Abstract
Abstract. The Venetian galea (galley), dominating the Mediterranean Sea for almost 1000 years, is one of the most emblematic and fascinating objects in the history and culture of the Serenissima Republic of San Marco, the official name of ancient Venice. This boat has changed according to the needs and developments that have taken place over the centuries, proving versatile and powerful in military and commercial use.Unfortunately, no complete specimen has been received, and everything that can be known about galleys derives from paintings made in different eras, in models and in some original parts, kept inside the Naval Historical Museum of Venice.Another source are some manuscripts, where part of the traditional shipbuilding knowledge is handed down. To understand a galley it is necessary to understand which techniques were used by the proti (directors of the ancient shipyard) which differ substantially from the current design.These techniques were the synthesis of knowledge handed down from person to person and which did not make use of design drawings such as are used today. To obtain the reconstruction of a galley, lacking complete original drawings, we collected and analyzed different documentation that testified the ancient forms.The presented work aims to reconstruct a digital model of a galea starting from the photogrammetric and laser scanning survey of a wooden model of the hull of half of a 25-bench galley of the mid-seventeenth century. The surveyed maquette and brought back to the real scale was integrated by some artifacts present at the Naval History Museum of Venice, surveyed with photogrammetric techniques and laser scanning too.In this way a hypothetical configuration was reconstructed (by synthesis of collected and historical data) which shows the shape that this boat could reasonably have had. The result is a digital model, then printed to the scale, obtained by three-dimensional modeling starting from the point clouds of the maquette and the original artifacts. This final model has been compared with all the iconographic and documentary sources for its historical validation.The results obtained were used for a set-up aimed at enhancing the museum, because it was intended for a large audience.
Highlights
Documentation of Cultural Heritage (CH) should be a high priority because it has an essential and irreplaceable part of the preservation cycle
The conservation of the galea's memory is made up of the safeguarding of different objects: manuscripts, drawings, books, ship fragments, models, wrecks. Each of these has had its own method of protection over time, the comparison between data from different sources has often been difficult
The shape recording uses rigorous survey techniques such as the photogrammetric one, in which scientific rigor results from the declaration of the tools used and the methods applied
Summary
Documentation of Cultural Heritage (CH) should be a high priority because it has an essential and irreplaceable part of the preservation cycle. The surveying process provides a virtually scaled model that is coherent in metric terms and enriched with the information regarding the aesthetic appearance of the material and reflectance properties (Chiabrando et al.2018; Andrews et al 2015) In this framework, GAMHer (Geomatics data Acquisition and Management for landscape and built Heritage in a European perspective), which is a 3-year project financed under the Italian PRIN 2015 framework (Progetti di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale), is a collaborative project that aims at exploiting and validating Geomatics algorithms, methodologies and procedures in the framework of new European regulations, which require a more extensive and productive use of digital information, as requested by the Digital Agenda for Europe as one of the seven pillars of the Europe 2020 Strategy. The maquette, built in the seventeenth century, appears to be that of a sensile type, lacking the rowing benches, the ship’s wheel and the mast It represents the design-technical part of the boat, especially for the study of water lines. The documentation obtained from the surveys and integrated with the various bibliographical and iconographic sources have allowed us to arrive at the definition of a complete digital model of the galley, the starting point for the subsequent elaborations used for the knowledge of this important Venetian maritime tradition
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