Ancient Sculpture Research Articles

The Conservation of Plaster Casts in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACTPlaster casts of ancient sculpture were widely collected by universities and museums through the nineteenth century. One of the intended functions of these casts was to preserve accurate 3D records of the sculptures, many of which were in remote locations around the world, often vulnerable to damage from weathering and vandalism. Gypsum plaster makes excellent casts, capturing fine surface details; however, it is also soft, porous, and easily damaged. This paper draws upon historical archives and patents to reveal the considerable efforts made during this period to create new techniques, recipes, and equipment to try to protect the casts. Case studies are selected primarily from the collection of casts put together by Walter Copland Perry in the 1880s, originally for the South Kensington Museum but transferred in 1907 to the British Museum. Samples were taken from a number of these casts and examined using scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy. These results, combined with archival evidence, demonstrate that protective coatings were carefully applied in thin coatings to many of the casts. Barium appears to have played an important part in these protective treatments and further testing is recommended to evaluate the precise nature of its role. These treatments successfully protected the delicate surfaces of the casts for many years. However, later neglect means that these casts now suffer from a range of other threats to their condition.

The Lost shield portraits of Aphrodisias. Reflections on Style and Patronage.

The paper re-examines a series of lost shield portraits discovered by Paul Gaudin in Aphrodisias in 1904-1905. It focuses on three aspects of these objects: the technical details of the carving and choice of model (style), the structural specifications (manufacture), and the subject matter (iconography and theme). It endeavors to place these objects in the context of other shield portraits found more recently at Aphrodisias and to evaluate them in light of recent scholarship on late antique sculpture. It stresses the similarities between these shield portraits and others from the site and reflects on possible contexts for the Aphrodisian shield portraits, considering for the first time the possibility that all of these Aphrodisian shield portraits might have come from the same context.

Digitalization of Ancient Sculpting Models and 3D Design Using Photogrammetry Methodology

The digitization of ancient sculptures is particularly relevant and necessary in relation to the preservation of the cultural heritage. And the studied ancient models have their unique identity in terms of their visual and functional qualities. In parallel, the study aims to optimize the technological process related to photogrammetric measurements and calculations, technological tools and specialized software applications such as Autodesk ReCap, Blender and MeshMixer. The used models in the article are for re-presentation of popular ancient models & artifacts from city of Varna (by the ancient name Odessos). By using a 3D print device, one of the resulting digitized models of an ancient angel will materialize by applying specific techniques to redesign its geometry. The completed 3D printed item of re-designed model of ancient stone angel is only for personal and non-comercial use. One of the main point in the article is to show advanced computer techniques for teaching and studying. The information in this article has been built for helping other specialist working in digital field regarding photogrammetry. Also the material can be useful for designers, engineers, archaeologists and others in their work for the publicity of ancient treasures.

The Smugglerius , re-viewed

This article offers a new reading of an object known as the Smugglerius (1776). Produced by the physician William Hunter and sculptor Agostino Carlini for London’s Royal Academy of Arts, the Smugglerius is a plaster cast moulded from the body of an executed man, whose corpse was first posed after a celebrated ancient sculpture, the Dying Gaul (1st–2nd c. CE), and then flayed to reveal the muscles beneath. Past analyses of the cast have focused primarily on its functional role as a tool of anatomical instruction, situating it in relation both to the Royal Academy’s pedagogical agenda and to Hunter’s decades-long practice as a teacher of anatomy to artists in eighteenth-century London. By contrast, I argue that the Smugglerius must also be understood as an aesthetic, material and affective object in its own right. Drawing on a range of contemporaneous visual and textual sources, I demonstrate that the cast elicited a variety of responses from Georgian viewers, from affection and irony to anger and contempt. These, in turn, were bound up with tensions and contradictions inherent in the Smugglerius itself, which draws together two discrete yet linked bodies: on the one hand, that of a modern, hanged criminal; and, on the other, that of an ideal classical figure, which, in the eighteenth century, was believed to represent not a Gaul but an ancient Roman gladiator.

“Reconstruction” of the polychromy of ancient sculpture: a necessary evil?

The contribution offers an overview of the history of reconstructions and their use, with a representative selection of formats and their contexts, from the beginnings in the early 19th century to the present. The polychromy of ancient architecture is dealt with only to a limited degree.The point of departure is a perceived need of establishing an informed and critical discussion of the whys and wherefores of reconstructions. On the background of the investigative technologies which have been developed with unprecedented rapidity, a methodological protocol allowing cross-checks of data is recommended.

Digital heritage dissemination and the participatory storytelling project #iziTRAVELSicilia: the case of the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse (Italy)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the participatory and crowdsourcing project #iziTRAVELSicilia could be a key to the dissemination of 3D models on cultural heritage. This project has been recognized as a best practice both in territorial digital marketing and in digital promotion and valorisation through storytelling and crowdsourcing culture. #iziTRAVELSicilia has already involved thousands of people, producing more than 180 museum and tour audio guides. It has become a real model of participation in the co-creation of cultural values. In this paper we briefly present the project and the case of the Archaeological Museum ‘Paolo Orsi’ in Syracuse (Italy), as best practice on digital dissemination through platforms such as Google Street View and izi.TRAVEL itself, revealing how this platform has been already largely used for the dissemination both of existing 3D models and for new 3D models, such as those made by USF IDEx for the ‘Paolo Orsi’ Museum. Specifically, a collection of 26 ancient sculptures has been virtualized via laser scanning and digital photogrammetry in a participatory experience of measurement science. The global dissemination of those 3D models through izi.TRAVEL’s platform and other alternatives platforms will represent a significant contribute to the digital accessibility of the Museum of Syracuse but also the starting point of a metrological 3D database of ancient Sicilian sculpture generated entirely crowdsourcing.

Rondinini paintings rediscovered: A self-portrait by Paul Bril and a ‘witchcraft’ by Pieter van Laer

Abstract The Rondinini family is important for having developed a well-defined taste in collecting during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, with an interest in ancient sculpture and painting staged in their palaces and villas in Rome and its surroundings. The most eminent artists active in seventeenth-century Rome worked for them. The paintings presented here are the most relevant examples of a great number of works that have re-emerged during a collaborative research project conducted by the universities of Florence and Salerno on the family’s contributions to the history of collecting. The first is a signed self-portrait by the Flemish artist Paul Bril, a pioneer amongst the landscape painters active in Rome between the late 1500s and early 1600s – a work of large size for the artist (110.0 x 81.5 cm); the second is a ‘witchcraft crowded with figures’ painted by Pieter van Laer, an eminent Dutch painter and leader of the group of masters called the ‘Bamboccianti’.

Античният модел – естетическа програма и метод на обучение през ХVІІ век

During the 17th century there was a change in the style and the aesthetic principles as well as in the canon, the proportions and the type of the figures depicted. In fact, towards the end of the seventeenth century, studying the ancient models took priority over the study of nature. The “Ancient Model” became not only a teaching method in the art academies, but also an aesthetic base for shaping the style and the manners of work. This is something we can see in the illustrative parts of the anatomy for artist’s books of the era. The presence of images of emblematic ancient sculptures becomes almost obligatory.

The collection of Sampieri family: from dispersion to denial and desirable development

In the early nineteenth century, the member of Sampieri family, burdened with debts, made a double sale of their paintings collection. Francesco Giovanni Maria Sampieri (1790-1863), son of Luigi Sampieri (1758-1797), enthusiastic and amateur composer and therefore member of Phillharmonic Academy in 1807, sold six paintings to Italian goverment for «326.522,50 italian lire».The artworks were trasferred by Andrea Appiani in 15 January in the following year, to the gallery of Brera Accademy, in Milan, which they were intendend. Francesco Rosaspina and Felice Giani oversaw in Bologna the packaging of the paintings on canvas of Carracci, Reni, Guercino and the Albani’s copper. The six paintings were already excluded from the previous Stima delli sottonotati quadri esistenti nella famosa Galleria Sampieri di Bologna of the 31 October 1810.The Stima record 129 paintings, less than 140 ones recorded in the previous inventories, and they are valued 120.900 italian lire. They will be sold to prince Eugenio Napoleone for only 27.777,50 lire.The frescoes from Carracci remain above the chimney vanishing and vaulted ceilings in the Bologna’s palace, remains the amazing Guercino’s Ercole fights with Anteo too. Guercino shows us a representation almost tangible of Ercole’s effort to victory on the Giant, summoning the ancient sculpture sublime.As we have seen, the mobile artworks are no longer in Bologna. The city lost, togheter with others collections, its «Superbissimo - So much superb- museum» from Sampieri family «a Gallery, not called worthy of private Knight, but of a Prince, or indeed, a King»

Massive 3D digitization of sculptures: Methodological approaches for improving efficiency

This paper describes a methodology for efficient massive 3D digitization of ancient sculptures under the scope of IU-Uffizi project. The project is sponsored by Indiana University (USA) with the technical support of Politecnico di Milano and the advice of a scientific committee of experts in the fields of art history and archaeology. The project aims at digitizing 1250 ancient sculptures in the “Uffizi museum”, Pitti Palace”, “Boboli Gardens” and a storage facility inside Villa Corsini in Castello near Florence. The authors have experienced a variety of different issues in the museum, including working with different lighting conditions, the placements of sculptures at difficult places for shooting images, inaccessible height and different ways for posing camera on the scene in an environment where the use of drones is prohibited. To solve such issues, specific technical choices were needed to reduce the digitization time and costs while maintaining a high coherence between the physical artefact and its digital counterpart. These technical solutions are being discussed, in a context where the purpose is to massively digitize complex objects in their original setting by minimizing the impact on the museum. Furthermore, several methodologies are being discussed to improve the efficiency of digitization regarding image capturing, 3D model creation, scaling and mesh editing.

Correction: Correction: The microbial community characteristics of ancient painted sculptures in Maijishan Grottoes, China

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179718.].

Niobe w oku kamery. Projekt filmowy — między konkretyzacją a scenopisem

Niobe, a poem by Galczynski was interpreted with verse and musical references, in the context of Mediterranean culture and contemporary realities of the palace of Nieborow, where a copy of the Ancient sculpture is located. The author creates a “film theory of narratology” and proceeds with reflections on various relationships between literature and cinema, on natural sight and imagination, and takes into consideration the following perspective theories: intersemiotic comparative, Bergson, Ingarden, Helman, Ziomek. Next, he offers a film interpretation of the descriptive part of the poem through a Large Violin Concert.

Greek Statues, Roman Cults and European Aristocracy: Examining the Progression of Ancient Sculpture Interpretation

<p>In 1747 Frederick II of Prussia acquired a rare and highly valuable statue from antiquity and gave it the description of Antinous (the ill-fated lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian). Although the bronze statue had always been accepted as an original from ancient Greece, the statue eventually assumed the identity of the Roman Antinous. How could Frederick II, an accomplished collector, ignore the blatant style and chronological discrepancies to interpret a Greek statue as a later Roman deity? This article will use the portraiture of Antinous to facilitate an examination of the progression of classical art interpretation and diagnose the freedom between the art historian and the dilettante. It will expose the necessary partition between the obligations of the art historian to provide technical interpretations of a work within the purview of the discipline with that of the unique interpretation made by individual viewers. This article confirms that although Frederick II lived before the transformative scholarship of Winckelmann, the freedom of interpreting a work is an abiding and intrinsic right of every individual viewer. </p>

Historic doubts, conjectures, and the wanderings of a principal curiosity: Henry VII in the fabric of Strawberry Hill

This article explores the inscriptions and material metamorphoses of Henry VII in Horace Walpole’s ‘paper fabric’, a reversible world of writing, collecting, and book-making. In Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), Walpole celebrates the funerary monument of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano at Westminster Abbey. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), conjecture and speculation become methodological prompts to unveil the textual and architectural discontinuities of history. Walpole’s next historical experiment consists in placing a bust of Henry VII in the agonies of death in the Star Chamber at his house at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. The bust’s importance is captured by its reappearance propped on top of a frontispiece and its dissemination in other reproductions in extra-illustrated copies of A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex … (1784). A dramatic representation of the bust in John Carter’s extra-illustrated copy of A Description, later engraved in his Specimens of the Ancient Sculpture and Painting now remaining in this Kingdom (1780–94), shows the alternative trajectories of Henry VII from Westminster Abbey to Strawberry Hill, from Walpole’s cosmopolitan collection of curiosities to Carter’s paper collection of national gothic specimens

Jean Li. Review of "The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha: The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian Sculpture" by Lawrence Berman.

Jean Li. Review of "The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha: The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian Sculpture" by Lawrence Berman.

Review: The Afterlife of Greek and Roman Sculpture: Late Antique Responses and Practices, edited by Troels Myrup Kristensen and Lea Stirling

Troels Myrup Kristensen and Lea Stirling, eds. The Afterlife of Greek and Roman Sculpture: Late Antique Responses and Practices . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 424 pp. 91 illustrations and 1 table. ISBN: 9780472119691. $85.00. Late Antiquity was a period of great change in the Roman Empire, when Christianity became the dominating religion, old traditions were abandoned, and temples were destroyed or adapted to suit new secular or religious purposes. In this process, the statuary decorating the private, official, and religious buildings and open areas was either preserved and reused in new contexts, destroyed and reused as spolia in building structures, or burned in lime-kilns to provide lime for new building works. Troels Myrup Kristensen and Lea Stirling have assembled a collection of papers on this highly interesting topic that developed out of two international seminars held at Aarhus University in 2008 and 2011. The final product engagingly analyzes the reuse and afterlife of ancient sculpture in Late Antiquity, and we may congratulate the editors for managing to gather an impressive group of international scholars to discuss and publish the results of their most recent studies. The volume presents a selection of case studies for the history of Greek and Roman statues in Late Antiquity from various parts of the Roman world. The editors provide in their introduction a general view for the topic, discuss issues of methodology and interpretation, and present a chronology of the fate of the ancient statues under examination. The papers that follow are divided into three topics. Part I, “Practices of Deposition and Reuse,” includes three papers; Part II, “Regional Perspectives,” includes seven; and Part III, “Grand Narratives,” contains four. As can be seen from this structure, the main emphasis has been given to the presentation of regional studies that give us an interesting insight into local practices at Sagalassos in Asia Minor, Athens, Corinth, Ostia, Roman Germany, Sicily, and on the Lower Danube. The editors’ introduction has a poignant subtitle, “From Use to Refuse,” that marks the multiple uses …

'Publish or Perish !’ - A Friend or a Foe for Author?

Writing has always fascinated human beings! Be it the stone carving of ancient Greek history or the hand-written manuscripts of medieval times, they always show the existence of the writer. It shows that somebody has hunted the giant mammoth or how the ancient sculpture was built. In other words, we remember them. “Publish or perish!” has always been taken as a pressure in the academia to continuously publish ones’ work in the journals. This sometimes can have negative impact of submitting poor quality articles to the journals. The same can sometimes deviate oneself from the actual research agenda and lead to many unethical behaviors such as plagiarism and fabrication. The teaching capabilities of a certain individual in an institution can sometimes get overshadowed by his inability to publish on time. An institute nowadays may hire a teacher looking at the number of articles he has published rather than his intrinsic ability to make his pupils understand the profoundness of certain topic. Hence, some of them even consider this publish or perish as a tyranny in the field of literature. Nevertheless, publication is and will be an important pedestal for the progression of our scientific work. The truthfulness of our research is the responsibility of ourselves only. The intellectual theft will lead us nowhere other than the self-devaluation and remorse. There are certain rules and we all should follow them. Publication is the requirement of our academic progression; hence its importance cannot be undermined. Writing should begin from within oneself only. There is no age bar to learning hence the culture of writing in each one of us will eventually lessen the burden of gifted and ghost authors in our scientific society. Sharing of work amongst our peers and learning from each other will overcome the hindrance in publishing our work and so does the regular conduction of workshops and seminars for sensitizing our authors. No work can be great work without mutual effort. The time has come for the authors and the editors to sit down for a cup of tea to remove prejudices from each other and aid each other. Happy writing !

MULTI-SOURCE 3D MODELS SUPPORTING ULTRASONIC TEST TO INVESTIGATE AN EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM IN BOLOGNA

Abstract. The paper presents the workflow and the results of an ultrasonic 3D investigation and a 3D survey application aimed at the assessment of the internal integrity of an ancient sculpture. The work aimed at highlighting the ability of methods devoted to the 3D geometry acquisition of small objects when applied to diagnosis performed by geophysical investigation. In particular, two methods widely applied for small objects modelling are considered and compared, the digital Photogrammetry with the Structure from Motion (SFM) technique and hand-held 3D scanners. The study concludes with the aim to enhance the final graphical representation of the tomographic results and to subject the obtained results to a quantitative analysis. The survey is applied to the Egyptian naophorous statue of Amenmes and Reshpu, which dates to the reign of Ramses II (1279-1213 BC) or later and is now preserved in the Civic Archaeological Museum in Bologna. In order to evaluate the internal persistency of fractures and visible damages, a 3D Ultrasonic Tomographic Imaging (UTI) test has been performed and a multi-sensor survey (image and range based) was conducted, in order to evaluate the locations of the source and receiver points as accurate as possible The presented test allowed to evaluate the material characteristics, its porosity and degradation state, which particularly affect the lower part of the statue. More in general, the project demonstrated how solution coming from the field of 3D modelling of Cultural Heritage allow the application of 3D ultrasonic tomography also on objects with complex shapes, in addition to the improved representation of the obtained results.

Ancient ‘Black’ Decorative Stones and the Ephesian Origin of Sculpturalbigio antico

Isotopic, EPR and petrographic studies aimed at establishing the provenance of sculptural bigio antico are reported, including 18 possible quarry sites and 21 ancient sculptures. The results demonstrate that the Belevi quarry, north-east of Ephesos, above the more famous white marble quarry, was the major source of this marble. Nineteen artefacts belong to Belevi, whereas the precise origin of the remaining two is unknown, but must probably be found within the same area. The peculiar distribution of δ13C values both for Belevi and artefacts was crucial for inferring the correct provenance, subsequently confirmed by additional analytical and petrographic data.

“Nel conoscere le cose tutte della natura”

The cardinal nephew, Flavio Chigi (1631–1693), is known for his very special collection of natural as well as artistic objects from abroad. A portrait of the man, who was in charge of the Chigi-collection, the connoisseur Nicolò Simonelli, shows him among the key pieces staged on a table, while underneath pieces of antique sculpture are stored in a strange way. The antagonism of the Priapus statue on display on the one hand and the pieces of antique statues placed underneath the table on the other bring monstrous aspects of the antique to light while the beau-idéal often identified with antique sculpture seems to be no longer a matter of question. The arrangement of these objects allows moreover a reflection on different modes of generation/creation known at the time. The paper emphasizes the aesthetic aspects of the vis plastica of nature.