In order to preserve cultural heritage, this paper proposes to develop a digital paintings visualization system. Our proposed system mainly consists of 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 by using the well-known Itti’s saliency analysis which already proved its efficiency on paintings. The experimental results show the efficiency of our approach and an evaluation based on a Mean Opinion Score validates the proposed method. Eighteen volunters watched for a total of 216 views at 72 video clips build up from 6 paintings, and we found a significant difference between our saliency-based generated videos and random-based generated videos.