In order to preserve cultural heritage, this paper proposes to develop a digital paintings visualization system. Our proposed system mainly consists of automatically extracting regions of interest (ROI) from a digital painting to characterize them. These close-ups are then animated on the basis of the painting characteristics and the artist’s or designer’s aim. In order to obtain interesting results from short video clips, we developed a visual saliency map-based method. The experimental results show the efficiency of our approach and an evaluation based on a Mean Opinion Score validates the proposed method.