On the anniversary of the 1990 heist that remains the world's biggest art theft ever, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston joined the public stage of the Google Art Project. Select artworks from the museum are now available online, and the Gardner became the first New England institution to allow Google's Street View technology to capture a virtual tour of the galleries.

The Gardner joins 400 public art collections on Google Art Project, run by the Paris-based Google Cultural Institute. Along with gallery views showing some 2,500 objects, the Gardner is featuring 52 artworks from its renowned collections of American and European art, including masterpieces by Sargent and Titian, that can be zoomed in on for details.

While the online exposure is a great tool for educators and students, or those looking to browse, whether inclusion on the Google Art Project will attract actual visitors to the museum has yet to be seen.

The launch of the Gardner on Google fell on the anniversary day of a painful loss of masterpieces by the likes of Vermeer, Manet, Degas, and Rembrandt, still missing after 24 years, yet that disaster was not mentioned by the museum in a press release.