The newly erected colossal statue of the fourth-century emperor, Constantine the Great, may not be authentic or very old, but it is a tribute to Rome’s grandeur and its ability to reinvent itself. The 43-foot seated statue was reconstructed by a Madrid-based digital art group, Factum Foundation, from 10 known fragments of the original sculpture. It was installed in a garden in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, close to where the Temple of Jupiter once stood. The head and most of the other fragments of the colossal statue were discovered in 1486, and have been etched by leading artists from the 15th century on. A team from the Factum Foundation spent three days using photogrammetry to record the fragments in the Capitoline courtyard, and the high-resolution data became 3D prints, which were used to cast replicas. The reconstructed statue is a testament to the use of new technologies in museums and offers new avenues of research and dissemination. Recent scholarship on the statue has suggested the statue of Constantine was itself…
2024-02-07 14:11:43
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