody, windswept home where Van Gogh’s parents lived and where the young painter first grew to love the moralistic tales of Charles Dickens.

Uffizi Galleries, Florence

This virtual tour features up-close looks at the museum’s interiors and the stunning masterpieces on its walls, including Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (the magnification of the latter is so powerful, you can see cracks in the paint of her eyelids).

Wander placid hallways and corridors, and gaze out a window at the Ponte Vecchio bridge, which straddles the picturesque Arno River.

Guggenheim Bilbao Museum 

Get up close and personal with a selection of modernist triumphs inside this Frank Gehry-designed landmark in Spain.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington

You can take a digital walk through “African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond” featuring work by black artists from the 1920s through to the 2000s.

This exhibition explores the Harlem-based portrait photography of James Van Der Zee, the lush brushstrokes of James A. Porter and the expressionistic folk art of William Henry Johnson, as well as a trove of others works relating to race, identity, politics, culture and family.

Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City

Kahlo’s life was forever altered by a bus accident that displaced three vertebrae and left her in pain for the rest of her life. Crutches, elaborate leather corsets, a prosthetic leg in a gorgeous red-leather boot embroidered with silk thread – they’re all on digital view, as are a slew of Kahlo’s traditional Mexican dresses.

Just as Google’s zoom feature provides a revelatory look at paintings, the blown-up photography here can reveal, say, the tiniest beads adorning a blouse. It feels like an in-person experience.

Also:

Thank Google not only for all of those interactive exhibitions but also for Art Zoom videos that play like mini documentaries, zeroing in on tiny details of famous canvases and narrated by famous musicians including Jarvis Cocker and Maggie Rogers.

A prime example: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel as examined by Canadian singer-songwriter Feist. Feist takes us inside her interpretation of one of Bruegel’s most famous works, which she notes stands 5 feet, 1 inch (155cm) high – almost as tall as the singer herself.