3D Applications in Conservation and Connoisseurship: Investigating and Supplementing the Scholarly Catalogues of the Red Faun

Abstract

Focusing on the Capitoline Red Faun, this paper concerns the 3-dimensional digital model (3DDM) and its potential utility in creating accurate conservation condition reports. Tradition condition reports verbally express information about the state of a work of art, such as its preservation or past restorations, and are often supplemented with photographs or drawings. The various historical catalogues that have appraised the condition of the Capitoline Red Faun, more aptly referred to as “scholarly catalogues” demonstrate the potential for ambiguity within this practice; of the five accounts appraising the state of the Red Faun, no two agree on which parts are ancient and which belong to the eighteenth-century restorations of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Clemente Bianchi. Given that this sculpture is included within the art historical canon of Hellenistic sculpture, a new condition report is timely. This paper undertakes an exhaustive analysis of the various joins and offers another condition report, this one illustrated with an interactive, annotated 3DDM. When served to the public and scholars alike, these interactive condition reports can act as a critical tool, garnering interest in and facilitating re-appraisals of status such as the Capitoline Red Faun.