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A star map of the world’s open museum collections
Auriaan is a star atlas of more than two million artworks from over 30 museums and libraries. An Art & Science project by Marcel Moonen, artist, architect and researcher. Auriaan turns the artworks that museums have opened to everyone into one sky to wander through: every museum a galaxy, every work a star. It runs free in the browser, on a computer or a phone.
What it does
The star system
Auriaan’s original core is its star system: a universe of many museums, each its own galaxy with sections, where every work is a star you can fly to. It all sits in one continuous space of 2.2 million works from 44 collections and runs in a phone browser. As far as we know, nothing comparable exists at this scale.
The sky
Fly from museum to museum, search by artist, subject or object, and open any work in high resolution, straight from the museum. Museums with related collections sit close together: the sky is arranged by what the museums hold (kinds of works, centuries, shared artists), not by where they are in the world.
Tours
Guided tours fly from museum to museum, with a guide who speaks English, Dutch or German. There are tours for children, students, older people and everyone, and tours of single artists from Dürer to Van Gogh, all based on what the museums themselves say about their works. New tours follow every week, and the research gets a tour of its own: the Scientific research tour, which shows what it finds.
How the tours are made
Marcel Moonen chooses the themes. Claude, Anthropic’s AI, writes each tour from what the museums themselves record about their works, and every name, date and fact is checked against those records before Marcel approves the tour. The translations are checked against the English, line by line. The guides’ voices are synthetic: Chatterbox, an open speech model by Resemble AI, speaks with the voices of real speakers who released their recordings openly. A speech recogniser checks every sentence, but a synthetic voice still gets a name or a word wrong now and then; such slips are corrected as they are found.
Play along
In “Look closer” you find the hidden detail yourself; in “How old is it?” you guess before you hear the story.
Star signs
At the end of a tour its works form a star sign you can keep, and you can make your own from works you collect.
Golden Flight
Golden Flight takes you from work to work, each one linked to the last by its subject, century, material or place, with a line in gold that says what connects them: “Another moon, about 900 years later.”
Research
Golden Flight is also a research project. Auriaan looks at the pictures themselves, not only their descriptions, to find links no catalogue records: shared compositions, gestures and motifs across museums and centuries. It uses openly published image models the way a researcher uses a microscope: no AI is trained, and no picture is kept. Claude, Anthropic’s AI, helps run the analysis and looks closely at the strongest matches; Marcel Moonen checks every finding against existing research. Two papers, one on this research and one on Auriaan itself, are planned for December 2026.
Open
Only works the museums have released as public domain or under open licences (CC0, CC BY). The pictures come from the museums themselves.
“Art belongs to everyone. Thanks to the museums that have opened their collections, Auriaan makes it easily accessible to anyone, anywhere.”
Try it
- auriaan.com
- Look closer (play along)
- How old is it? (play along)
- Vermeer (one artist)
- Animal hunt (for children)
Pictures
Screenshots of Auriaan, free to use with the credit “Auriaan”. The works shown are in the public domain; their museums are named in the captions.
The collections
Cleveland Museum of Art · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Rijksmuseum · SMK – National Gallery of Denmark · National Gallery of Art · Finnish National Gallery · Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich · Paris Musées · Smithsonian Institution · The New York Public Library · Yale Center for British Art · National Museum in Kraków · National Palace Museum · National Museum in Warsaw · Städel Museum · Princeton University Art Museum · Minneapolis Institute of Art · Wellcome Collection · Los Angeles County Museum of Art · Slovak National Gallery · Te Papa Tongarewa · Yale University Art Gallery · J. Paul Getty Museum · Musea Brugge · Museum of Fine Arts Ghent · Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp · Mu.ZEE · Museo Egizio · Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal · Tokyo National Museum · Kyoto National Museum · Nara National Museum · Kyushu National Museum · National Diet Library · Ernest Zmeták Art Gallery · Nasjonalmuseet · East Slovak Gallery · Orava Gallery · Gallery of Spiš Artists · Peter Michal Bohúň Gallery · Miloš Alexander Bazovský Gallery · Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe · Tokyo Metropolitan Library · Mauritshuis
About
Auriaan is an Art & Science project, and the work of one person: Marcel Moonen, artist, architect and researcher, based in Switzerland. Auriaan has been online since 31 October 2026. The guides’ voices are synthetic, made from openly licensed recordings of real speakers; the tours are in English, Dutch and German, and more languages follow.
Contact
As of 8 November 2026