THE AURA
IN THE AGE
OF DIGITAL
MATERIALITYRETHINKING PRESERVATION
IN THE SHADOWOF AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

The project is part of the exhibition

LA RISCOPERTA DI UN CAPOLAVORO
12 March – 28 June 2020
Palazzo Fava, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Bologna

A project of:Under the patronage of:

A collection of essays assembled by Factum Foundationto accompany the exhibition

The Materiality of the Aura:
New Technologies for Preservation

Pontificio Consiglio della Cultura

In collaboration with:Chiesa di Bologna

With the contribution of:

Palazzo Fava, Bologna
12 March – 28 June 2020

‘Factum Arte’ can be translated from the Latin as ‘made withskill’. Factum’s practice lies in mediating and transforming material.
Its approach has emerged from an ability to record and respond to
the subtle visual information manifest in the physical world aroundus. Hundreds of decisions are embedded as material evidence in theprocess of making an object of any kind. Archaeologists are trained
to read this evidence, as are forensic detectives at a crime scene.
Patrick Blackett, an experimental physicist, wrote that his work wasto ‘cultivate an intimacy with the behaviour of the physical world’ –this is an equally good description of Factum’s aims.

Credits
This book has been assembled and edited by Adam Lowe,
Elizabeth Mitchell, Nicolas Béliard, Giulia Fornaciari,
Tess Tomassini, Blanca Nieto and Guendalina Damone.

All projects carried out by the Factum Foundation are collaborative
and there are many people to thank. This is not the place to nameeveryone but some people have done a great deal to make all thiswork possible including: Charlotte Skene Catling, Otto Lowe,
Tarek Waly, Simon Schaffer, Pasquale Gagliardi, Fondazione Giorgio
Cini and everyone in ARCHiVe, Bruno Latour, Hartwig Fischer,
Jerry Brotton, Roberto Terra, Cat Warsi, John Tchalenko, Manuela
Mena, Peter Glidewell, The Griffith Institute, Emma Duncan, Lord
Rothschild, Fabia Bromofsky, Ana Botín, Paloma Botín, Lady Helen
Hamlyn, Ziyavudin and Olga Magomedov, Rachid Koraïchi, Andrew
Edmunds, Colin Franklin, Ed Maggs, the Hereford Mappa Mundi
Trust, Rosemary Firman, Philip Hewat-Jaboor, Helen Dorey, Peter
Glidewell, Purdy Rubin, Fernando Caruncho, Susanne Bickel,
Markus Leitner and everyone at the Swiss Embassy in Cairo, Jim
Moran, Kathelin Gray, Johnny Allen, Bassam Daghestani, Mohammed
Jameel, George Richards, David Coulson and the Trust for African
Rock Art, Jeffrey and Veronica Berman, Ben and Donna Rosen,
Clark Winter, Mauricio Torres Leclerc, Maria Golia, Anthony Sattin,
Nicholas Penny, Mark Leithauser, Carole Patey, Michael Snodin, Silvia
Davoli, Bill Sherman, Nico Schwartz, Julian Rothenstein, Ahmed
Mater, Larry Keith, Jose Luis Colomer, Richard de Tscharner andthe trustees of the Carène Foundation, William Ewing, Paula andJim Crown, Sir Paul and Jill Ruddock, Jonathan and Jane Ruffer,
Lindsay Stainton, Pippa Shirley, Juan Manuel Albendea, Casilda Ybarra,
Jorge Coll, Ana Debenedetti, Gabrielle Finaldi, Stephen Clarke, The
Gentle Author, Ali AlJuboori, Hansi Escobar, Ramon Blecua, Annette
Warren Gibbons, Michael Jones, Rut Ballesteros, Rebecca Foote,
Dinah Casson, Fabio Roversi Monaco, Richard Terra, People’s Palace
Projects, Shobita Punja, Sarah Thomas, Daniel Crouch, Fred Hohler,
Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, Michael and Sarah Spencer, Aidan Weston
Lewis, Nicholas Kugel, Pilar de la Béraudière, Dario Gamboni, Jorge
Otero Pailos, Betsy Bolman, Ken Singer, Chiara Casarin, Matteo
Lanfranconi, Mario Matthias Wivel, Chance Coughenour, Anna
Somers Cocks, Bernardo Tortorici Montaperto, Clare Foster, Clemens
Weijkamp and Raymond op het Roodt, Gabriele Finaldi, Jonathan N.
Tubb, Phil Harvey, Roberto Grandi, Roger Law, Sarah Thomas, andmany others who care about the preservation of the past.
And, of course, everyone at Factum Arte who works tirelessly tosupport the Factum Foundation and turn its vision into a reality.
This book is dedicated to Pasquale Gagliardi, who first got
the ball rolling.

CONTENTS

11

Preface, Fabio Roversi Monaco

15

Introduction, Adam Lowe
CHAPTER 1
RE-THINKING THE FUNCTION OF FACSIMILES

29
33
43
49
53
57
65

Saving the best wine for last, Richard Powers
The migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimiles,
Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe
ReACH: a collective and global re-think of our approach to copies in the age of digital
reproduction, Anaïs Aguerre
3D data, public access, freedom of information laws, CosmoWenman
A Renaissance of the Renaissance, Jonathan Jones
Returning to distorted origins, Mari Lending
Reviving Walpole’s narratives at Strawberry Hill House, Silvia Davoli
CHAPTER 2
PRESERVING, SHARING AND RESPONSIBILITY

77
93
101
109
119
127
131
135
139

Collections entail responsibilities: notes on a global institution, Hartwig Fischer
Get back. Artifices of return and replication, Simon Schaffer
Thefts, fakes and facsimiles: preserving the Bakor monoliths of eastern Nigeria, Ferdinand Saumarez Smith
The resurrection of the Sacred Cave of Kamukuwaká, AkariWaurá, Shirley Djukurnã Krenak,
Nathaniel Mann, Irene Gaumé, Mafalda Ramos, and Patricia Rodrigues
Death and entanglement. Some thoughts about life, love and the aims of art conservation, Alva Noë
Discrete objects and complex subjects: from Mosul to London and back again, Nicolas Béliard
Sharing skills and technologies: teaching photogrammetry in AlUla, Otto Lowe
Digitising the manuscript heritage of Dagestan, Eva Rosenthal
The return of an interpretation of Caravaggio’s Nativity, Bernardo Tortorici Montaperto

CASE STUDY 1
RESURRECTING THE BOLOGNESE RENAISSANCE

CHAPTER 3
NEW INFORMATION GENERATING NEW KNOWLEDGE
151
159
169
173
177
181
193
197
203
209

Atelier Canova: a new vision of Antonio Canova, Chiara Casarin
Restoring the corpus of Archie Creswell, William Owen
The Raphael Cartoons at the V&A: close-range digitisation at a monumental scale, Carlos Bayod Lucini
Malevich’s Black Square, Eva Rosenthal
Re-SEARCH, Clare Foster
Rethinking our thinking about thinking: epistemology, architecture, and world, Brian Cantwell Smith
The hand of the artist: graph analysis and El Greco, Adam Lowe
Building a Mirror World for Venice, Frédéric Kaplan and Isabella de Lenardo
ARCHiVe: Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice, Adam Lowe
ARCHiVe case study: exploration of automatic transcription for the index cards fromthe Daniélou collection, Rashmi Gajare

317
323
331
339
345
349

CASE STUDY 2
THE THEBAN NECROPOLIS PRESERVATION INITIATIVEWORK IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS, EGYPTCHAPTER 4
CARTOGRAPHY: RECORDING SHAPE, MAPPING SURFACE
221
227
231
235
247

The work of mapping in an age of digital mediation, Jerry Brotton
The way we see the world, Adam Lowe
Re-creating the lost silver map of al-Idrisi, Elizabeth Mitchell
Recording an Ottoman-Venetian world map, Guendalina Damone
The Gough Map. Revealing function through cartography, Catherine Delano-Smith and Damien Bove
CHAPTER 5
ACCESS AND DISPLAY

259
269
281
285
289
295

Through the looking glass. Transportive architecture, Charlotte Skene Catling
Verum Factum Arte: Scanning Seti and the afterlife of a pharaonic tomb, Bryan Markovitz
Recording and displaying Bernardino Luini, Guendalina Damone
La Casa Natal de Velázquez: re-presenting the Spanish Golden Age, Elizabeth Mitchell
Proliferation of opera houses, concert halls, museums & art galleries: are we building sepulchresand mausoleums for the future? Jasper Parrott
Art in time, Alexander Nagel

Recording and re-uniting the Polittico Griffoni, Adam Lowe
Beauty in relief, Carlos Bayod Lucini
Historic cartography and digital technologies: Factum Foundation and the virtual restorationof the countryside map from the Sala Bologna at the Vatican, Nadja Aksamija and Francesco Ceccarelli
Publica magnificentia and architectural palimpsest: the restoration of the façadeof San Petronio, Roberto Terra
Restoration, replication, resurrection: choosing a future for Amico Aspertini’s Deposition of Christ,
Elizabeth Mitchell
Recording emotion: Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ,
Tess Tomassini and Guendalina Damone

365
369
371
373
377
381

389

Immortality and beyond, Nicholas Reeves
The Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative, texts by the Theban Necropolis
Preservation team and the University of Basel
Stoppelaëre House: the restoration of the building and the establishment of the
3D Scanning, Archiving and Training Centre
The recording of the tomb of Seti I
The sarcophagus of Seti I: recording and re-materialisation
Recording fragments in Egypt and in collections around the world

Conclusion, Adam Lowe

PREFACE
Fabio Roversi Monaco

Fabio Alberto Roversi
Monaco held the position ofHigh Rector of the Universityof Bologna from 1985–2000.
He is Emeritus Professor of
Administrative Law at the same
university. He conceived andrealised the Magna Charta
Universitatum and is founderand Honorary President of the
Observatory Magna Charta
Universitatum. He was Presidentof Banca IMI, where he currently
holds the position of Vice
President. He was President of
the Academy of Fine Arts in
Bologna. From 2001 to 2013 he
was President of the Cassa di
Risparmio di Bologna Foundationand today he holds the positionof President of the Society
Museum of the City of Bologna.

PAGE 2

Putting the finishing touches tothe facsimile of Veronese’s Wedding
at Cana, in Palladio’s refectory on
the island of San Giorgio Maggiore,
Venice, 2007.
OPPOSITE

Detail from the predella of the
Polittico Griffoni, painted by Ercole
de’ Roberti in 1473 and now in the
Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.
FOLLOWING PAGES

Compianto sul Cristo morto(Lamentation over the Dead Christ)
by Niccolò dell’Arca, c. 1463,
situated in the church of Santa
Maria della Vita in Bologna. The
Compianto, which consists of sevenlife-size terracotta statues, wasrecorded by Factum Foundation
using photogrammetry in 2019.

10Thanks to the extraordinary collaboration of nine international museums, oneof the greatest masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, the Polittico Griffoni byFrancesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti, returns to shine in the city forwhich it was created, 300 years after its dismemberment between 1725 and 1731.
While the original panels will return home after the 100-day exhibition, their digital replicas will remain in the city. Thanks to the rigorous work and innovative technologies of Factum Foundation, the perfect reproduction of the polyptych will be able tobe admired first in San Petronio, in the original chapel, and then within the Museo della
Storia di Bologna, where it will remain indefinitely.
Already in 2012, Factum had created for the Museo della Storia di Bologna theimpressive facsimile of the fresco showing the bird’s-eye view map of Bologna from theSala Bologna at the Vatican Apostolic Palace. This intervention was part of a larger project
involving the recording of the whole room, which was intended to inform the restorationof damaged or incomplete areas and the reconstruction of lost fragments.
If the facsimile of the map of Bologna made it possible for the public to enjoy anotherwise inaccessible artwork, Factum’s work with respect to the Polittico Griffoni hassought to restore the original arrangement of a dismantled polyptych, making it possible
to appreciate the artefact in its original form.
Over the past 20 years, Factum Foundation has dedicated itself to documenting,monitoring, studying, and recreating the world’s cultural heritage: from its initial workon Egyptian tombs, to the facsimile of the Wedding at Cana, to the re-materialisation of
Caravaggio’s Nativity (perhaps stolen by the mafia), to mention only a few of its projects.
The creation of reproductions or the digitisation of works, which has many anddiverse uses, is of enormous importance today not only for the conservation of works ofart, put at risk due to the natural passing of time or reckless human actions, but also forpreserving the memory of certain contexts that no longer exist. This is the case for our
project on the Polittico Griffoni.
Adam Lowe’s entire work aims, with great intelligence, at an ever-deeper understanding of the material aspects that make up works of art. ‘Every work of art is a dynamic object: it ages and changes, like people. It is not something immutable – it is aprocess.’ Thus, for Adam, ‘recording’ the surface of a work is first and foremost a question of knowledge.
Ultimately, with the exhibition of the Polittico Griffoni, Factum allows us to reflect
profoundly on ways in which digital technologies, in both physical and virtual form, arechanging our perspectives on the sharing and protection of the evidence of the past.

11

12

P R EFACE

13

INTRODUCTION
Adam Lowe

Adam Lowe is the Directorof Factum Arte and the founderof Factum Foundation for Digital
Technology in Conservation.

OPPOSITE

Render of the interior of thesarcophagus of Seti I, showing thefigure of Nut, goddess of the sky,lying beneath the mummified bodyof the pharaoh. The sarcophagus iscovered with text from the Book ofGates, which guides the deceasedon their journey through theafterlife. The sarcophagus has beenin Sir John Soane’s Museum in
London since 1824, when Sir John
Soane purchased it from Belzoni.

14T

his publication focuses on Factum Foundation’s work to promote the use ofhigh-resolution recording, digital restoration and creative re-materialisation
while bringing into focus the changing attitudes towards owning, sharing,preserving and displaying cultural artefacts. It accompanies two related exhibitions:
La Riscoperta di un Capolavoro and La Materialità dell’Aura at Palazzo Fava in Bologna. La
Riscoperta di un Capolavoro is focused on the reunification of the 16 original panels thatstill exist from the Polittico Griffoni, the altarpiece which stood in the Griffoni Chapel inthe Basilica of San Petronio until it was broken up in 1725. The 16 tempera paintings by
Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti will be exhibited together with 16 facsimiles
arranged in what is thought to be the original configuration of the altarpiece – allowing it
to be seen as its patrons and makers intended. La Materialità dell’Aura examines the ways
in which works of art are recorded, remade and presented.
The aim of the collection of thoughts and images in this book is to encourage
reflection on the ways that digital technologies, in virtual and physical form, arechanging our approach to the preservation and conservation of the material evidenceof the past. High-resolution digital recording and long-term secure archiving are theparentheses that are shaping this debate. If an object is recorded correctly it can beanalysed, studied, shared and rematerialized for a variety of purposes. This approachto recording requires an understanding of different processes and is generating a hostof new skills that are led by the technologies: composite photography, land-based andaerial photogrammetry, close-range 3D scanning, long-range scanning in colour and
3D, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and photometric stereo, multi-spectral
imaging and microscopy. The recording is the foundation of everything that follows.
The data can then be used in different ways. In its digital form it can be made accessible
worldwide where it can be used as both an educational and creative resource. It can be
optimized and used for virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. It can be scientificallyanalysed for forensic purposes. It can become the source material for digital restorations that never touch the original artwork. It can be rematerialised using various 3D
output technologies. It can be analysed with AI self-learning neural networks. It can
inform exhibition display and it is leading to a digital connoisseurship based on a mix
of fact and opinion, knowledge and evidence.
Twenty years ago, when Factum was being formed, there was a real excitement
about what was possible. The 3D data recorded in 2001 in the tomb of Seti I set new
standards that have still not been significantly improved in terms of 3D resolution anda correspondence between the original and the re-materialised surface. In 2007, when
discussing the facsimile of Veronese’s Wedding at Cana on his television show Passepartout,
Philippe Daverio threw a copy of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay The Work of Art in the15

THIS PAGE

Pedro Miró using structured lightscanning to record the statueof Idrimi in the British Museum,2017.
OPPOSITE

Completed facsimile of the Tombof Raphael from the Pantheon,2020.

Age of Mechanical Reproduction over his shoulder stating that in a digital age we need torethink the relationship between originality and authenticity. At a time when technology
is moving very fast, this re-thinking is taking its time. While the arguments have moved
on from Walter Benjamin’s position that was important in the mid-1930s, a clear mapof the new territory created by digital technology has yet to emerge. There is a vast
accumulation of thoughts around the theme, but the ‘aura’ has remained more or lessintact as the thing that separates an original from its copy. Jean Clair, the ex-Director of
the Musée Picasso and the Venice Biennale, in his book L’hiver de la culture has argued that
it is better to display replicas than to fill museums with deteriorating relics. The V&A’s
exhibition and publication A World of Fragile Parts (2016) took a general look at the valueof copies while the ReACH initiative, organized by the V&A and the Peri Foundation,
resulted in the publication Copy Culture, outlining important issues relating to data ownership, high-resolution recording and data sharing. The position of UNESCO, ICOMOS
and other professional bodies is significantly out of date.
Walter Benjamin struggled to define exactly what he meant by ‘the aura’. His
choice of metaphor, suggesting both halo and radiation, is actually the opposite of thephysical evidence that makes an object specifically what it is. Objects are the repositories of compounded ideas, thoughts, materials, evidence, transactions and the actionsof time. They are the counterpoint of the ephemeral communications of today – theyrequire time and reflection but they deliver complex insights – they reflect and redirectevery thought we impose upon them.
Lithographically printed images of works of art will always lack many of the qualities of the original. New imaging technologies and 3D recording systems allow us toclose the gap between an object and its reproduction. No copy will ever re-materialise
everything that is in the original, but the closer the replication comes, the more can be16

revealed. In part this will allow us to understand the decisions and materials that makethe original, the way it has aged and decayed and the things that have happened to it over
its lifetime. All things are in a constant dynamic process of change. Replicas not only help
us understand and empathise, they can also encourage us to become aware of our temporal and perspectival limitations.
Digitality and auras have much in common; they are far from being discrete, stable
and clearly defined. Digitality was once associated with the virtual but is becoming
increasingly physical. Digital data is dependent on electricity and human input. For
Benjamin the aura is intrinsic to, and emanating from, the object; in reality the aura is

INT RO DU CT IO N

17

projected onto the object by the viewer and is the product of our own perception ofvalue, our beliefs and prejudices. When these change, the aura can relocate.
Digital technology can be used to accurately record different aspects of an object.
The aura inhabits these spaces. The digital used to be virtual, now it has the potential
to be both virtual and physical, greatly magnified facilitating closeness, penetrated withmulti-spectral light sources revealing under-painting and allowing pigments to be analysed and re-materialised. Technology is evident in both the mechanics of the hardware
and the elegance of the algorithms that shape the software. Both, in the hands of skilled
digital artisans, are leading to new insights and understanding. When concepts are divorced from physical evidence they tend to disperse. Thoughts and ideas need to findtheir form: the written word, song, dance, music, performance, architecture, sculpture,
painting and both tangible and intangible representation. They are always rooted in theirtime but accessible to those who look, listen and question. Walter Benjamin starts his
essay with a quote from Paul Valéry’s ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’:For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what
it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transformthe entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself
and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notionof art (Aesthetics, 1928).
Digital technology is bringing about that ‘amazing change’, but Valéry’s prediction seems
almost prophetic if you read what follows that quote in the original text:
At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will beaffected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a systemof sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object
or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall
only have to summon them and there they will be, either in their living actuality
or restored from the past. They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist
wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. A work of art willcease to be anything more than a kind of source or point of origin whose
benefit will be available and quite fully so, wherever we wish.
While Valéry was imagining the internet, Benjamin mused on the progression fromwoodblock to lithography and then onto photography, silent film and talking cinema. He
considers what is lost between the performance of an actor on stage and the stars of thescreen. In an essay on mechanical reproduction the concept of performance could apply
to copies of paintings and sculptures as much as music and theatre. In this context Alois
Auer’s remarkable work at the Imperial Printing Works in Vienna in the 1840s (whenelectricity was making the photo-mechanical revolution possible) is significant. In Auer’s
environment of curiosity and experimentation, driven by the commercial potential ofmass media, image and form were merging and the physical nature of things was being
examined and celebrated. The discrete patterns of coloured dots that formed the printed
image sat alongside continuous gradations of tone that contained the seeds of the digital
revolution that has brought with it a host of materialisation methods that can be loosely
called 3D printing.
18

FOLLOWING PAGES

Back to front: a test for thefacsimile of the Martyrdomof St Matthew by Caravaggio;
topographic and bathymetricdata from the surface of the
globe without water; and twoworks from Ahmed Mater’s series
Mitochondria: Powerhouses (firstshown at Galleria Continua,
San Gimignano, 2017).
Background: a test for the facsimileof Tutankhamun’s tomb; a recreation of Raphael’s Christ Fallingon theWay to Calvary (now in theMuseo del Prado) painted for the
church of Lo Spasimo, Palermo;
and an altar made by Factum Artefrom a print by Piranesi publishedin Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi,
tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichidisegnati ed incisi dal Cav. Gio. Batt.
Piranesi, Rome, 1778. Foreground:
the re-creation of the lost silver
map by al-Idrisi, made for Roger IIof Sicily but lost in a shipwreckin the 12th century.

New technologies are seldom new. Photo-sculpture emerged in Paris in 1851 andelectroforming played an important role in the formation of the Victoria and Albert museum after the Great Exhibition of 1851. 3D recording and 3D output methods do notfeature in Benjamin’s idea of mechanical reproduction where a photograph is an image
that subjectively records the material world and in turn is imperfectly reproduced bydifferent printing systems available at low cost and in high volume. He focused on theimpact that this was having on shaping public opinion. The media was pushing the aesthetics of Fascism and the propaganda of Communism. Benjamin’s essay was written inGerman in 1935 and published in French in 1936 when many could see the world was
only heading one way. The manipulation of printed media was playing an important roleand seeding conflict. Benjamin’s understanding of technology predicts the fake news,
data harvesting and ephemeral twitter feeds devoid of truth that fuel today’s political debate. Benjamin, the cultural critic, understands the ways in which technology was being
harnessed for political control. Valéry, the poet, is thinking about a system of stimuli andworks of art available wherever we wish. In today’s digital world, augmented- virtualand mixed-realities exist alongside new recording and output technologies capable ofhighly faithful physical ‘re-productions’. In turn this is changing the way we think about
preservation, display, dissemination, archiving and ownership.
This collection of essays and short texts does not attempt to be definitive, but
it touches on many of the concerns facing preservation today. Most of the authors or
projects have a direct connection to Factum, others less so. In each case, the words andimages help to map out the rapidly changing territory. Charles-Germain de Saint Aubin
titled his caricature of a satyr inspecting Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour at
the Salon of 1757 ‘La verité Surmonte l’Autorité’. Hopefully technology is helping us tolook past our own prejudices and re-think why culture is essential for communication.
Today would the same satyr inspecting the facsimile of Boucher’s painting in the exhibition Madame de Pompadour in the Frame at Waddesdon Manor, feel that the aura has become
unfaithful, inhabiting both the original object and the authentic copy.

Background, left to right: a
CNC-carved relief panel from thenorth-west palace of Ashurnasirpal
II, Nimrud; a facsimile of a pillar
face from the tomb of Seti I in
the Pergamon Museum, Berlin;
and facsimiles of two facing
door-frames from the tomb of
Seti I, now in the Museum ofArchaeology, Florence, and the
Musée du Louvre, Paris. Middle
distance: a facsimile of Seti I’s
sarcophagus from Sir John Soane’s
Museum in London. Foreground:tests for a print of a destroyed
temple in Tibet by Thomas Laird;
colour test for a new recording of
the tomb of Tutankhamun madein 2019 (in order to carry out adirect comparison with the colour
recording of 2009).

INT RO DU CT IO N

19

20

INT RO DU CT IO N

21

22

INT RO DU CT IO N

23

24

INT RO DU CT IO N

25

CHAPTER 1

RE-THINKING
THE FUNCTION
OF FACSIMILES

26

INT RO DU CT IO N

27

SAVING THE BEST WINE FOR LAST
Richard Powers

This is the transcript of apresentation given by Richard
Powers at an interdisciplinary
discussion entitled ‘Coping with
the Past’ that took place at the
Giorgio Cini Foundation on theisland of San Giorgio Maggiore,
Venice in 2009.
Richard Powers is a novelist
whose works explore themes
from science, technology andnature. He was awarded a
MacArthur Fellowship in 1989,
the National Book Award in2006 for his novel The Echo
Maker, and a Pulitzer Prize in2019 for The Overstory.

PREVIOUS PAGE

Crowds in front of the Mona Lisa
in the Musée du Louvre, Paris,
with Veronese’s Wedding at Canain the background.
OPPOSITE

Factum Arte’s facsimile of theWedding at Cana in Palladio’s
refectory on the island of San
Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, thespace for which the original wasconceived and painted.

28

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

M

y goal in this session is for us to use the language of storytelling – character, setting, scene, focalization, plot, reversal, exposition, development, denouement,
all the conventions of narrative expectation – to reveal the hidden stories that
underwrite our different disciplines.
So let me start by looking for the similarity at the core of four related stories. In
the oldest of the four, a young man attends an enormous party that is about to turn intoa disaster of the first order. The host has misjudged his guests’ needs and run out of libation. The whole social fabric of the gathering is about to unknit. Reluctantly, the young
man undertakes an act of creative makeover, converting ordinary water into somethingthat not only perfectly resembles wine but passes for wine of the finest quality.The guests
marvel at the miraculous conversion, the gathering is refreshed, and earthly possibility is
rewritten. And I am left with two slightly frivolous questions: first, why does this story
become immortal? And second, why did the young man need to start with water in thefirst place? Why didn’t he just make wine spring up from empty vessels?
In the second oldest story, a young man at the height of his power is commissioned
by a prominent institution in a city nearing its zenith to recreate that first story. After amillennium and a half of countless representations, that narrative has become so familiar it
is all but invisible. In an astonishing 15 months, the man transforms a mainsail’s worth ofcanvas into a scene both ancient and current. He places the biblical story in a strange GrecoRoman-Renaissance assemblage and populates it with 130 contemporaries, including himself and two other masters of visual simulation. A fossilized story becomes, through re-presentation, something weirdly, unnervingly re-presented – old wine in new bottles. Viewers
marvel at the miraculous translation, legacy is reaffirmed, and the past is re-inhabited.
In the third oldest story, an obscure 20th-century French poet, essayist, and translator from Nîmes sets out to recreate Don Quixote. He doesn’t mean to copy or transcribe the canonical masterpiece, or even to write his own contemporary version of thestory, which would be too cheap and easy. He does not want to create one of ‘those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Canebière or Don Quixote
on Wall Street’. Instead, ‘His admirable intention [is] to produce’ from out of the context
of his own historical moment and his own personal experience ‘a few pages which [will]
coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes’. Overthe course of three centuries, the comic epic has become lost inside its own aura. Once,the poet says, the Quixote was a profoundly transforming entertainment; ‘now it is theoccasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions. Fameis a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst’.
Over countless sleepless nights, tearing up and revising thousands of tortured manuscript pages in an archaic language that he hasn’t even mastered, the young man arrives
29

– through the force of his own experience and creative impulse – at a handful of passages
judged by an outside reader to be an astounding revelation. For the exact same words are
now wiser, more surprising, and more achingly profound because of the three centuriesof historical contingency that have added to the pain and comedy of the tale. To tilt at
those windmills in the early 17th century is inspired satire. To do so in the age of trench
warfare and aerial bombardment is the most divine madness. Pierre Menard, as his literary executor Borges says, ‘has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting andrudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism andthe erroneous attribution’. Scholars of the restored passages marvel at the miraculous
reconstruction, the canon is revivified, and the society of reading is re-inscribed.
In the youngest of the four stories, a vast network of artists, historians, scholars, scientists, engineers, programmers, designers, technicians, and countless others, few of themknown to one another, aggregate for the startling task, not of transcribing a 67 sqm painting
almost half a millennium old, but of recreating it, re-originating it, through many thousandsof agonizing decisions, at dizzy degrees of fidelity. But fidelity not to some static original,
but to a ‘trajectory of transformations’ set loose in the constantly changing run of social
time. To fill a refectory wall at the height of the Renaissance with an ancient story of renewal is an act of mastery, faith, cohesion, exuberance, and conviction.To restore that samewall with that same painting of that same ancient episode – after Darwin, after Hiroshima,
after the launch of interplanetary probes, after decolonisation, after the onset of global
warming and mass extinction, after nanocomputing, after the discovery of the molecularbasis of life – and to do so with technologies that have broken free of any individual’s ability
to understand, now becomes an act of near-perverse regeneration. Those who had lost theability to see anything at all in the aura-laden original will look again. New gatherings will
be refreshed. Future pasts will be reformed. The reproduction reawakens the original.
The thing that makes these four stories similar is one peculiar power of narrative.
Narrative is, of course, the thing that keeps time from collapsing into just one damn thing
after the other. It’s the grouping of a series of events and interactions into a significant
arc. Narrative accomplishes this conversion primarily by bringing about, in the willing
mind, a strange reversal of the dominant direction of time.
The act of reading consists, in Peter Brook’s memorable phrase, of ‘the anticipationof retrospection’. In the quotidian experience of unreflective time, the past is fixed andgradually forecloses on the open future. In the reflexive experience of narrative time,
the pre-existing future constantly changes the mutable past. You read page 10, alreadyknowing it will mean something very different by page 300. And sure enough, by page300, page 10 has changed utterly, although it remains word for word the same. Page 10
posts itself forward, waiting for page 300 to intercept and reinterpret it.
Every new event in a story alters the events that generated it. Veronese re-enchants what happened at Cana. Borges re-canonizes Cervantes. Lowe re-cognizes
Veronese. In an age obsessed with innovation and individuality, it pays to remember
Eliot’s words in the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘the most individual
parts of [the poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’. [Or better yet, his famous words from Four
Quartets: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’.]
Yeki bood, yeki nabood. This is the traditional Persian fairy tale opener: it was
like this, but it wasn’t like this. The English gambit is Once upon a time. C’era una volta.
30

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESIl était une fois. This is the seditious contract between the writer and reader of fiction: thefollowing isn’t real, but treat it as if it were. And the contract is offered up in a time thatwas in time once, but isn’t anymore, except in the time recreated by narrative time. So
the question immediately arises: why should something with no material basis in fact andlying outside actual time have any emotional power to move or rearrange us? The answer,
I think, is that our brains have been shaped by natural selection to take the map for theplace and use it as a shortcut into the nunc stans, the standing now.
Fiction sacrifices an ontological hostage in order to ransom an epistemologicalone. And it does so once, upon time itself. By inverting time, stories restore us to time.
Stories aren’t just like some world, they are the traces of mind, negotiating the world.
Representations are real things: ask the writers of the code that controls the scanner thatrecorded Veronese and helped Adam (Lowe) bring a factual past back into the dynamic
present. But representations are not slaves to a conventional realism; they fashion the conventions we use to sense ourselves in time. By releasing the present to once again resemble
and re-assemble the past, representations can free the past to rejoin its vital new futures.
Good reading is the act of empathically becoming any number of desperate characters colliding with each other. But the collisions that fiction portrays must be as robust as the collisions of this world, in which every character fashions herself as a moral
center. The impoverishing novel – or call it the fundamentalist novel – is dominated by asingle, monolithic conviction. The story means less than it says. In enriching novels, themap gives way to a wider place. Good writing and good reading reproduce not fixed,
autonomous positions, but interdependent assemblages of hopes, fears, dreams, legacies
and testaments, woven into a shared text-tile by countless shareholders, a textile being
constantly rehabilitated.
Over the last two days, I’ve been hearing this group move toward a provisional
starting point for how we might begin to tell impoverishing stories from enriching ones:
impoverishing narratives collapse reciprocal, dynamic processes into amnesiac packaged
products. Enriching narratives release products into long-time processes. Bad stories arefull of monolithic, privileged certainties that stop time and collapse focal perspective toa controlling view. Good stories move the reader freely across all three tenses, througha country full of voices. Bad stories get us to side with the hero. Good stories get us tokeep changing sides, and even to change the sides themselves.
Here are some hidden narratives we’ve touched on that can impoverish our existence in time: the myth of cultural progress or, on the other hand, the myth of the goldenage, the myth of the unique destiny or the myth of the invariant inheritance, the myth ofthe privileged present, the myth of the intact origin, the myth of the solitary maker, themyth of autonomous innovation.
What of the narratives that restore and renovate time? We have a little over one
hour to find them. Stranger things have happened, c’era una volta.
In the Greek New Testament, the common word for miracle is semeion: ‘sign’. And
from this word – by what Bruno Latour calls devious etymology, using that wonderfully
fictional reconstruction, Proto-Indo-European – I can get to the word facsimile. At impoverished parties, the good stuff comes out first and it’s downhill from there. Enrichinggatherings – those that spill backwards into the future past – make from the merely similar something miraculous, forever saving the best wine for last.

S AV ING T H E B ES T W INE F O R L A S T

31

THE MIGRATION OF THE AURA,OR HOW TO EXPLORE THE ORIGINAL
THROUGH ITS FACSIMILES
Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe
A chapter prepared by Bruno
Latour and Adam Lowe for
Switching Codes: Thinking
Through Digital Technology inthe Humanities and in the Arts,
eds. Thomas Bartscherer andRoderick Coover (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
2011)
Adam Lowe is the Director of
Factum Arte and the founder ofFactum Foundation for Digital
Technology in Conservation.
Bruno Latour is a philosopher
and anthropologist, and oneof the founders of the field ofScience and Technology Studies.
He is Emeritus Professor
at Sciences Po, Paris. His
many books include We Have
Never Been Modern, Facing
Gaia, and most recently Down
to Earth. He has curated
a series of exhibitions at
Zentrum für Kunst und Medien(ZKM) including Iconoclash,
Making Things Public and ResetModernity! and is curator of theforthcoming exhibition Critical
Zones, also at ZKM, and of theTaipei Biennale 2020.

OPPOSITE

The statue of Idrimi (c. 1600–1500
BCE) was excavated in the 1930s
in what is now the Hatay region ofTurkey. The inscription states that
Idrimi, originally from Aleppo,
travelled across the Middle East to
Emar and Canaan before becoming
ruler of Alalakh (in Hatay). A
facsimile was made for the charity
Making Light. It will be part ofan exhibition about migration andrefugees from the conflict in Syria.

32

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

Something odd has happened to Holbein’s The Ambassadors at the National Gallery
in London. The visitor does not immediately know how to describe her malaise.
The painting is completely flat; its colours bright but somewhat garish; the shapeof every object is still there but slightly exaggerated; she wonders what has happened tothis favourite painting of hers. ‘That’s it’, she mutters, ‘The painting has lost its depth; thefluid dynamics of the paint have gone. It is just a surface now’. But, what does this surface
look like? The visitor looks around, puzzled, and, then, the answer dawns on her: it resembles almost exactly the poster she bought several years ago at the Gallery bookshop,
and that still hangs in her study at home. Only the dimension differs.
Could it be true, she wonders. Could they have replaced the Ambassadors by a facsimile? Maybe it’s on loan to some other museums, and, so as to not disappoint thevisitors, they put up with this copy. Or maybe they did not want to trick us, and it
is a projection. It is so flat and bright that it could almost be a slide projected on ascreen… Fortunately, she composes herself enough to not ask the stern guard in theroom whether this most famous painting is the original or not. What a shock it would
have been. Unfortunately, she knows enough about the strange customs of restorers andcurators to bow to the fact that this is, indeed, the original although only in name, thatthe real original has been irreversibly lost and that it has been substituted by what mostpeople like in a copy: bright colours, shining surface, and above all a perfect resemblancewith the slides sold at the bookshop that are shown in art classes all over the world by art
teachers most often interested only in the shape and theme of a painting but not by anyother marks registered in the thick surface of a work. She leaves the room suppressing atear: the original has been turned into a copy of itself looking like a cheap copy, and no one
seems to complain, or even to notice, the substitution. They seem happy to have visitedin London the original poster of Holbein’s Ambassadors!
Something even stranger happens to her, some time later, in the Salle de la Jocondein the Louvre. To finally get at this cult icon of The Da Vinci Code, hundreds of thousandsof visitors have to enter through two doors that are separated by a huge framed painting,
Veronese’s Nozze di Cana (Wedding at Cana), a rather dark giant of a piece that directly
faces the tiny Mona Lisa, barely visible through her thick anti-fanatic glass. Now the visitor
is really stunned. In the Hollywood machinery of the miraculous wedding, she no longer
recognizes the facsimile that she had the good fortune of seeing at the end of 2007 when
she was invited by the Cini Foundation to the island of San Giorgio, in Venice. There it
was, she remembers vividly, a painting on canvas, so thick and deep that you could still
see the brush marks of Veronese and feel the sharp cuts that Napoleon’s orderlies had tomake in order to tear the painting from the wall, strip by strip, before rolling it like acarpet and sending it as war booty to Paris in 1797 – a cultural rape very much in the33

mind of all Venetians, up to this day. But there, in Palladio’s refectory, the painting (yes,it was a painting even though it was produced through the intermediary of digital techniques) had an altogether different meaning: it was mounted at a different height, onethat makes sense in a dining room; it was delicately lit by the natural light of huge east andwest windows so that at about 5pm on a summer afternoon the light in the room exactly
coincides with the light in the painting; it had, of course, no frame; and, more importantly, Palladio’s architecture merged with admirable continuity with Veronese’s painted
architecture, giving this refectory of the Benedictine monks such a trompe l’oeil depth ofvision that you could not stop yourself from walking slowly back and forth and up anddown the room to enter deeper and deeper into the mystery of the miracle.
But here, in the Mona Lisa room, even though every part of the painting looked
just the same (as far as she could remember), the meaning of the painting she had seenin Venice seemed entirely lost. Why does it have such a huge gilt frame? Why are there
doors on both sides? Why is it hanging so low, making a mockery of the Venetian balconyon which the guests were crowding? The bride and groom, squashed into the left handcorner, seemed peripheral here, while in Venice, they were of great importance, articulating a scene of sexual intrigue that felt like a still from a film. In Paris, the composition
made less sense. Why this ugly zenithal light? Why this air-conditioned room with its
dung brown polished plaster walls? In Venice, there was no air-conditioning; the painting
was allowed to breathe by itself as if Veronese had just left it to dry. And, anyway, the visitors could not move around the painting to ponder those questions without bumping into
others momentarily glued (queued) to the Joconde turning their backs to the Veronese.
A terrible cognitive dissonance. And yet there was no doubt that this one, in Paris,
was the original; no substitution had occurred, no cheating of any sort – with all its restoration, Veronese would certainly be surprised to see the painting looking as it does, but
that’s different from cheating. She remembered perfectly well that in Venice it was clearly
written: ‘A facsimile’. And in San Giorgio there was even a small exhibition to explain
in some detail the complex digital processes that Factum Arte, the workshop in Madrid,
had used to de- then re-materialize the gigantic Parisian painting, carefully laser scanning
it, A4 by A4, photographing it in similarly sized sections, white light scanning it to record
the relief surface, and then somehow managing to stitch together the digital files before
instructing a purpose-built printer to deposit pigments onto a canvas carefully coatedwith a gesso almost identical to that used by Veronese. Is it possible that the Venice version, although it clearly states that it is a facsimile, is actually more original than the Paris
original, she wonders? She now remembers that on the phone with a French art historianfriend, she had been castigated for spending so much time in San Giorgio with the copyof the Nozze: ‘Why waste your time with a fake Veronese, when there are so many true
ones in Venice?!’ her friend had said, to which she had replied, without realizing what
she was saying: ‘But come here to see it for yourself, no description can replace seeing thisoriginal… oops, I mean, is this not the very definition of “aura”?...’ Without question,
for her, the aura of the original had migrated from the Louvre to San Giorgio: the best
proof was that you had to come to the original and see it. What a dramatic contrast, shethought, between the Veronese and the The Ambassadors, which claims to be the original inorder to hide the fact that it is an expensive copy of one of its cheap copies!
‘But it’s not the original, it’s just a facsimile!’ How often have we heard sucha retort when confronted with an otherwise perfect reproduction of a painting? Noquestion about it, the obsession of the age is for the original version. Only the original
34

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESLiDAR scan of the interior of
the Cathedral of the Nativity of
the Virgin at Ferapontov, Russia,
painted by Dionisy and his
assistants in 1502. The frescoes
were recorded by the Peri
Foundation and Factum
Foundation in 2017.

possesses an aura, this mysterious and mystical quality that no second-hand version will
ever get. But paradoxically, this obsession for pinpointing originality increases proportionally with the availability and accessibility of more and more copies of better andbetter quality. If so much energy is devoted to the search for the original – for archeological and marketing reasons – it is because the possibility of making copies has neverbeen so open-ended. If no copies of the Mona Lisa existed, would we pursue it with suchenergy – and, would we devise so many conspiracy theories to decide whether or not
the version held under glass and protected by sophisticated alarms is the original surface
painted by Leonardo’s hand or not?
So, in spite of the knee-jerk reaction – ‘But this is just a facsimile’ – we should
refuse to decide too quickly when considering the value of either the original or its
reproduction. Thus, the real phenomenon to be accounted for is not the punctual delineation of one version divorced from the rest of its copies, but the whole assemblage
made up of one – or several – original(s) together with the retinue of its continually rewritten biography. It is not a case of ‘either or’ but of ‘and, and’. Is it not because theNile ends up in such a huge delta that the century-old search for its sources had been so
thrilling? To pursue the metaphor, we want, in this paper, to behave like hydrographers
intent in deploying the whole catchment area of a river, not only focusing on an original
spring. A given work of art should be compared not to any isolated locus but to a river’s
catchment, complete with its estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many
meandering turns and, of course, also, its several hidden sources.

T H E M IG R AT IO N O F T H E AU R A

35

To give a name to this catchment area, we will use the word trajectory. A work of art– no matter of which material it is made – has a trajectory or, to use another expression
popularized by anthropologists, a career.1 What we want to do in this paper is to specify
the trajectory or career of a work of art and to move from one question that we find moot(‘Is it an original or merely a copy?’) to another one that we take to be decisive, especiallyat the time of digital reproduction: ‘Is it well or badly reproduced?’. The reason why wefind this second question so important is because the quality, conservation, continuation,sustenance and appropriation of the original depends entirely on the distinction between
good and bad reproduction. We want to argue that a badly reproduced original risks
disappearing while a well accounted for original may continue to enhance its originality
and to trigger new copies. This is why we want to show that facsimiles, especially thoserelying on complex (digital) techniques, are the most fruitful way to explore the original
and even to help re-define what originality actually is.
To shift the attention of the reader away from the detection of the original to that of
the quality of its reproduction, let us remember that the word ‘copy’ does not need to be
so derogatory, since it comes from the same etymology as ‘copious’, and thus designatesa source of abundance. To the question: ‘Is this isolated piece an original or a facsimile?’,it might be more interesting to ask: ‘Is this segment in the trajectory of the work of art
barren or fertile?’.
To say that a work of art grows in originality thanks to the quality and abundanceof its copies, is nothing odd: this is true of the trajectory of any set of interpretations.
Abraham has become the father of a people ‘as numerous as the grains of sand’ only
because he had a lineage. Before the birth of Isaac, Abraham was a despised, barren oldman. That he became ‘the Father of three religions’ is a result of what happened to Isaac,
and, subsequently, what happened to every one of his later sons and daughters. Such isthe ‘awesome responsibility’ of the reader, as Charles Péguy so eloquently said, because
this process is entirely reversible; ‘if we stop interpreting, if we stop rehearsing, if westop reproducing, the very existence of the original is at stake. It might stop having abundant copies and slowly disappear’.2
We have no difficulty raising questions about the quality of the entire trajectorywhen dealing with the performing arts, such as dance, music and theatre. Why is it so difficult when faced with the reproduction of a painting, a piece of furniture, a building ora sculpture? This is the first question we want to clarify.
No one will complain on hearing King Lear: ‘But this is not the original, it is just a
representation!’. Quite right. That’s the whole idea of what it is to play King Lear: it is toreplay it. In the case of a performance, everyone is ready to take into account the whole
trajectory going from the first presentations through the long successions of its ‘revivals’
all the way to the present. The Platonic ideal of King Lear is something which no one hasever seen and no one will ever be able to circumscribe. In addition, it requires no great
sophistication to be fully prepared for disappointment at not finding ‘the’ first, original
presentation by Shakespeare ‘himself’, but several premieres and several dozen different
versions of the written play with endless glosses and variations. We seem perfectly happy

1 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986); Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
2 See the commentaries of Péguy in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Continuum
International Publishing, 2005).

36

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

to be excited by the anticlimactic discovery of the source of a major river in a humble
spring barely visible under the mossy grass.Third, and even more importantly, spectators
have no qualm whatsoever at judging the new version under their eyes by applying the
shibboleth: ‘Is it well or badly (re)played?’. They can differ wildly in their opinions, somebeing scandalized by what they take as some revolting novelties (‘Why does Lear disappear in a submarine?’) or bored by the repetition of too many clichés, but they have no
difficulty in considering that this moment in the whole career of all the successive King
Lears – in the plural – should be judged on its merit and not by its mimetic comparison
with the first (entirely inaccessible anyway) presentation of King Lear by the Shakespeare
company in such and such a year.
So free are we from the comparison with any ‘original’, that it is perfectly acceptable to evaluate a replay by saying: ‘I would never have anticipated this; it is totally different from the way it has been played before; it is utterly distinct from the way
Shakespeare played it, and yet I now understand what the play has always been about!’. It
is accepted that some revivals – the good ones – have the capacity to dig out of the original novel traits that might have been potentially in the source, but that have remained
invisible until now. So, even though it is not evaluated by its mimetic resemblance to an
ideal exemplar, yet it is clear, and everyone might agree, that, because of the action of
one of its late successors, the genius of Shakespeare has gained a new level of originality
because of the amazing feat of this faithful (but not mimetic) reproduction. The origin isthere anew, even though it is so different from what it was. And the same phenomenon
would occur for any piece of music or dance.The exclamation: ‘It’s so original’ attributed
to a new performance does not describe one section along the trajectory (and especiallynot the first Ur- version) but the degree of fecundity of the whole cornucopia. In performanceart, the aura keeps migrating and might very well come back suddenly… or disappear
altogether. When so many bad repetitions have so decreased the level of fecundity of thework that the original itself might be abandoned, it will stop being the starting point of
any succession. Such a work of art dies out like a family line without any lineage.
Why is it so difficult to say the same thing and use the same type of judgment fora painting or a sculpture or a building? Why not say, for instance, that the facsimile of
Veronese’s Nozze di Cana has been replayed, rehearsed, revived thanks to a new interpretation in Venice in 2007 by Factum Arte? What seems so easy for performance art remains
far-fetched for the visual arts. If we claim that the Nozze di Cana has been ‘given again’ in
San Giorgio, someone will immediately say: ‘But the original is in Paris! The one now in
San Giorgio is just a facsimile!’. A sense of fakery, counterfeiting, or betrayal has been introduced into the discussion in a way that would seem absurd for a piece of performanceart (even though it is perfectly possible to say of a very bad company that it made ‘a sham’at playing Shakespeare). It seems almost impossible to say that the facsimile of Veronese’s
Nozze di Cana is not about falsification but it is a stage in the verification of Veronese’s
achievement, a part of its ongoing biography.
One reason for this unequal treatment obviously has to do with what could becalled the differential of resistance among all segments of the trajectory. In his much too
famous essay, through a deep fog of art historical mysticism, it is this gap in technologythat Walter Benjamin pointed out under the name of ‘mechanical reproduction’.3 In the
3 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken
Books, 1968), 217–51.

T H E M IG R AT IO N O F T H E AU R A

37case of performance art, each version is just as difficult to produce, and just as costly, as
the former one (actually more and more expensive as time goes on and certainly morethan in Shakespeare’s time – just think of the wages for the security guards and all thehealth and safety standards!). Just because there have been zillions of representations ofKing Lear it does not mean that the one you are now going to give will be easier to fund.
This is the technical reason why, in the case of performance art, we don’t distinguishbetween an original and a copy, but rather between successive versions of the same play,each designated by the label ‘version n’, ‘version n+1’, ‘version n+2’, etc.
The situation appears to be entirely different when considering, for instance, apainting. Because it remains in the same frame, encoded in the same pigments, entrusted
to the same institution, one cannot help having the impression that every reproduction
will be so much easier to do and that there will be no possible comparison of quality
between the various segments of the trajectory. This is why the aura seems definitely
attached to one version only: the autograph one. And certainly this is superficially true:
if you take a picture of the Nozze di Cana in Paris with your digital camera, no one in his
right mind can render commensurable the pale rendering on the screen of your computer and the 67 sqm of canvas in the Louvre… If you claimed that your picture was ‘justas good as the original’, people would raise their shoulders in pity, and rightly so.
And yet, the distance between ‘version n’ called ‘the original’ and ‘version n+1’
called ‘a mere copy’ depends just as much on the differential of efforts, of costs, of techniques as on any substantial distinction between the successive versions of the same
painting. While in performance art these are grossly homogeneous (each replay relying
on the same gamut of techniques), the career of a painting or a sculpture relies on segments which are vastly heterogeneous and which vary greatly in the intensity of theefforts deployed along its path. It is this asymmetry, we wish to argue, that too often precludes one from saying that the Nozze di Cana in Paris has been ‘reprinted’ or ‘given again’
in Venice. And it is certainly this presupposition that so angered the French art historian
who castigated her friend for wasting her time in San Giorgio instead of visiting the‘genuine Veroneses’. Hidden behind the commonsense distinction between original andmere copies lies a totally different process that has to do with the technical equipment,
the amount of care, and the intensity of the search for the originality that goes from one
version to the next.
It is also important to note that the difference between performance arts and theothers is not as radical as it seems: a painting has always to be reproduced, that is, it is always a re-production of itself even when it appears to stay exactly the same in the sameplace. This requirement is well known by curators all over the world: a painting has tobe reframed, dusted, sometimes restored, relit, and it has to be represented in different
rooms with different accompanying pictures, on different walls, inserted in different
narratives, with different catalogues, and with changes in its insurance value and price.
So, even though a painting might never be loaned, surviving inside the same institutionalsetting without undergoing any heavy restoration, it has a career all the same; to subsist
and be visible again, it needs to be taken care of. If you don’t, it will soon be accumulating
dust in a basement, be sold for nothing, or will be cut into pieces and irremediably lost.
If the necessity of reproduction is accepted, then we might be able to convince
the reader that the really interesting question is not so much to differentiate the original from the facsimiles, but to be able to tell apart the good reproduction from thebad one. If The Ambassadors has been irreversibly erased, it is not out of negligence, but,
38

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

on the contrary, because of an excessive zeal in ‘reproducing’ it. What the curators did
was to confuse the obvious general feature of all works of art – to survive they have to
be somehow reproduced – with the narrow notion of reproduction provided by photographic
posters while ignoring many other ways for a painting to be reproduced. For instance, they
could have had a perfect facsimile registering all its surface effects in 3D and restored
the copy instead of the work itself. If they had done this, they could have invited several
art historians with different views to suggest different ways of restoring the copy andproduced an exhibition of the results. Their crime is not to have offered a reproductionof the Holbein instead of the Holbein itself to the visitors of the National Gallery – The
Ambassadors remains behind all the successive restorations much like King Lear remains behind each of its replays, granting or withdrawing its auratic dimension at will dependingon the merit of each instance – but to have so limited the range of reproduction techniques that they have chosen one of the most barren one: the photograph – as if a painting
were not a thick material but some ethereal design that could be lifted out of its materiality and downloaded into any reproduction without any loss of substance. Actually, aterribly revealing documentary shows the culprits restoring the Holbein by using as theirmodel photographs of the original and subjectively deciding what was original, what had
decayed, what had been added, and imagining the painting as a series of discrete layersthat can be added or removed at will – a process that resembles plastic surgery more thanan open forensic investigation.
Thus, what is so extraordinary in comparing the fate of the The Ambassadors withthat of the Nozze is not that they both rely on reproduction – this is a necessity of existence – but that the first relies on a notion of reproduction that makes the original
disappear forever while the second adds originality to the original version by offering it
new dimensions without jeopardizing the penultimate version – without ever touching it,
thanks to the delicate processes used to record it.
But, one might ask, how could any originality be added? One obvious answer is: bybringing the new version to its original location. The cognitive dissonance undergone by
the visitor in the Mona Lisa room comes in part from the fact that in Palladio’s refectory
every single detail of the Nozze has a meaning entirely lost and wasted in the awkward
situation provided for the version n-1 in Paris. In other words, originality does not cometo a work of art in bulk; it is rather made of different components, each of which can beinter-related to produce a complex whole. New processes of reproduction allow us to
see these elements and their inter-relationship in new ways. To be at the place for which
it had been conceived in each and every detail is certainly one aspect – one element – inwhat we mean by an original. Well, on that ground, there is no question that it is thefacsimile of the Nozze that is now original and that it is the version in the Louvre that has
lost at least this comparative advantage.
We should not however be too mystical about the notion of an ‘original location’ in
the case of the Veronese since the very refectory in which the facsimile has been housed
is itself a reconstruction. If you look at photographs taken in 1950, you will notice thatthe original floor was gone and another had been installed at the height of the windows.
The top was a theatre and the basement a wood workshop – the whole space had beenaltered. It was rebuilt in the 1950s, but the plaster and floor were wrong and the boiserie that surrounded the room and added the finishing touches to the proportion of theroom was missing. In its stripped-down state, it looked more like a high protestant spacethat almost seemed to laugh at the absence of Veronese’s counter reformation flourish.

T H E M IG R AT IO N O F T H E AU R A

39But now the effect of the facsimile is such that there are rumors that the return of thepainting has triggered a plan for a new restoration that will retrospectively return thespace to its former glory. A facsimile of a heavily restored original, now in a new location,
was causing new elements to be added to an original in its original location that is in parta facsimile of itself. Originality once seemed so simple…
The same is certainly true of availability. What angered the visitor so much in the
Louvre was that she could not actually scan visually the Nozze without bumping into
Mona Lisa addicts. The Veronese is so full of incident and detail that it cannot be appreciated without time to contemplate its meaning, implications and the reasons for its continued importance. What does it mean to enshrine an original, if the contemplation of
its auratic quality is impossible? This, too, is another element that can be prized away anddistinguished from all the others. Actually, this component of originality does not needto go with the originality of the location: the best proof of this may lie in the facsimileof the burial chamber from the tomb of Thutmosis III in the Valley of the Kings.4 It contains the first complete text of the Amduat to be used in a pharaonic tomb. The Amduat
is a complex narrative mixing art, poetry, science and religion to provide a coherent
account of life in the afterworld. The tomb was never made to be visited and the physical and climatic conditions inside are incompatible with mass tourism. As a result, thebuilding is deteriorating rapidly and glass panels have had to be installed to protect thewalls from accidental damage and wear and tear. However, the interventions in the tombchange its nature and inhibit both detailed study of the text and an appreciation of thespecific character of the place. Exhibitions that present the facsimile and contextualize
the text have now been visited by millions of people in North America and Europe. The
delocalized facsimile has established the reasons for its continued importance, turned
the visitors into a pro-active force in the conservation of the tomb, and could become
part of a long-term policy that will keep the version n-1 safe but accessible to the small
number of specialists who require access for continued study and monitoring. See? Eachof the components that together comprise what we mean by a true original begin traveling at different speeds along the trajectory and begin to map out what we have called
the catchment area of a work of art.
A third element of originality has to do with the surface features of a work. Toooften, restorers make a mockery of the materiality of the original they claim to protect
by limiting matter to shape only because they confuse 3D with 2D. Many Venetians, when
they first heard of the Nozze facsimile, immediately conjured up in their mind a glossy flat
surface much like that of a poster, and they were horrified at the idea of being given thisin reparation for Napoleon’s cultural rape of San Giorgio. Little could they anticipate thatthe facsimile was actually in pigment on a canvas coated with gesso, ‘just like’ Veronese
had used. When it was unveiled, there was a moment of silence, then ecstatic applauseand many tears. Large numbers of Venetians had to ask themselves a very difficult question: how is it possible to have an aesthetic and emotional response in front of a copy?
This question is followed by another: how do we stop Venice from being flooded with badcopies without the criteria to distinguish between good and bad transformations?

No doubt, it is an uphill battle: facsimiles have a bad reputation – people assimilatethem with a photographic rendering of the original – and digital is associated with anincrease in virtuality. So, when we speak of ‘digital facsimiles’, we are certainly looking
for trouble. And yet we claim that, contrary to common presuppositions, digital facsimiles are introducing many new twists into the centuries-old trajectories of works of art.
There is nothing especially ‘virtual’ in digital techniques – and actually there is nothing
entirely digital in digital computers either!5 The association of digitality with virtuality
is entirely due to the bad habits given by only one of its possible outputs: the pretty
poor screen of our computers. Things are entirely different when digital techniques are
only one moment in the move from one material entity – Veronese’s Nozze version n-1 inthe Louvre – to another equally material entity – version n+1 in San Giorgio. During
this time of mass tourism, increasingly vocal campaigns for the repatriation of spoils ofwars or commerce, when so many restorations are akin to iconoclasm, when the sheer
number of amateurs threaten to destroy even the sturdier pieces in the best institutions,
it does not require excessive foresight to maintain that digital facsimiles offer a remarkable new handle to give to the notion of originality what is required by the new age. Since
all originals have to be reproduced anyway, simply to survive, it is crucial to be able todiscriminate between good and bad reproductions.

4 The facsimile of the tomb (in its current condition but without the elements that turn the environment into a museum)has resulted in detailed publications by the Egyptologist Erik Hornung and the psychologist Theodor Abt in both film andbook form. Erik Hornung and Theodor Abt, The Dark Hours of the Sun – The Amduat in the Tomb of Thutmose III (Madrid: Factum
Arte, 2005), DVD; Erik Hornung et al., Immortal Pharaoh – The Tomb of Thutmose III (Madrid, Factum Arte, 2006).

5 Adam Lowe and Simon Schaffer, N01se, 2000. An exhibition held simultaneously at Kettle’s Yard, the Whipple
Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge and theWellcome Institute, London (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2000); Brian Cantwell Smith, ‘Digital Abstraction and Concrete
Reality’, in Impressiones (Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, 2003).

40

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

The authors thank the participants at the dialogue held at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Veniceon ‘Inheriting the Past’, and in particular the director of the Cini Foundation, Pasquale Gagliardi.

T H E M IG R AT IO N O F T H E AU R A

41

ReACH: A COLLECTIVE AND GLOBAL
RE-THINK OF OUR APPROACH TO COPIESIN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION
Anaïs AguerreAnaïs Aguerre is the founderand Managing Director ofCulture Connect Ltd. Before
setting up Culture Connect
she was Head of International
Initiatives at the V&A where she
led the Museum’s international
strategy. Anaïs was the Project
Director of ReACH, a global
initiative on the Reproductionof Art and Cultural Heritage
spearheaded by the V&A incollaboration with the Peri
Charitable Foundation.

OPPOSITE

Scanning Canova’s statue ofPaolina Borghese in the Galleria
Borghese, Rome, a collaboration
between Factum Arte and Giberto
Arrivabene.

42

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

I

n 1867, Sir Henry Cole, founding director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A),
launched the Convention for Promoting Universally Reproductions of Works of Art for the
Benefit of Museums of All Countries. Recognising the new opportunities that technologicaladvances of the time (namely photography, electrotyping and new casting techniques)
made possible, the 1867 Convention helped usher in a period in which museums actively
engaged in the creation of reproductions of examples of great works of art and architecture produced from around the world ‘for the benefit of museums of all countries’. As
noted by Professor Mari Lending, author of Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power ofReproduction, ‘Cole’s convention marks a key moment in the translation of national monuments into portable global patrimony’.1 The need to collectively preserve and share acommon world heritage was clearly asserted.
150 years later, in response to increasing global threats (pollution, terrorism, conflicts
or mass tourism) to our shared heritage, the V&A spearheaded, in collaboration with thePeri Foundation, the ReACH initiative on the Reproduction of Art and Cultural Heritage.
One of the main objectives of ReACH was to establish what a 21st-century version of
the Henry Cole Convention should be like. To this end, I had the privilege of coordinating
and leading an unprecedented global consultation gathering experts from across the globe
tasked with the mission to co-author this 21st-century version of the Convention.
Building on Cole’s legacy, our ambition was to explore collectively what lies behind the immense promise that today’s digital technologies offer to the field of historicpreservation and more broadly, to the museum and heritage sector. Digital technologies
are changing the cultural landscape, offering new ways to produce, store and share museum and heritage assets like never before. However, there was no clear methodology
for how museums and heritage organisations should engage with these technologies.
To complicate matters, legal protocols and procedures had not adapted to these new
realities, and often acted as roadblocks to new practice. The ambition with the ReACH
initiative was therefore to bring clarity – by highlighting best practices, debating pressing
issues, and drafting a new declaration – and ultimately to offer our heritage and museum
community a useful roadmap for dealing with reproductions in the future.
Officially launched in Paris at UNESCO’s headquarters in May 2017, the ReACH
initiative has brought the global museum and heritage community together and enableda collective rethink of how our imperilled cultural heritage could be preserved, and todebate at a global scale the creative opportunities that copying these works offers a global
audience.With the support of key research partners – Factum Arte, the Louvre Museum,

1 Mari Lending, ‘Preserved in plaster’, in Copy Culture: Sharing in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Brendan Cormier(London: V&A Publishing, 2018).

43

the Smithsonian Institution, the State Hermitage Museum, theVorderasiatisches Museum,the Warburg Institute and theYale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage – thecore research activity took place between May and December 2017. Through a series offive roundtable discussions – hosted in Washington with the Smithsonian Institution, in
St Petersburg with the State Hermitage Museum, in Abu Dhabi with the Department ofCulture and Tourism, in Beijing with the Palace Museum and in London at the V&A – wehave drawn together more than 100 experts from across the world (individuals as wellas institutions, start-ups as well as public organisations, scholars, lawyers, curators anddigital experts) and conducted an unprecedented global consultation to broaden ourcollective knowledge and to share it with others.
This resulted in the production of the ReACH Declaration, launched at the V&A
in December 2017 and reproduced here. Over twenty directors of world-class museums
from across the globe put their names to this text as initial signatories. This 21st-century
version of the Henry Cole Convention invites us to embrace with confidence advances intechnology and connectivity to better study, share and preserve our cultural heritage.
Beyond the Declaration and the subsequent technical guidelines produced, ReACH
has also outlined the benefit of activating our collective intelligence when tackling issues
that no individual museum or country could address alone. Since December 2017, wehave kept the #ReACHDialogue open. Maintaining this conversation on a global scaleis critical to ensuring that the issues at stake don’t fall hostage to nationalist discourses
or become weaponised in other ways. Moreover, it is only by maintaining an open andglobal dialogue that we can truly embrace the unprecedented opportunity offered by
new technologies for multiple heritage narratives to co-exist on a shared global stage
and, as such, truly unlock the 360º view of our cultural heritage. Finally, as Brendon
Cormier and I highlighted in the introduction to Copy Culture: Sharing in the Age of Digital
Reproduction (ed. B. Cormier, London, 2018), ‘the impulse to record should never outweigh asking the fundamental question of why and how’. In the face of the urgent imperative to develop more sustainable practices in the museum and heritage sector, theecological impact of our work should also be taken into account. Our responsibility tothe past is intimately connected to our responsibility to the future. Once again this requires a collective rethink and engagement.

THE ReACH DECLARATION, 2017

Promoting Universally the Reproduction, Storage and Sharing of Works of Art
and Cultural Heritage through Digital Technologies
VISION
This declaration promotes the vision that works of art and cultural heritage should bepreserved and shared as widely as possible throughout the world.
Through advances in technology and connectivity, we now have a revolutionary
opportunity to enhance learning, creativity and innovation, and to reach new audiences
worldwide, through the reproduction and sharing of works of art and cultural heritage(‘Works’). Furthermore, digital technologies can enable us to record, document and,in some instances, recreate Works threatened by environmental hazards, conflicts, terrorism, rapid economic development, mass-tourism, theft and other natural and human-caused disasters (‘Endangered Works’), or Works that have already been lost.
44

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

Three versions of Canova’s Paolina
Borghese, front to back: glass,wax, and stereolithographicallyprinted resin, exhibited in AWorldof Fragile Parts at the 2017 Venice
Biennale. The sculptures are now
permanently installed in the
new interpretation section of the
V&A’s cast gallery.

For cultural institutions that hold collections for the benefit of the public, the opportunity to provide open access now, or in the future, to Works in a digital format is
an exciting new frontier in their mission to preserve and transmit knowledge, culture
and history for present and future generations. Such opportunities and possibilities alsopresent responsibilities. Digital Records need to be responsibly created and safeguarded
for the long term, to ensure integrity as well as retrieval, and reuse by future generations.
Furthermore, as the means and skills required to use and access digital technology are
not distributed evenly around the world, it is incumbent on those with the capacity to do
so to provide support and training.
This Declaration is intended to promote the production, sharing and preservation ofdigital records and reproductions (‘Records’) by both individuals and organisations. Owners
and Stewards of Works and others involved in the process of generating these Records areencouraged to disseminate and use the ReACH Declaration as widely as possible.
The text herein is the result of an extensive global consultation on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the 1867 Henry Cole Convention for Promoting Universally Reproductions of Works of
Art for the Benefits of Museums of All Countries.The Convention, inspiring in its clarity, practicality
and openness to the creation and sharing of reproductions, served as the basis for the establishment of
this new Declaration.The ReACH Declaration for Promoting Universally the Reproduction, Storageand Sharing of Works of Art and Cultural Heritage Through Digital Technologies was adopted at the
final ReACH roundtable held at theVictoria and Albert Museum in London on 8 December 2017.
REPRODUCTION
Article 1. Stewards of Works are encouraged, for the benefit of the public of today andfuture generations, to take advantage of technological advances to create Records ofWorks entrusted to their care, for purposes of documenting and preserving all Works,
but in particular Endangered Works.

R e ACH

45

Article 2. Those involved in the process of documenting and producing digital Records
are encouraged to work to then-current accepted standards that support academic study
and the monitoring of the condition of the original object.
Article 3. The process of documenting and producing Records should be non-invasive
for the Works involved. The preservation of the Work itself remains of paramount importance. Digital Records are a tool that can support preservation, but are not a substitutefor preservation.
Article 4. The process used to produce Records, as well as the intended purpose foreach specific Record, should be documented, to better enable usage and interpretationof such Records today, and by future generations.
Article 5. Before making and sharing Records, the historic context of and possible cultural and national sensitivities about the Works should be considered, as well as applicablelegal and ethical constraints, and the rights of donors and third parties. Transparency,
and participation by communities or cultural groups with ties to the Works, should be
encouraged.
STORAGE
Article 6. Digital Records should be contemporaneously archived and maintained by
the Steward of the Work. Works should be recorded in a manner that renders them likely
to be retrievable and reproducible even if technology changes. Enabling data migration
is of paramount importance.
Article 7. The Steward of the Work should own or, at a minimum, retain unrestricted
and perpetual rights to use, reproduce and share the Records, unless applicable law or acontractual agreement requires otherwise.
Article 8. Digital Records should be linked to metadata that enriches the digital asset
for research, education and preservation.
Article 9. Digital and Physical Records should be marked or otherwise identified as
copies using methods that are sustainable and, to the extent feasible, do not rely on technologies at risk of obsolescence. Those involved in the process of making these Records
are encouraged to develop an international system to identify copies.
SHARING
Article 10. Stewards of Works are encouraged to make Records freely available to the
public for personal use and enjoyment and for non-commercial research, educational,
scientific and scholarly uses.
Article 11. Stewards of Works and other parties involved in the process of documenting
and producing Records are encouraged to share those Records of Works as widely as
possible but, in particular, to reach new audiences, especially those with special needs.
This includes, where possible, proactively addressing issues of equal access to digitaltechnology on a global scale.
Article 12. Stewards of Works and other parties involved in the process of documenting
and producing Records of Works are encouraged to use established and standardized licensing schemes and symbols that convey to the public the manner in which the Recordsof Works may be shared and reused, including open access content.
Article 13.When Records are shared and disseminated, Stewards ofWorks involved should
provide attribution to the original author of the Works and, where practicable, provide
credit to those involved in the process of documenting and producing Records of Works.
46

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

The exhibition Words of Stone,
based on facsimiles of early Islamic
tombstones from Kala Koreysh,
Dagestan, at the State Hermitage
Museum in St Petersburg (2017).
The exhibition travelled to the
V&A (2017–18) following thesigning of the ReACH declaration.
© Peri Foundation.

COLLABORATIONSArticle 14. Stewards of Works with resources, skills and access to digital technology areencouraged, as much as they possibly can, to provide support and training to develop theskills needed to document and produce high-quality Records to other cultural institutions in the world who lack such means.
Article 15. Stewards and other parties engaged in making Records should share digitaltechnology, where feasible, and collaborate on strategies to make it more affordable.
Article 16. Stewards of Works and other parties engaged in making Records are encouraged to work collaboratively to develop compatible systems to enable the exchangeof recorded data and metadata on a global scale. A set of specific technological standards
and practical guidelines will be produced by a ReACH technical committee. These standards and guidelines will be revised as technology changes.
Article 17. In light of the major infrastructure requirements to ensure long-term preservation and transfer of digital Records, public-private partnerships should be encouraged as well as collaborations between countries.
DEFINITIONS
A. ReACH stands for Reproduction of Art and Cultural Heritage. B. Work means a workof art or other cultural item. The term Work is intended to be broadly construed and includes, but is not limited to, works of art in all media and from all eras, for example paintings, works on paper, sculpture, murals, antiquities, monuments, architecture and architectural elements, and archaeological sites. C. Endangered Work means Work threatenedby environmental hazards, conflicts, terrorism, mass tourism and all other natural and human-made disasters. D. Steward means any governmental or private entity that owns or
possesses Works held for the benefit of the public. The term Steward is intended to bebroadly construed and includes, but is not limited to, museums, heritage sites, monuments,
libraries, repositories, archives, places of worship, whether governmental, sovereign, or
private. E. Record means a digital recording or reproduction of a Work and the data generated in the process of faithfully capturing images and data regarding the Work so as to createa high-quality digital or physical reproduction of the Work. F. High quality means a levelof quality sufficient to constitute a representation of a Work as faithful as possible.

R e ACH

47

3D DATA, PUBLIC ACCESS,FREEDOM OF INFORMATION LAWS
Cosmo Wenman

Cosmo Wenman is an
artist and design consultant
specialising in 3D design,
3D scanning, and 3D printing
applications. He lives inSouthern California.

OPPOSITE

Digital render of a 3D scan of
the bust of Nefertiti, recorded by
TrigonArt for the Neues Museum,
Berlin. Render by Cosmo Wenman.

48

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

I

f 3D scans are made freely available to the public, the world’s cultural heritage can becopied and transformed in new, unpredictable ways, and the data will reverberate in
the arts for thousands of years. The specific applications – robotically-milled replicas,
architecture, video games, augmented reality, surgical modifications, and who knows
what else – will reveal themselves in the work of countless artists to come. That as-yetunseen art, and that open-ended process, are what I am working to realize with my accessprojects, which I pursue as my own works of art: I encourage reluctant cultural heritage
institutions to see my broader view, and I try to demonstrate public interest in, and demand for access to, their 3D data.
In Berlin, the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection has a high-quality, fullcolor 3D scan of the most iconic portrait sculpture ever produced, the 3,364-year-old
Bust of Nefertiti. The artefact has been in their collection since 1920, and is one of themost copied works of ancient Egyptian art. For reasons the museum has difficulty explaining, it does not share its Nefertiti scan with the public.
The museum is operated by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, known inesitz (SPK). SPK is one of the largest cultural
German as the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
organizations in the world, with a 390-million-euro annual budget. As a state-funded
entity, SPK is subject to German freedom of information laws. I sent them a request for
their Nefertiti 3D scan and cited those laws, which grant everyone an unconditional rightto access state records.
SPK resisted. They acknowledged that the law required them to give me accessto the scan, but claimed that directly giving me copies of the data would threaten theircommercial interests. They use the 3D data to produce the expensive Nefertiti replicas
they sell in their gift shop, and implied they needed to protect that revenue to financeongoing digitization projects. In museum-worl
museum-world parlance, this argument against open
access is known as ‘the gift shop defense’.
Instead of simply giving me copies of the data, they offered to let me ‘inspect’ thescan in a controlled setting, either in their Berlin offices, or in the German consulate in
Los Angeles.
They were treating their scan of Nefertiti like a state secret.
Curious to witness their concept of access in action, I accepted their offer. At theinspection in Los Angeles, the museum’s attorneys provided a slow, underpowered laptopthat was barely capable of displaying the large 3D files. I objected to this inadequate formof access and made a new freedom of information demand, this time for information
about their purported gift shop revenue. I also called their bluff on their revenue excusesby asking them if they would accept a donation in exchange for making their Nefertiti
data freely available to the public, and what their price was.
49

Their response was revealing.
SPK rejected the idea of accepting a donation in exchange for unrestricted publicaccess to the scan. They confirmed they had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, and admitted that they did not direct even that small revenue
towards digitization.
In the nearly 10 years since it had created the Nefertiti scan, SPK had completely
failed to commercially exploit the valuable data idling on its hard drives.
All their reasons for not giving me the Nefertiti data fell apart. The gift shop defense had been a deception.
As if in recognition of this, there was something else in their response – something
I did not expect. A flash drive containing the Nefertiti scan.
When I looked at the data for the first time, there was another surprise. To marktheir territory, SPK had crudely carved a copyright claim directly into the underside ofthe digital model of Nefertiti, along with a Creative Commons license that prohibits
using the data for commercial applications.
The Nefertiti artifact is undisputedly in the public domain. It is nonsensical andirresponsible to claim a copyright in a digital copy of a public domain work. This practice– known as copyfraud – is intended to have a chilling effect on the public’s lawful use of
public domain works. But the Creative Commons license SPK used to bar commercial
applications also explicitly allows for the copying, redistribution, adaptation, and transformation of the data. That license also states that users ‘do not have to comply with thelicense for elements of the material in the public domain’.
So with that, SPK almost completely buckled.
I say almost because, even three years after I made my first freedom of information demand, SPK still left it to me to actually put their Nefertiti scan online
and make it available to a wider audience. When I put it online, thousands of people
downloaded it just in the first week; proof of public interest in the data. SPK shouldbe embarrassed.
50

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

Digital renders of a 3D scan of
the bust of Nefertiti, recorded by
TrigonArt for the Neues Museum,
Berlin. Render by Cosmo Wenman.

I hope other museums will see the SPK’s secretive policy as an example of what not
to do with their 3D data. Unfortunately, their stalling tactics and bad-faith arguments are
not unique. I’m facing similar resistance to my current effort to force the Musée Rodinin Paris to release its unpublished scans of Auguste Rodin’s works, which are all in the
public domain. (Victory in that case will make all French national museums’ 3D scans
accessible to the public.)
It’s very difficult to find anyone who can articulate coherent reasons for keeping
this kind of data away from the public. I’ve come to believe that policies like SPK’s are
driven by fear of loss of control, fear of the unknown, and, worse, a lack of imagination.
SPK cried poverty to protect a tiny amount of gift shop revenue that it falsely purported to spend on digitization efforts, and did the absolute minimum to comply withfreedom of information laws. All to prevent me – and you – from looking too closely at
a 3,364-year-old portrait of an Egyptian royal.

3D DATA, PUBLI C AC C ES S , F R EEDO M O F INF O R M AT IO N L AW S

51

A RENAISSANCE OF THE RENAISSANCE
Jonathan Jones

Jonathan Jones is the art critic
for The Guardian and was on thejury for the 2009 Turner Prize.
He is currently writing a historyof the Renaissance for Thames& Hudson.

OPPOSITE

Recording the Borgherini Chapelusing panoramic photography
in the convent of San Pietro inMontorio, Rome, 2016.

52

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

T

here’s nothing like experiencing Italian art in the churches, convents, palaces andloggias that survive among modern Italy’s mopeds and focaccerie, the espresso
still buzzing inside you. I can’t think of Raphael’s frescoes in the Villa Farnese
without also remembering a particular garage you pass on the way to see it, or the Doria
palace in Genoa without the motorway flyover at the bottom of its garden. Not that it’salways so gritty. It would be a lie to say I don’t think of a negroni in a Sicilian square every
time I picture Caravaggio’s Burial of St Lucy.
For some, this unavoidable web of associations might seem to reduce the seriousness and importance of Italian art. Perhaps it was an underlying Victorian puritanismthat made the creators of London’s National Gallery, in assembling one of the world’s
finest collections of Italian Renaissance painting, strip it of almost anything that mighttie it to the sordid streets of 19th-century Italy where – according to E. M. Forster in1908 in A Room with A View – you were as likely to see a knife fight as a cicerone. Here,hexagonal trays made for serving sweetmeats to 15th-century Florentine women who’djust survived childbirth are hung on the wall as oddly shaped ‘paintings’ and Piero dellaFrancesca’s Baptism of Christ is shown in splendid isolation from the Catholic rites ofSansepolcro Cathedral – leaving its arched top, made for an exact physical setting, as akind of ineffable mystery.
It was like a shot of properly made coffee (hard to find in London) to come acrossFactum Foundation’s recreation of the Borgherini Chapel in San Pietro in Montorio,
Rome, in this museum. Here was a big piece of Italy, perfectly reproduced. Instead of
showing a photograph of Sebastiano del Piombo’s painting of the Flagellation of Christ
for its exhibition Michelangelo & Sebastiano, the National Gallery got Factum to makea facsimile of the semicircular chapel itself. It was like punching through the wall.
Flatland became three-dimensional. The towering recess with its half-dome canopy receded in real space in a time-scarred curved expanse of colour. In that curving space, thebodies of Christ and his torturers that Sebastiano based on drawings by his great friend
Michelangelo take on a solid, sculptural existence you could never guess at, or at least
not feel, from a flattened image.
Factum’s replica was so uncannily precise that it included a space made by somefool for electrical sockets among all the resonant traces of history. It seems to me to inaugurate a new era of reproduction. It is now possible to replicate not just images, butplaces. The complex emotions place brings with it radically change the experience a museum brings its visitors. Factum’s Borgherini Chapel doesn’t just have the ‘aura’ Walter
Benjamin thought only an original work of art can possess. It practically has an aroma.
You can smell the candle wax, incense, and dust as you are transported into that shadychurch on Rome’s Janiculum Hill. Sigmund Freud wrote vividly of his pilgrimages to53

THIS PAGE

Factum Arte’s artisans putting thefinishing touches to the semi-domeof the apse.
OPPOSITE

Constructing the facsimile of theBorgherini Chapel, 2017.

another Roman church on another hill, San Pietro in Vincoli, on the Esquiline, to behold
Michelangelo’s Moses:
How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour
to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed tosupport the angry scorn of the hero’s glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously
out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob
upon whom his eye is turned…
If you have ever explored Renaissance art in its intended locations you will surely recognise
this intense quality of discovery and encounter. In fact it’s the essence of Michelangelo,
whose physicality Sebastiano echoes in the Borgherini Chapel. And perhaps the entire art
history and popular understanding of the Renaissance has been muffled by an inability toreproduce its immediate, physical, multisensory impact – until now.
The National Gallery’s extreme approach to the Renaissance, presenting it asa succession of perspective illusions on flat panels and canvases, isn’t the only one
museums have taken over the two centuries of their existence. The V&A assembled afantastical collection of casts in the 19th century that try to do exactly what Factum
has now achieved with the Borgherini Chapel: present the Renaissance in the round.
But its casts of such icons as David and the Gates of Paradise can only be grey or at best
gilded imitations of the real thing, enjoyed today with a glib post-modern irony thatsees these idealistic teaching aids as equal to the original. Their true purpose is to makeus taste the original, and so want more of it. But they can’t capture its aura, any morethan a photograph can.
Another option is to bring the original itself into the museum. I can’t think of abetter way to infect someone with the Renaissance than to show them the Studiolo from
Gubbio that you can enter in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Among its perspective
54

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

panelling you can feel the spectacle and magic of actually being there – because you are
there. But in an age when museums are criticised for their imperialist possessions andsome Dubliners have even demanded the repatriation of James Joyce’s bones, it doesn’t
seem likely any more big chunks of Italy are going to enter universal museums.
Enter Factum. For the miraculous transportation of a real, solid, yet also virtualchapel from the Janiculum to Trafalgar Square opens a radical new possibility. Now greatart can be experienced in its place – in a distant place. The magic of great art can betranslated elsewhere without dispossessing anyone. The Borgherini Chapel is quite asmall piece of the fabric of Italian art. What about fascsimiles of the Brancacci Chapel in
Florence, the Arena Chapel in Padua, the Sistine Ceiling...?
This is not a new age of fakery. It’s a new era of knowledge. Imagine schoolkids
experiencing the Sistine in London, the Last Supper in Chicago, The Fall of the Giants in
Lagos. We might be on the verge of a Renaissance of the Renaissance, when we wake up
and smell the coffee of great art.

A R ENA IS S A NCE O F T H E R ENA IS S A NCE

55

RETURNING TO DISTORTED ORIGINS
Mari Lending

Mari Lending is a professor
in Architectural Theory andHistory, and a founding memberof OCCAS (the Oslo Centre
for Critical Architectural
Studies). Within the EU-funded
HERA project she editedPrinting the Past: Architecture,
Print Culture, and Uses of the
Past in Modern Europe (PriArc).
She edited the book Images of
Egypt (Oslo: Pax, 2018), with
Eirik Bøhn and Tim Anstey, andcurated an exhibition with thesame name at the Museumof Cultural History in Oslo
(20 September – 20 December2018). She is the author of themonograph Plaster Monuments.
Architecture and the Powerof Reproduction (Princeton
University Press, 2017).

OPPOSITE

This waxwork of Marcel Proust is
located in the Château de Breteuil,
where the author stayed whilewriting À la recherche du temps perdu.
Factum also has a connection with
the Château de Breteuil: from2015–16, Factum Arte worked
on a project with the Château
to make a facsimile of the famous
Teschen Table.

56

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESI
The last decade has witnessed a return to a very physically received past, which has
made itself manifest in a wide range of exhibition-making that displays a sensitivity forthe material archival object and its space.1 The desire to rethink spaces and objects, andthe return to objects spanning from documents to monuments, is clearly grounded in an
intellectual climate different from the one that governed postmodernism’s play with thepast as a repository of form. Yet however meticulously such returns to lost contexts are
based on empirical evidence and documentary residues, they align themselves neitherwith the ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist’ (‘as it really was’) of 19th-century positivism,
nor the Enlightenment’s fantasies of primordial states, which resurfaced in the modernist
myth of the tabula rasa as yet another theory of origins. It is exactly a disinterest in thepristine and in origins that characterizes this new return to historical artifacts acrossmedia, while emphasizing both the history and historicity of objects.
‘As the trend away from theory’s abstraction has moved the tectonic plates ofresearch more and more towards materiality, so has its manifestation in “things” attracted greater interest’, Alina Payne observes while describing how works of art andarchitecture are collected and consumed, detached and detachable, discrete and unrooted.2 If art and architectural culture has slowly recovered from a slight hangovercaused by decades of theoretical excess, it is nonetheless a very specific theoretical
backdrop that enables the current reassessment of things and spaces. The fundamental
destabilization of the original/copy dichotomy inherited from philosophical deconstruction has somehow meandered from the realm of texts to a wide territory of objects. In lieu of nostalgia, ideas of permanence, origins, and authenticity, maybe alsoof chronology and genealogies, we are witnessing a preoccupation with how artefacts
behave, change, move, work, and fluctuate, with how they circulate in time and space.
Distorted temporalities and unexpected returns are parts of the unruly and sometimes
traumatic lives of objects, as Factum Arte’s exquisite facsimiles have repeatedly shown;most iconically with the reintroduction of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana in its original setting in 2007. In critical ways, Factum Arte demonstrates the extent to which a
reproduction’s relation to a possible original work can hardly be explained as derivative. Remakes, replicas, reinventions, restitutions, restorations, and facsimiles are partof the lives of precious objects.
1 For instance: When Attitudes Become Form. Bern 1969/Venice 2013; Environments and Counter-Environments (New York,Basel, Stockholm, Chicago, 2010–13), and Model as Ruin (Oslo, 2013).
2 Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 11.

57

II
A dazzling scene in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) may help us
understand the complex relations of an assumed original work to its reproduction, andalso to rethink concepts of originality, integrity, aura, authenticity, and authorship beyond modernist ideology and received ideas of monuments and permanence. The scene
in question revolves around one of the first and most compelling objects of desire introduced in the novel. As a young boy, the main character, Marcel, visits the Trocadéro
museum in Paris, particularly admiring a plaster portal from the medieval church in thefictitious Norman town Balbec. The museum is however everything but fictitious: it is
the Musée de sculpture comparée, conceived by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, andopened to the public in the Palais de Trocadéro in 1882. Within the frame of a novel, theyoung Marcel recurrently visited this fashionable museum of reproductions during the
1890s and fell in love with the Balbec portal, sprinkled with alluring epithets such as‘singular’, ‘Persian’, ‘half Romanesque’, ‘Norman Gothic’.3
Marcel becomes increasingly impatient to experience the totality of the church
firsthand.Yet finally in front of the church, in this long-awaited moment, he immediately
realizes that the original does not measure up to the copy. Not only is the church trivialized by its surroundings, by prosaic elements such as a square, a café, a billiard saloon,
a bank, a bus station, streetlights, and trams. Marcel is also discouraged to discover that
it is located in Balbec-en-Terre and not, as he believed, in Balbec-Plage, ‘soaked by thespindrift blown from the tumultuous deep’, inseparable from the Norman topography
and built of stone quarried from ‘wave-washed cliffs’. Expecting ‘the church itself, thestatue in person, the real things!’ to be more imposing than its plaster version in Paris,
it turns out to be ‘much less’. Most aggravating of all, the original is reduced to ‘nothing
but its own shape in stone’.4
The church has absolutely nothing of the aura that is normally ascribed to theunique, the particular, the original. While the plaster portal in Paris appeared universal
and immortal, endowed ‘with a general existence and an inaccessible beauty’, the realbuilding with its sculptured doorway appears as ‘a little old woman in stone, whose
height I could measure and whose wrinkles I could count’. Whereas the plaster cast isperfect and timeless, the actual stone version is the victim of time and reality, caught inwhat Proust sensationally termed ‘the tyranny of the Particular’.5 Proust’s receptivity to
the reproduction would certainly have pleased the founders, architects, restorers, artists,
molders, directors, curators, archivists, and photographers involved in what became oneof the most influential collections of plaster monuments, and in which exquisite reproductions of portals from French medieval churches formed the core. And when showingthat the monument’s irreducible particular does not reside in its material authenticity,
Proust fundamentally challenged the notions of aura developed by his first German translator Walter Benjamin.
19th-century plaster casts and contemporary high- resolution recording, digital restoration and creative re-materialization of three-dimensional works of art and3 Marcel Proust, TheWay by Swann’s, vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2002), 388.
4 Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, vol. 2 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. James Grieve (London:
Penguin, 2005), 237–38.
5 Ibid., 239.

58

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

Young boy, Marcel’s age, admiring
a plaster portal at the Trocadéro,
2007. Photo Mari Lending.

architecture share a number of critical issues in regards of ideality, reality, historicity– and materiality. The formatori, architects, artists, archaeologists, and museum curatorsthat created the exquisite plaster monuments, displayed an intense interest in materiality
when recording fragile and often dispersed works of the past at full scale. The material
expression of plaster displayed many different claims to truth, not least in regards ofpatina, polychromy, and surface treatment: plaster monuments were hailed as perfectly
preserved replicas of weather-beaten originals or as ideal expressions of imaginary beginnings, spanning from Assyrian sculpture, Egyptian columns, and Greek friezes to medieval portals and Renaissance balconies, niches, and choir stalls. The apparently banalmaterial of plaster became an important matter to display the history and historicity of
weathered originals, as well as theories on the origins of works that had suffered the‘destructive hand of Time’.
From its conception, the Trocadéro promoted the benefits of plaster far beyond
the commonsensical opinion that a good reproduction is more valuable than a poor
original.The reproduction could reveal aspects of a work
undetectable in the fragmented reality of the real world,
and the mounting of architectural fragments aimed at arealism in the experience of details impossible in situ.
The curators saw no reason to distinguish between thework itself and its reproduction: a cast has ‘the complete
scientific value of the original and thus deserves to be
examined with the same interest’.6 In fact, the museum
boldly claimed that a perfect cast is not only ‘plus exact
que l’original’, but in its plaster perfection closer to themonument’s moment of origin, and as such in a sense
closer to the original than the original itself.7

III
Proust was untouched by the enduring French traditionof museum critique, dating back at least to Quatremèrede Quincy’s attacks on the Louvre in the 1790s, to Paul
Valéry’s ‘Le problème des musées’ (1923), and beyond.
‘Our age is plagued by the notion that objects should beshown only with things which accompany them in reality,
thus depriving them of the essential, that act of mind
which isolated them from reality in the first place’, hestated, advocating the museum as a liberating, abstracted
space that introduced a necessary distance between theobject and its place of origin.8 ‘For Proust, the work of art
6 Louis Courajod and P. Frantz Marcou, Musée de sculpture comparée (moulages).
Palais de Trocadéro. Catalogue raisonné publié sous les auspices de la commission desMonuments historiques. XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1892), III.
7 Camille Enlart, Le Musée de sculpture comparée au Palais du Trocadéro (Paris:
Librairie Renouard, 1911), 3.
8 Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 224 and 223.

R ET U R NING TO DIS TO RT ED O R IG INS

59

is like a quotation that forgets its source and thereby demonstrates its own origin’, Didier
Maleuvre asserts, an observation that is even more intriguing given that a reproduction
constitutes the center of Proust’s museum philosophy.9 The version first experienced– in this case, the replicated fragment in the museum – has become a new original, distanced from the model’s historic source. Nowhere does Proust make this clearer thanin a detour on bibliophilia in the novel’s final volume. Like printed books, a plaster cast
may come in editions, it can be multiplied. The aging narrator acknowledges that thebook-lover’s passion transcends the singular volume’s inherent value, and is separablefrom the historical value rooted in the precious object’s provenance.10 This objective
value is determined in ‘a living sense’ – that is, the life of the rare book as a collector’s
item, analogous to a singular work of art.
Here, however, the original has to be looked for elsewhere. A first edition is the‘edition in which I had read it for the first time’, the narrator states, ‘I would look forthe original editions, by which I mean those from which I had received an original
impression of the book. Because subsequent impressions are not original’. It is impossible not to think about Factum Arte’s Egyptian works in light of Proust’s reflection;
the Tutankhamun tomb as installed by the entrance to the Valley of the Kings, and thetomb of Seti I, at the moment residing further from its source. These works evoke thehistoricity of both the old and the new, and let us understand that however exactly performed, reproductions carry an inherent productive and liberating distance from theirsources.11 Similarly, Proust effortlessly inverts the conventional hierarchy of copies
and originals when the young pilgrim finds himself in front of ‘the real thing’. Thisdisappointment with the church in Balbec is not, however, a local phenomenon; rather,
it is symptomatic of a fundamental aesthetic problem. While the awe-inspiring effectof art is guaranteed conventionally by the singular and irreproducible work, Prousthints at another way of thinking about the convoluted relationship among materiality,
context, and significance.

9 Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 72.
10 Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, vol. 6 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 195.
11 See Mari Lending, ‘Reciting the Tomb of Tutankhamun’, Perspecta, 49 (The MIT Press, 2016).

60

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

Two views of the 12th-century
gallery, Trocadéro. From Paul
Frantz Julien Marcou, Album duMusée de sculpture comparée, vol. I(Paris, 1897).

‘In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of
the work of art – its unique existence at a particular place’, Walter Benjamin declaredin the mid-1930s.12 Compared to art forms such as sculpture and painting, architecture, one would assume, is especially site-specific: immovable, inexorably subjected togravity, place, and its own materiality. ‘The here and now of the original underlies theconcept of authenticity’, according to Benjamin, who let phenomena like authenticity,
uniqueness, authority, and aura serve as floating signifiers.13 Monuments are indeed
imbued with ideas of a ‘unique existence in a particular place’. Architecture is brutallysubjected to history, both with regard to reception, and physically, through deterioration, restoration, and environmental change. In the case of the singular half-Romanesque, Norman Gothic, Persian church in Balbec, Benjamin would have conferred theirreproducible ‘here and now’ quality on the medieval building facing the busy squarein Balbec-en-Terre. Proust concludes differently. Marcel realizes that the ‘here andnow’ reality is incapable of guaranteeing anything of importance, not to say of permanence. Just like Eurydice disappears from the ambit of Orpheus’s gaze, the ‘real’building disintegrates into history and the everyday before Marcel’s eyes. The plaster
portal in Paris had allowed him to imagine a totality unobtainable in real life.
In Proust, authenticity springs from the first impression, not from the first version in regard to origins or provenance. This first edition, the fragment in Paris, generated something ‘more and different’. ‘When I recognised the Apostles, whose statues
I had seen as mouldings in the Trocadéro Museum and who now stood to the left andright of the Virgin, waiting by the deep recess of the porch as though to pay me homage,I tried to close my mind to everything but the eternal significance of the sculptures.’14
This eternal significance is not embodied in the stone carved from the Norman cliffs
and patinated through the course of history. It originates in the first encounter withthe unalterable reproduction. In this tension Proust grasped an aspect of Benjamin’s
theory of the decline of aura that Benjamin himself overlooked. It is, writes Samuel
Weber, ‘the very real possibility that aura will be reproduced in and by the very media
responsible for its “decline’’’: what ‘has become increasingly evident ever since, is thataura thrives in its decline and that the reproductive media are particularly conduciveto this thriving’.15 This possible blooming of aura – transplanted from the original to
the reproduction, and from one medium to another – is exactly what Proust identified
in the 19th-century mass medium of the architectural plaster cast.
In contrast to the persistent analogy linking museums to tombs, graveyards, andepitaphs, Proust sees reality as lethal for art. Face-to-face, the carved-in-stone Virgin of
the Porch appears lifeless and accidental, drowning in context and the banality of everyday life. The reproduction, on the other hand, was ‘protecting her forever from any
vicissitudes which might jeopardize them, letting her stand unscathed amid their annihilation, ideal, full of her universal value’.16 In reality and across history, the original work
is perpetually corrupted.
12 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, 2nd version, in Benjamin,
Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2002), 103.
13 Ibid., 103.
14 Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 238.
15 Samuel Weber, ‘Mass Mediauras, or: Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin’, in Mass Mediauras: Form,
Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 101.
16 Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 238.

R ET U R NING TO DIS TO RT ED O R IG INS

61

Postcard by the Neurdein brothers
showing director Camille Enlart,
curator Jules Roussel, andchief moulder Charles Édouard
Pouzadoux in the 13th-century
gallery, Musée de sculpturecomparée, c. 1900. Musée desmonuments français/Cité del’architecture et du patrimoine.

Today, new media and new technologies are challenging orthodox modernist
conceptions of material authenticity and the ontology of originals. The 19th-century
plaster monument was already part of this destabilization of originals and copies. The
idea of the precious original, the tenacious cult of authenticity, the obsession with indigenous materiality, the modernist ideology of honesty, and essentialist conceptionsof site-specificity are all challenged by the historical patina of high-end reproductions.
In Proust, the Balbec portal is not a referent pointing to a lost original. It is a thing
in its own right. Fragmented, decontextualized, and translated – in time, place, discourse, and materiality – Proust’s plaster portal and Factum Arte’s productions testify
to aspects of art works that the original itself, in a chaotic reality beyond curated control, could never present.

The authorial voice of In Search of Lost Time famously compares Marcel’s future
novel to a medieval cathedral. More specifically, and less commented on, is the factthat its model of remembrance is taken from Viollet-le-Duc’s dream of restoring ‘thewhole edifice to the state in which it must have been in the 12th century’. Paraphrasing
Viollet-le-Duc, Proust also, anachronistically, evokes the working methods – and thevocabulary – of Factum Arte, when the future novelist claims that he has more ‘precise
data’ to ‘reinstate’ and ‘restore’ the past than ‘restorers generally have’. Yet Marcel’s
reproductions spring from ‘mental imprints’ not forensic investigations; impressions
that he compares to forever-lost originals such as Leonardo’s Last Supper and the portalof St Mark’s Basilica, as painted by Gentile Bellini.17
Proust’s attentiveness to details detached from their architectural body by means ofzooming anticipated Walter Benjamin’s promotion of the advantages of mechanical technologies in the experience of art. Photography ‘can bring out aspects of the original that areaccessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint) but not tothe human eye’. Further, it can ‘use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion,
to record images which escape natural optics altogether’.18 As such, Benjamin’s discussionof the decay of aura as a result of mechanical reproduction was not primarily a melancholicmusing on decay and loss, but a hint at the aura’s possible manifestations in new media.
When defining an original, he underscored that its physical alterations over time ‘can betraced only from the standpoint of the original in its present location’, and that changes‘can be detected only by chemical or physical analyses (which cannot be performed on a
reproduction)’. Nonetheless, the following reads as a perfect description of the effects ofboth Proust’s plaster portal and Factum Arte’s facsimiles: ‘technological reproduction canplace the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain’.19
17
18
19

Proust, TheWay by Swann’s, 166–67.
Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, 103.
Ibid.

62

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESR ET U R NING TO DIS TO RT ED O R IG INS

63

REVIVING WALPOLE’S NARRATIVESAT STRAWBERRY HILL HOUSESilvia Davoli

Silvia Davoli is specialised in
the history of collecting andtaste. She is research curator at
Strawberry Hill and research
associate at Oxford University.

H

orace Walpole, renowned for publishing the first ever Gothic novel, The Castleof Otranto, in 1764, was a multi-faceted writer, the first English art-historian(Anecdotes of Painting in England, 176–80), author of an immense number of letters, inventor of the neo-gothic style, an antiquarian and a great art collector.
Son of the first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole (1676–1745), in 1739 Horace– like so many of his peers – went on the Grand Tour, accompanied by the poet Thomas
Gray. On his return, he bought a small strip of land close to the Thames, in a pastoral
area described by Walpole as ‘my little Brenta’ and where other nobles and men of letterspossessed elegant houses. In order to build the house in an authentic neo-Gothic style
Walpole formed the ‘Strawberry committee’, whose goal was to reproduce a neo-Gothic
style based on features of original medieval architecture.
Walpole was aware of the novelty of his work; writing to his friend Horace Mannin Florence he declared: ‘I shall speak much more gently to you, my dear child, though
you don’t like Gothic Architecture.The Grecian is only proper for magnificent and public

THIS PAGE

Facsimile of a double portraitof Robert Walpole andCatherine Shorter, painted
by George Eckardt (c. 1754)
and now at Houghton Hall, ina frame attributed by Horace
Walpole to Grinling Gibbons.
OPPOSITE

Silver bell, known by Horace
Walpole as the ‘Cellini Bell’,made by Wenzel Jamnitzer
around 1550 and now part of
the Rothschild Bequest to the
British Museum.

64

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILES

65

buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments look ridiculous when crowded into
a closet or in a cheesecake house. The variety is little, and admits no charming irregularities’ (letter to Mann, 25 February 1750).
Strawberry Hill is a complex and original place. To fully understand it, it is necessary to completely immerse oneself in 18th-century English culture animated byphilosophical empiricism, by Edmund Burke’s theories of Beauty and the Sublime,
and by the first learned societies of antiquarians, who instead of looking at Roman
and Greek classicism, looked to the national past. There are various characteristics ofStrawberry Hill that recur in Walpole’s letters – its small size, asymmetrical structure,use of fragments – and frequent reference to the artificiality of the composition, emphasized by the abundant use of trompe l’oeil, such as the wallpaper imitating Gothic
architectural details made of stone. Walpole constantly uses an ironic lens to describe
Strawberry Hill, calling it in different instances a Trifle, a Toy House or even a fauxancestral castle – his family, of mercantile origin, did not have a real one. This irony
serves to create a sense of distance from reality, thereby inviting meta-reflection on thehouse itself, on the collection and on their profound integration.
Walpole dedicated half of his life to building Strawberry House and its collection,and the other half to thoroughly describing it. He feared its eventual dispersal and to
avoid this danger he used the only means he had at his disposal, the written word. He
published two descriptions of the house and its contents (A description of theVilla of Horace
Walpole, 1774 and 1784) complemented by some beautiful views of the main rooms.
Walpole’s fear was not completely unfounded: in 1842 the collection, more than six
thousand objects (not including the prints, drawings and coins!), was dispersed in amemorable auction that lasted more than ten days.
66

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESA detail from the facsimile ofJoshua Reynolds’ portrait of
the Ladies Waldegrave, Horace
Walpole’s nieces, in the roles of
the three Fates. Commissioned by
Horace Walpole in 1780.

FOLLOWING PAGES

The petroglyphs in the sacredcave of Kamukuwaká, located in
the Xingu region in the Brazilian
Amazon, were vandalised in 2018.
Following the digital restorationof the damaged surfaces incollaboration with the Wauja
people, Factum Arte recreated thecave, whose return to the Xingu
region is currently being planned.
Bakor monoliths in CrossRiver State, Nigeria, 2016. The
monoliths are under increasing
threat from deforestation and theburning of yam stubble. Factum
Foundation has been working
with the Trust for African RockArt and the University of Calabar
for the last four years to digitiseand preserve these importantmonoliths. © David Coulson.
The installation of a facsimileof one of the lamassu from
Ashurnasirpal’s palace at Nimrud,
now in the British Museum, into
the entrance of the student hall at
the University of Mosul in 2019.

Walpole was an insatiable collector of historical curiosities, such as the famous
Magic Mirror of Doctor Dee (British Museum) or Cardinal Wolsey’s Hair (Christ
Church, Oxford), objects which he collected not because of their uniqueness, as in thecase of the Renaissance Wunderkammer and its mixture of naturalia and mirabilia, but
because of the power they had to create connections to the past. Walpole, like manyof his contemporaries, was interested in History, in the reconstruction of historicalnarratives. Even portraiture, omnipresent in Strawberry Hill, develops this theme:
through their characters, the portraits represent history, helping the spectator to connect with a particular past.
After years of semi-neglect, the house was restored and reopened to the public in
2010, but it was like an almost empty shell. The new museum’s mission is to acquire,
where possible, the works of art that were once part of the original collection, but for
obvious reasons this is a slow, expensive and complex process. Another priority is toallow the public to enjoy Strawberry Hill in its entirety – that is, to experience the original complementarity between architectural design and some of the key works of thecollection. To this end, the Trust has decided to reproduce several works of high artistic
value which were once exhibited in Strawberry Hill but are now held in museums or
private collections.
This is how the collaboration with Factum Arte was born. Factum Arte allowed
us to faithfully reproduce complex works such as the double portrait of Robert Walpole
and Catherine Shorter by John Giles Eccardt and its elaborate Rococo frame (Lewis
Walpole Library), the extraordinary portrait of the three Ladies Waldegrave by Sir Joshua
Reynolds (National Gallery of Scotland), the historic painting depicting the family ofHenry VII and St George and the Dragon now part of the Royal Collections, the portrait byAllan Ramsey of Walpole’s nieces (Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) and the extraordinary
silver bell made by Wenzel Jamnitzer (British Museum), one of the objects most admiredby Walpole. These highly significant works today accompany visitors on their discovery
of Strawberry Hill and help to restore some of the narratives which Walpole had created
for the house.
Moreover, the presence of copies does not seem to be completely contrary to
Walpole’s philosophy. Precisely because the historical narrative prevailed over the concept of uniqueness, when Walpole could not obtain original portraits of his heroes
and heroines – such as the portrait of Lord Falkland painted by Mark Geeraerts, atthe centre of one of the most famous episodes of the Castle of Otranto – he did nothesitate to commission a copy. In fact, one of the most famous rooms in StrawberryHill, the Holbein Chamber, was entirely built around copies of a series of drawings
originally by Hans Holbein, rediscovered in 1727 by Queen Caroline at Kensington
Palace, executed by his friend the antique dealer George Vertue. Vertue’s drawings are
now preserved at Sudeley Castle, but thanks to the reproduction of facsimiles faithfulin every respect to the originals, they can now be admired in the room that was built tohold them at Strawberry House. Without the reproduction of these splendid portraits
from the court of Henry VIII it would not have been possible to transmit to the public
the historical, artistic, and cultural significance of this room.
In 2018, an exhibition was held which brought together the house and its collection for the first time in more than 150 years. It was a never-to-be-repeated occasion, in
which original works of art were united with copies to allow visitors an authentic visualexperience, viewing Strawberry Hill House through the eyes of Horace Walpole.

R EV IV ING WA L P O L E’S NA R R AT IV ES

67

68

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESR EV IV ING WA L P O L E’S NA R R AT IV ES

69

70

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESR EV IV ING WA L P O L E’S NA R R AT IV ES

71

72

R E -T HI N K IN G TH E F UN C TION OF FACSIMILESR EV IV ING WA L P O L E’S NA R R AT IV ES

73

CHAPTER 2PRESERVING,SHARINGAND RESPONSIBILITY

74

75

COLLECTIONS ENTAIL RESPONSIBILITIES.
NOTES ON A GLOBAL INSTITUTION
Hartwig Fischer

This essay was originallypublished in Peter Mosimann
and Beat Schönenberger, Kunst
und Recht, vol. XI (Bern: Stampfli
Publishers Ltd., 2019).
Hartwig Fischer took up thepost of Director of the British
Museum in Spring 2016. Hegained his PhD in Art History
at the University of Bonn in 1993
after studying in Berlin, Romeand Paris. Hartwig began his
career in museums as a Research
Assistant and then Curatorof 19th-Century and Modern
Art at the Kunstmuseum Basel,
Switzerland before becoming
Director of the Folkwang
Museum, Essen in 2006. In 2012he was appointed Director
General of the Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen (State Art
Collections), Dresden, withresponsibility for 14 museums
and associated libraries, archives
and research centres.

PREVIOUS PAGE

The re-creation of Raphael’s Christ
Falling on the Way to Calvary, often
known as Lo Spasimo (The Agony).
Originally painted on wooden panels
in 1514, it was transferred onto
canvas in Paris in the early 19th
century. Factum has remade the work
as a panel painting to be installed in
the recently restored original marble
frame in the Church of Santa Mariadello Spasimo, Palermo.
OPPOSITE

Fig. 1: Stele of Ashurbanipal,
668–655 BC. © Trustees of the British
Museum.

76

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

1. CULTURAL RESOURCES
In his essay ‘There is no cultural identity’, published in 2016,1 the French philosopher andsinologist François Jullien re-examines the concept of the universal – as developed andadvanced by the West. Jullien considers the challenges the concept increasingly faces as
new centres of power and thinking emerge, Western controls mutate or wane, globalisation diversifies or fractures, nationalisms thrive, and reclamations abound. Without reducing universalism to a mere tool of domination – its roots and development over 2,500
years are diverse and complex – Jullien states that any claims to a (totalising) universal,
on the part of the West, are no longer sustainable. In its place he advocates a ‘rebellious
universal’ which, as an unattainable horizon, an unachievable ideal, keeps us searching,keeps peoples from retreating into their ‘cultural differences’, from indulging in their‘essence’; instead it pushes them to continue facing and reaching out towards each other,and to continue developing and transforming, an attitude which alone keeps them alive.
Opposing the concept of difference defining identity through exclusion, Jullien
strengthens the notion of écart, a distance or in-between that connects. He insists that
cultures are interrelated through an in-between that keeps them en regard, in sight ofeach other, each remaining dependent on the other, challenged by the other. Throughthe in-between that keeps them linked, each culture activates the other as a resource,
pushing each beyond the boundaries of its ‘identity’ and opening them up to the impactof the other. We should conceive of culture here as a set of thought systems, beliefs, andinteractions growing out of history, a people’s or group’s practice, knowledge and conceptions that develop over time, through the accumulation of individual and collective
actions and interactions.
What bridges the distance between cultures and enables us to use them as a resource is dialogue, a dialogue that respects the otherness of the other and enables us tocomprehend ourselves, and the other, in our interconnectedness.
Jullien’s ‘dialogue’ combines dia, meaning distance as well as moving across the
distance, and logos, meaning the possibility of understanding, the shared common groundof intelligibility.
Jullien fears that the West has put its ability to dialogue at risk. With the overpowering strength of its ‘global’ values it has tried to impose its universalism on otherpeoples, colonising their cultural practices through triumphant rationality, which in turnis now provoking identity claims whose virulence mirrors the uniformity formerly imposed by the West.
1 François Jullien, Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle (Paris: L’Herne, 2016).

77

A true dialogue can only take place in the language of both cultures, Jullien claims,
between languages: translation is the basic, practical implementation of dialogue, it reveals the discomfort, the permanent disquiet, the nondefinitive nature of any authentic
dialogue, moving forward through never-ending reiterations. It also reveals its strength:
moving between cultures and bridging the écart generates energy and engagement,
leading to mutual understanding.
Jullien’s thinking addresses important aspects of what the British Museum as one of
the great comprehensive institutions of human cultural achievements aspires to: a self-critical but confident universalism constantly engaged in dialogue to activate its collection as abeneficial cultural resource for millions of people. This resource should be available physically both in London and abroad, and digitally across the world, working with specialists
and communities from all continents to bring out the many stories the objects in its care
encapsulate, rendering them meaningful and accessible for a most diverse global public.The
Museum itself has the capability to constitute a ‘shared common ground of intelligibility’–each object in its collection has the potential to generate dialogue.
All human societies create material circumstances within which people live and attempt to thrive. Such material circumstances are embodied in the artefacts in the British
Museum, which are concrete instances of the logics, emotions, aesthetics, successes andfailures of all human ways of life. Living in a multicultural world involves bringing one’s
own logic into contact with other logics and exploring areas of congruence and disjuncture.
The Museum is the very place of hospitality to allow this to happen, to acknowledge areasof similarity, and also of radical difference in engaging with the cultures of the world.
But isn’t the Museum’s claim to universal relevance being challenged by movements
in many parts of the world that reject cosmopolitan approaches in favour of nationalist andpopulist ideologies, denounce universalism as self-interested subterfuge and endorse therenationalisation of cultural politics? What is the Museum’s position in the current debate‘about possession of objects and sites, about who is entitled to produce knowledge andnarratives about them, about the contexts in which they are most appropriately understoodand accessed, and about who is responsible for their conservation and preservation [?]’, toborrow Professor Sunil Khilnani’s succinct formulation during a recent conversation.

2. A COLLECTION BELONGING TO THE WORLDThe British Museum is a unique place of translation, placing cultures in sight of eachother, bridging the écart and making them freely accessible. It is no coincidence that themost visited object of the Museum is the Rosetta Stone, the one object that, discovered
and transferred from Egypt in a context of imperial competition, allowed Champollion
and his contemporaries to decipher the hieroglyphs and thus rediscover and open up thehistory and culture of ancient Egypt.
The British Museum was founded in 1753 when Britain was already a significant
power with colonial possessions across the world. This context is obviously importantto the history and character of the collection of the British Museum. But the Museum
was not established as an arm of the state to celebrate British imperial power. It was
founded at the height of the European Enlightenment by the British Parliament as anindependent charitable trust. Its collection had to represent the world; it had to be kept
together forever, for the benefit of present and future generations; it had to be openly
78

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

accessible for everybody, for people from all nations, not only the British; the collection
had to be explored through innovative research bringing together different disciplines tocompare cultures across the millennia and to understand our common humanity; and theknowledge thus generated had to be widely shared to benefit the public. In other words,
the Museum was meant to be not only about objects and the knowledge and stories theypreserve but just as much about relationships and exchange between human beings.
In order to deliver these objectives, Parliament vested responsibility for the institution in the Trustees. The Trustees have fiduciary ownership of the collection, but they areowners only inasmuch as they act on behalf of the entirety of its beneficiaries, and thesebeneficiaries, or owners, are the citizens of this world, and future generations.
This is a unique setup: it has created an exceptional tool to study and explore thehistory of humankind through significant objects, from first beginnings until today.2

3. COLONIALISM, IMPERIALISM
The term ‘colonialism’ refers to nations or powers or elites extending their authority
over territories and peoples, primarily for the purposes of expanding trade and accessing
and using resources, mostly to the benefit of some parts of the population, and to thedisadvantage of others. There are evidently great differences between the basic types ofcolonialism that variegate into a great range of forms impacting on the identities of all
involved, whatever their role and position within these constellations.
There are vast differences, also, between the loose network of Greek or Phoenician
cities across the Mediterranean and centralised, industrialised states that carved up an
entire continent, Africa, into different areas of rule and exploitation, or between theempires of the Aztecs and the empire of Han China.
Broadly speaking, however, we might say that colonialism and its specific formof government – empire – have marked the last 5,000 years of history, and have for agreat number of people provided the basic political and social framework of their lives:‘An empire is thought to exist where there is some overarching political control oversubject colonies. Imperialism is a special case of colonialism where there are colonies
tied together into one political structure, which has a series of ideological, economic andcultural implications’, Chris Gosden writes in Archaeology and Colonialism.3
Empires and colonialism themselves are part of the global history of power, inequality, and exploitation, the history of amassing resources for major innovations
and developments that have shaped the world, its societies, and individuals and theirnotions of both society and identity profoundly. The emergence of the modern world
and of globalisation as a world system are marked by colonialism. ‘Colonialism is the
major cultural and historical fact of the last 500 years and to some extent the last 5,000
years’, Gosden writes.4
2 See Jonathan Williams, ‘Parliaments, Museums, Trustees, and the Provision of Public Benefit in the EighteenthCentury British Atlantic World’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76, no. 2 (2013): 195–214. The British Museum Act of1753 was replaced by the British Museum Act of 1963 and enhanced by subsequent legislation, notably the Museums andGalleries Act of 1992, the Human Tissue Act of 2004 regulating the return of human remains, and the Holocaust (Returnof Cultural Objects) Act of 2009, which do not change the basic legal structure of the institution.
3 Chris Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5.
4 Ibid., 4.

CO L L ECT IO NS ENTA IL R ES P O NS IB IL IT IES

79‘Colonialism is a process by which things shape people, rather than the reverse.
Colonialism exists where material culture moves people, both culturally and physically,leading them to expand geographically, to accept new material forms and to set up power
structures around a desire for material culture.’5 We understand the experience of people
living under the conditions of colonialism through the items they made, exchanged,
used, had to give up or left behind. A considerable number of objects in the collectionof the Museum are themselves documents of forms of imperial rule and colonisation
dating back over 5,000 years, through many different forms of Empire across the world.
They allow us to situate colonialism within the long history of empires as a political andcultural phenomenon and their crucial role in the diffusion and displacement of people,
ideas, cultural practices and things on the one hand, of exploitation, oppression anddestruction on the other, with slavery as its most horrendous and pernicious practice.
However, the imperialism and colonialism that the current debate on restitution
focuses on is the more recent form of this type of rule. It is still close to us, it marks the
lives of people up to the present, and it is part of our own past even though we were notdirectly involved in it or not even born when it ended. It is a shared difficult past. Actsof violence were perpetrated during the period of imperial conquest and during colonial
rule with effects that echo into the present. Institutions like the British Museum have a
responsibility to address and respond to these challenges.

4. RESTITUTION
The report on the return of objects to Africa commissioned by President Macron,written by Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy and published in November 2018, advances
two areas of action: restitution, and collaboration, following the President’s earlier statements on colonialism as crime against humanity (in February 2017 while campaigning in
Algiers) and on the temporary or permanent return of African objects in French public
collections (in a speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in November 2017).6
In assessing how objects have entered collections in France, the authors make the basic
assumption – following Macron’s assertion – that colonialism constitutes a crime against
humanity and that therefore any transfer of objects under the conditions of colonialism wasinherently illegal, unless the present owner can prove that an object was acquired with thefull and documented consent of the previous owner, and that an adequate price was paid.
They suggest that the major part of African holdings in France (and by implication in Europe)
should be returned, or rather that they are still the property of nations, communities, institutions or individuals in Africa, and that it is France’s duty to acknowledge this fact, and theAfrican states’ only task is to decide at which moment over the next decades they wish totake back the objects, or whether leave them as loans in European museums. Nations, communities, institutions or individuals are here being subsumed by and represented through thestate, and not acting on their own behalf – a legal and political assumption with far-reaching
implications. The authors of the report consider other forms of collaboration as inadequate
and basically unacceptable unless the objects have been returned at least in principle. The
5 Ibid., 159.
6 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a new relational ethics (Paris:
Philippe Rey, 2018).

80

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

return alone corroborates the acknowledgement of past wrongs and the intention to engage
in a process that would heal the wounds inflicted by European colonialism.
Sarr and Savoy argue that return is an indispensable prerequisite of more beneficial,
more equitable relations between Africa and Europe, in a crucial moment of economic
and intellectual transformation that will lead African nations to decide for themselves
what kind of society they want to build, what kind of economy they want to develop,
how to interpret and come to terms with their own complex past, and how to engage
with the rest of the world.7

5. ENGAGING WITH THE WORLD
While convinced that the foundational value of the British Museum’s collection – and its
global significance – resides in its breadth, depth, complexity and unity, the Museum has
been working with communities and institutions across the globe, entering into difficult
conversations about the past and charting together a course that provides access to objects, tells their stories, makes different voices audible and uses them to reconnect withthe past and derive from that connection new energies to shape the future.
The research conducted by the British Museum in partnership with others frequently
reveals how layered, differentiated, entangled a historical situation can be when it comes toagency in trade and transfer under the conditions of colonialism in the British Empire, butequally across continents and millennia. This too needs to be acknowledged, and so indeed
should the role of power, inequality and exploitation on all continents throughout history.
There is no obvious reason for limiting this debate to any specific region, and the British
Museum never has. Nor is there a reason to limit it to the late 19th and early 20th century orsolely to European empires. The same arguments can apply to all countries formerly undercolonial rule or simply under the rule of someone else. Colonialism and imperial expansion
have been practised on all continents, and long before European states rose to global power.
When does a region (or community) cease to be independent and turn into an
integral part of a bigger whole, and inversely, when does it gain independence and turninto an entity in its own right? Obviously, identities are multiple at all moments, and they
are constantly in flux. Objects do not necessarily have a national identity inscribed into
them and aligned with present-day nations and territories. In what sense can modern nation states lay claim to historical objects that predate contemporary national delineations
and sentiment? Objects frequently carry intricate legacies of transfer and acquisition,
involving violence, conflict and inequality, long before they enter a museum.8
In addressing these questions and in trying to chart an answer the British Museum
must be aware of the persistence or recalibration of colonial structures today and theirpolitical, economic, social, and cultural dimensions in regional, national and transnational
contexts. The shifting centres of power and of power constellations reshape the way wenegotiate the specific relationship between the individual and local on the one hand, andthe pervasive nature of global connections on the other. There are few places that allow us
to engage in these processes like the British Museum, within the reference frame of two
million years of human development in its diversity, complexity and unity. ‘To understand
7 These ideas are developed more comprehensively in Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2016).
8 I am grateful to Sunil Khilnani for discussing these points in a recent conversation.

CO L L ECT IO NS ENTA IL R ES P O NS IB IL IT IES

81

the present in its unique form, and its historical lineages, we need to understand the pastshapes that colonialism and power have taken through material culture.The past histories ofcolonialism are no infallible guides to grasping the present, but they can open up our minds
to the range of possible shapes power takes, which will provide inspiration in understanding
our present situation and for seeking a more human dimension to global structures.’9
The British Museum has made great efforts in seeking to contribute to ‘a morehuman dimension to global structures’ by making the collection ever more accessible as ameans of learning and knowledge. Its curators work with communities from around theworld every day and conduct research on the history of its collection and the provenanceof its objects. Together they organise exhibitions addressing many of the complex issues ofworld history and the many ways objects were acquired and have entered the collection;
they also encourage curators in other countries to present their narratives of the objects
from the British Museum.They welcome museum colleagues and heritage specialists fromacross the globe for training and skill sharing that enables all sides to learn from eachother; they partner with institutions on all continents to build up cultural infrastructure;preserve cultural heritage; assist in the return of stolen or illicitly exported objects; andenhance experience and expertise, building up a global network of professionals.
The Museum is one of the most significant lenders of objects across the world andkeeps circulating them through exhibitions and long-term loans. It has built up a comprehensive, publicly accessible database of the objects in the collection, and has accelerated
the use of digital technologies to enable and facilitate exploration of the collection fromanywhere in the world. Its inventories and archives are freely accessible, inviting independent research on the objects, the collections, and the history of the institution.10 With
continued investment in digitisation, information will progressively become available
online to those who cannot physically visit the Museum and its archives.
There are myriad ways of working together, exploring the collections, researching
their history and provenance, or of using them to open up a new understanding of a region’s culture. Exhibitions are among those tools. One example of how this can be done
was India and the World, presented in 2017–18 at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai and
the National Museum in Delhi. Preceded by ten years of collaboration, training, smallershows and research projects, this major exhibition was developed by a team of curatorsand scholars from Mumbai, Delhi and London to showcase 5,500 years of Indian history
in a global context, with all works pertaining to South Asia coming from Indian collections, and all works highlighting the global connections of South Asia coming from the
British Museum. The show attracted far more than 200,000 visitors in Mumbai alone,
and involved hundreds of schools who seized the opportunity to have their pupils engage
with a much wider perspective on Indian and global history than their institutions would
normally offer, stressing among other aspects the grand multicultural, multi-faith traditions of India. It also offered digital introductions and presentations for those who could
not attend or desired to deepen their experience following their visit. The exhibition has
created a template, both as a method of collaboration and as a means to show the interconnectedness of a country and its various cultures.11

9 Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism, 259.
10 See for instance Delbourgo’s critical appraisal of Hans Sloane, whose collection formed the basis of the British Museum.
James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (London: Allen Lane, 2017).
11 www.indiaandtheworld.org/.

82

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

Fig 2: Relief with Assyrian
soldiers demolishing and looting
the city of Hamanu, 645–640 BC.
© Trustees of the British Museum.

6. OBJECT JOURNEYS
The paths which objects have taken through time and space before entering the collection of the British Museum are numerous. The following pages give an impression ofjust how varied these journeys have been and hint at the many complex stories of theseobjects. The final example, though not of one specific object, demonstrates the additional
dimensions digital innovations offer for people from across the world to access the collection, engage with it and use it creatively.
a. Stele of Ashurbanipal (Fig. 1)
This monument, dated to 668–655 BC, was excavated in Babylon and has been part of
the Museum’s collection since 1881. It shows Ashurbanipal, king of the Neo-Assyrian
Empire that had been controlling formerly independent Babylon for centuries, lifting alarge basket of earth for the ritual moulding of the first brick of the Temple of Marduk.
The cuneiform inscription records Ashurbanipal’s restoration of a shrine in Babylon as an
example of his kingly might, the divine favour he was enjoying, and his many good acts
as imperial overlord.
Under Ashurbanipal’s rule, from 669–631 BC, the Assyrian Empire reached
its maximum expansion through conquest and annexation, stretching from today’s
Western Iran to the Eastern Mediterranean, from Turkey to the Persian Gulf and to
Egypt. At its administrative and political centre, the royal city of Nineveh (present-day
Mosul, Iraq), a literary and visual court culture developed, based on the influx of riches
from all over the empire, which produced highly sophisticated architecture and works ofart, and the greatest library of the ancient world.
Assyria, however, soon fell victim to destruction by previously oppressed peoples,
especially the Medes and Babylonians, and after 612 BC it sank into oblivion. Excavations
by Paul-Émile Botta, and especially by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam from
1845–47 around Mosul, then part of the Ottoman Empire, brought to light the extraordinary reliefs that had adorned the walls of the royal palaces, extolling the prowess and successof the ruler (Fig. 2). On their second expedition from 1849–51, they uncovered the libraryof Ashurbanipal, which allowed cuneiform script to be deciphered by Henry Rawlinson,
and which in turn opened up the entire literary heritage of ancient Mesopotamia (Fig. 3).
Typically for those times, Rawlinson was a British East India Company army officer, a politician and a leading Orientalist, called by some the Father of Assyriology.
With the permission of the Ottoman government, many of the finds were transferred to London and Paris, and triggered research into the ancient Middle East on an
unprecedented scale, allowing for the rediscovery of the first states and empires in theregion and their associated political, religious and administrative structures. After the fallof the Ottoman Empire, France and Great Britain carved up the Middle East along thelines of the Sykes-Picot agreement in order to secure access to a newly relevant natural
resource, oil. The creation of the Kingdom of Iraq under the Hashemite dynasty was oneof the consequences of these developments, and has influenced the development of theregion up to the present day.
British writer, political officer, administrator and archaeologist Gertrude Bell, whoplayed an important role in these developments, would also become instrumental infounding the National Library of Iraq, and in 1926 the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, whichquickly grew into a major institution for the preservation and showcasing of Iraq’s cultural

CO L L ECT IO NS ENTA IL R ES P O NS IB IL IT IES

83

heritage, receiving the major finds from all over thecountry. Bell was also key in introducing legislation on theprotection of cultural heritage in Iraq in 1926–27.
Despite this promising start, a nearly unbroken series of conflicts driven by far-reaching power struggles,colonial demarcations, the scramble for raw materials anddenominational and religious enmities has led to entire
communities being attacked, killed or forced into exile. In
the process, some of the most important historical sites,
museums and objects have been destroyed by war, subsequent looting and vandalism and, most recently by ashort-lived radical regime, Daesh (the so-called ‘IslamicState’). In response to this systematic destruction of cultural heritage, some of the great museums and research
institutes of the world, with the financial support of foundations and governments of numerous countries, havestarted, in collaboration with Iraqi colleagues, to help
protect and preserve cultural heritage sites, monuments
and museums in Iraq for present and future generations.
In 2015 the British Museum developed a scheme
which, in the face of destruction, could offer something
positive and constructive. The ‘Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme’,or simply ‘Iraq Scheme’, which is supported by the UK government, is building capacity
in the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage by training fifty of its staff in a wide
variety of advanced techniques of retrieval and rescue archaeology. The programme, undertaken first in the UK and then on two specially selected archaeological sites in safe areasof Iraq, delivers state of the art training in all aspects of archaeological fieldwork, from84

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

geophysical and geomatic surveying and documentation to complex excavation methodology. The training provides the participants with the expertise and skills they need to face
the challenges of documenting and stabilising severely disrupted and damaged heritage sites
in preparation for potential reconstruction. These two fieldwork projects are not ‘training
excavations’ as such, but rather fully developed scientific excavations at which participants
are offered instruction in the detailed techniques of field archaeology. Both excavation projects provide a wealth of experience for the participants.
On 24 October 2019, Factum Arte and the British Museum set up, in collaboration with colleagues in Iraq, high-resolution 3D copies of two lamassu in the British
Museum’s collection produced by Factum Arte (lamassu are winged bulls, or, as in thisinstance, winged lions with crowned human heads, that flanked the entrances to Assyrian
royal palaces). They were placed in front of the newly rebuilt Student Centre (Fig. 4),
near the library building of Mosul University, one of the most important libraries of the
Middle East that was destroyed by Islamic State. It is a statement about sharing, and about
the importance of culture, at a time when digital can have an extraordinary impact inboth the virtual and physical worlds. The event was celebrated by students and inhabitants of Mosul as an important step in the recovery of their cultural heritage.

Fig. 3: The Flood Tablet or The
Gilgamesh Tablet, Library of
Ashurbanipal, 7th century BC.
© Trustees of the British Museum.
Fig. 4: Installation of lamassu
facsimiles, University of Mosul,
2019.

b. The Cyrus Cylinder (Fig. 5)
Territorial expansion, consolidation and assimilation of language, religion and culture
have a long history as a political and social phenomenon. Numerous objects now in the
British Museum show that the movement of people, ideas and things, both voluntarily andby force, has roots in deep human history and in the ancient world. The Cyrus Cylinder
is one such example.
Named for its shape, the Cyrus Cylinder is an account written in the Babylonian
language that documents the conquest of the great city of Babylon by Cyrus the Great,in 539 BC, which resulted in the assimilation of the Babylonian Empire into the growing
Persian Empire.The Cylinder was deposited in the city walls of Babylon around that date.
Found at the site during a British Museum sponsored dig in 1879, it has been displayed
more or less continually ever since.
The text, probably written on the orders of Cyrus, records the awfulness ofNabonidus, last King of Babylon, who is claimed to have perverted the cults of gods including Marduk, the presiding deity of Babylon. Marduk, we are told, selected Cyrus as his
champion to restore the old ways and made him King of the World. Cyrus then marched on
Babylon where the Babylonians welcomed him as their new king and delivered Nabonidus
to him. Cyrus presents himself as a worshipper of Marduk who strives for peace, abolishes
a labour service imposed on the city’s free citizens, and restores temples, religious cults,
and previously deported gods and people. The Cylinder also appears to support biblicalevidence in the Book of Ezra, which tells us that Cyrus liberated the Jews and allowed themto return home. This has led to the assumption that Cyrus was a champion of humanitarianvalues, but although it is often described as a ‘first bill of human rights’, the surviving text
on the Cylinder contains no guarantee of human rights. In any case, such a concept would
not have existed in Cyrus’ time. This is rather an official text justifying the annexation ofBabylon by Persia and depicting an act of conquest as an act of salvation and restoration.
Adopted as an official emblem during the 2,500th-anniversary celebrations held by
the last Shah for the founding of the Persian Empire, the Cylinder was loaned to Iran in1971 where it formed part of the festivities. Having acquired special reverence among

CO L L ECT IO NS ENTA IL R ES P O NS IB IL IT IES

85

THIS PAGE

Fig. 5: The Cyrus Cylinder, 539 BC.
© Trustees of the British Museum.
OPPOSITE

Fig. 6: The Meroë Head, 27–25 BC.
© Trustees of the British Museum.
Fig. 7: The Rosetta Stone, 196 BC.
© Trustees of the British Museum.

Iranians, it was loaned again in 2010–11 to the National Museum in Tehran to figure in an
exhibition curated by the museum’s staff. At a time of tense political relations this second
loan of the cylinder was a moment of great significance both within Iran itself and also
for British-Iranian relations, demonstrating how objects can act as agents of cultural dialogue.Today copies of the Cylinder are omnipresent across Iran, speaking of the country’s
grand history, beneficial impact, and the clemency of a ruler who grants rights and allows
peoples to return to their ancient lands.
c. The Meroë Head (Fig. 6)
Empires result in the movement of people, ideas and things. Not only do objects acquire
new meanings through their diffusion, but their survival may sometimes even be dependent
on their having been removed from their original context. The Meroë Head, which is anover-life-sized bronze portrait bust of the first Roman emperor, Augustus (27 BC – AD 14),
is an example of this, and a rare survival of a bronze statue from antiquity. It is believed tohave been part of a statue erected early in the reign of Augustus in a Roman garrison town
in Egypt, newly annexed by the Roman Empire. Intended to project the power and omnipotence of the emperor, it served such a purpose for only a short period. Within a couple ofyears, it had been torn down by an invading enemy, the neighbouring Kushite Kingdom tothe south of Egypt. They raided the Roman garrisons and looted the statues, transportingthem hundreds of miles south to the Kushite capital at Meroë in present-day Sudan.
Most of the statues were returned following negotiations between the Meroitic
Queen Amanirenas and the Roman general Petronius. However, this bust remained atMeroë where it was buried under the threshold of a temple dedicated to Victory. It appears to have been deliberately placed so that the Meroïtes could trample over it. This actof humiliation ultimately ensured its survival. It was discovered in 1910 by archaeologists
led by John Garstang, having spent most of its history below ground and, therefore, outof sight. We do not know the name of the local workers who found the statue that day (asis so often the case). Garstang’s project, on behalf of the Institute of Archaeology at the
University of Liverpool, was carried out under the recently established (1905) Antiquities
Ordinance, created by the British administrators of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominiumof Sudan (1899–1956). While this banned illicit export of antiquities from Sudan, it did
86

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

allow for a partage system. This ensured that sponsoring institutions in the UK and beyond
could receive a share of the finds; through this route, the Augustus head arrived at the
British Museum. The phenomenon of partage sits alongside other methods of acquisitionsof the time, including diplomatic gifts from governments, acquisition of older collections,and purchases by individuals subsequently donated to the Museum.
d. The Rosetta Stone (Fig. 7)
The Rosetta Stone, one of the most famous objects in the British Museum collection, is
inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King
Ptolemy V Epiphanes, roughly 140 years after Alexander of Macedon had conquered
Egypt. The Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies was installed after his death and ruled thecountry until it was conquered and incorporated into the Roman Empire.
The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic scripts,
while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. It is believed to have originally been displayed
within a temple, possibly at Sais, and was probably moved in late antiquity or during theMamluk period (1250–1517), when it was finally used as building material for the foundation of Fort Qaitbey near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta.
The Stone was discovered by a French soldier during Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Egypt from the Ottoman Empire which aimed to weaken British access to India.
Transferred to the Institut d’Egypte in Cairo, copies were made for French scholars towork on. With the defeat of Napoleon’s armies by Britain, the Treaty of Alexandria set
the terms of capitulation in 1801. This included 13 antiquities, which despite French
protests, were deemed state property, not the holdings of individual French soldiers
or scholars. King George III subsequently donated the Rosetta Stone along with theother 12 objects to the British Museum in 1802, and it has been on public display at
the British Museum almost continuously ever since.

CO L L ECT IO NS ENTA IL R ES P O NS IB IL IT IES

87

The Museum pioneered new printing and reproduction techniques and distributed
copies and casts in the UK, France, Germany and the US immediately after the Rosetta Stone
entered the collection.12 This helped with the decipherment of hieroglyphs, finally cracked
by Jean-François Champollion in 1822. Three more fragmentary copies of the same decree
were discovered later, and a number of similar Egyptian bilingual or trilingual inscriptions
are known today. The Rosetta Stone, though no longer unique, was the essential key to ourmodern understanding of ancient Egyptian literature and civilisation.Today, the term Rosetta
Stone is used metaphorically to refer to the essential clue to a new field of knowledge.
The British Museum currently collaborates closely with Egyptian colleagues on research, skill-sharing and documentation projects. Fieldwork at Naukratis in the Nile Delta
explores the cosmopolitan port city with its Greek sanctuaries and harbour facilities, whileat Shutb near southern Egypt, there is work with the local community to explore continuities with the past. The ‘Circulating Artefacts’ project tracks and researches the movementof pharaonic antiquities beyond Egypt, helping combat illicit trade. A major project fundedby the EU brings together the Museum and four other major European institutions toprovide technical assistance towards the redevelopment of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
e. The costume of the Chief Mourner, Tahiti (Fig. 8)
Museums cannot ignore difficult colonial legacies; objects collected by European explorers
often present complex narratives regarding conquest, trade and ownership. However, there
is often agency on both sides, which the British Museum seeks to explore through the research, conservation and display of objects. One such example, a Chief Mourner’s costumefrom a time preceding the colonisation of Tahiti, was one of the star objects in the recent
Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives exhibition, which familiarised visitors with theappraisal of Cook’s voyages and their aftermath by today’s descendants of the people that
inhabited the regions he explored, some of which would ultimately beincorporated into the British Empire.
In traditional Tahitian society the death of an important chief orhigh-ranking individual was followed by a period of mourning. It was afraught and uncertain time, and to manage the transition of power to a
new chief or leader, a series of ceremonies were held known as Heva
Tupapa’u, or ‘mourning for the corpse’. The Chief Mourner’s costume
was carefully designed and painstakingly constructed from beaten bark
cloth and plaited coconut fibre decorated with feathers, coconut shells
and hundreds of pearl shells which shimmer when it is worn. It would
strike awe into those who encountered it, including the crew who arrived
with James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in 1769.The voyage botanist,
Joseph Banks, described seeing a man wearing a ‘dress so extraordinarythat I question whether words can give a tolerable idea of it’.
Cook and Banks attempted to procure a costume, but they wererebuffed, having been unable to offer the Tahitians anything they would
consider worth exchanging. Instead, they made drawings. Cook’s disappointment at not being able to acquire a costume stayed with him andwhen he returned to Tahiti on his second voyage in 1774, he arrived
prepared. This time, he brought red feathers from small parrots and
12 A number of casts and copies were also presented to Egyptian institutions over the last 150 years.

88

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

THIS PAGE

Fig. 8: The costume of the Chief
Mourner, Tahiti, 18th century.
© Trustees of the British Museum.
OPPOSITE

Fig. 9: Benin plaque depicting
the Oba flanked by two assistants,
with Portuguese figures in the
background, 16th–17th century.
© Trustees of the British Museum.

lorikeets he had obtained on the islands of Tonga, having learned how much Tahitians
valued them. Of the exchange, Cook wrote that during a visit from ‘the Royal Family’,
Tu’s father ‘made me a present of a complete Mourning dress, curiosities we most valued,
in return I gave him whatever he desired and distributed red feathers to all the others’.
Cook purchased a number of complete mourner’s costumes, perhaps as many as ten,which he brought back to Britain aboard the HMS Resolution.
Cook’s interest in the costumes and persistence in acquiring them was, it transpires,
crucial to their preservation. Another consequence of the arrival of early Europeans suchas missionaries and the introduction of firearms was the disruption of traditional ceremonies, and the Heva Tupapa’u was soon abandoned. Other existing mourner’s costumes
did not survive on the islands, and some were traded out to Europeans in various circumstances. Today, six complete examples survive in various institutions around the world.
Close interaction between the Museum’s curatorial, conservation and science teams,
working with Tahitian specialists in preparation for the 2018 exhibition, revealed much new
information about the costume, including the source of its feathers, as well as the emergenceof two garments rolled into it, which had been previously thought to be padding. These
collaborative discoveries have deepened understanding of this object, its role in traditional
Tahitian culture, and of European contact with the people of Tahiti in the 18th century.
f. Benin Bronzes (Fig. 9)
The Kingdom of Benin was one of the most important precolonial states of West Africa andis known around the world for its sophisticated bronzes, many of which display narratives
from the early life of the kingdom. Known to the Portuguese from the 15th century, since
the earliest European voyages to West Africa, the kingdom became a major trading partnerwith Europeans. At this moment of European ‘contact’ Benin was already an important
political formation and major trading state, situated withina regional network that connected it to trans-Saharantrade routes supplying gold, ivory and other products to
the North African Islamic world and beyond. Benin’s place
within history is equally known for its conquest by British
forces in the late 19th century, an expedition which led tothe sacking and looting of its capital and the scattering of
the majority of Benin’s iconic bronzes around the world.
Today, Benin and its bronzes are the focus of international debates regarding cultural property and restitution.
It is against this background that the Benin Dialogue Grouphas developed, a partnership of Nigerian and European museums and heritage institutions focused on realising the vision of a world-class permanent display of Benin Kingdom
objects in Benin City, composed both of bronzes and otherobjects currently in Nigeria, and of international loans. The
new Benin Royal Museum planned to house these objects,
to be built by the commissioned architect Sir David Adjaye,
will probably be one of the most significant African museum statements of the coming decade.
In the course of visits to Benin City by British
Museum staff in both 2018 and 2019, the architect and a

CO L L ECT IO NS ENTA IL R ES P O NS IB IL IT IES

89

range of people across the city communicated the desire for new ways of thinking andlearning about Benin’s past, and archaeology is seen as a central means of undertaking thisnew exploration. The British Museum intends to partner on such projects, working together with Nigerian colleagues to explore Benin’s early history and in so doing to engage
in new dialogues concerning the African and global past.
The archaeology of West Africa promises to shed new light on the histories of its
precolonial empires and states and their global links via trans-Saharan trade routes from themedieval period. As demonstrated through the recent Caravans of Gold exhibition in North
America, archaeology not only has the potential to dramatically improve understanding ofthese lesser-known aspects of Africa’s history, but also to help bring these to life and communicate them to a wide range of audiences within Nigeria and across the world.
g. Exploring the Maya World13 (Fig. 10)
A founding principle of the British Museum was, and remains, that the collection and theinformation contained within it must be shared to the greatest possible extent. In collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, the British Museum has harnessed the power of
new technology to capture and communicate stories of the collection, bringing them toa global audience through the Exploring the Maya World project.
Exploring the Maya World has digitised a remarkable collection testifying to theachievements of ancient Maya art and architecture gathered by Alfred Maudslay in thelate 19th century. Maudslay used the latest technology of his time to capture and record
the stories of ancient Maya cities in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras: he created thefirst dry glass plate photographs of iconic sites like Palenque, Chichén Itzá and Tikal,
spending years living and working throughout the region. He also created more than 400
large plaster cast replicas of building façades and monuments, which have been stored in
the British Museum for more than a century.
This collection also contains some of the best-preserved records of ancient Maya
writing. By working closely with colleagues in Mexico and Guatemala, the entire collection has been made available online for anyone to explore and research. The extraordinary stories that have emerged during this project have also been put online for people
to enjoy in Spanish, Portuguese and English anywhere in the world.
13 https://artsandculture.google.com/project/exploringthemayaworld.

90

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

Fig. 10: Exploring the Maya World
Project, 2018–19. Palenque thenand now, incorporating an original
photograph by Alfred Maudslay
from 1890–91. © Trustees of the
British Museum.

The power of this project has been in its exceptionally collaborative approach: it hasbrought together curators, indigenous communities, scholars and technology specialists fromacross Mexico, Guatemala, the UK, Denmark, France and the US. Everyone has been united
by a common mission to communicate the true value of conserving shared cultural heritage.
Exploring the Maya World brings to life the energy and dynamism of culture in a way that canbe hard to generate within a physical environment, and the voices in this project are vibrantand full of colour: they tell their own stories and the stories of those that have lived before.
The British Museum has the potential to reach many more people beyond those visiting the collection in London by bringing the Museum to the world virtually. Only a few
years ago it would have seemed unrealistic to create a catalogue of 3D objects viewable fromanywhere in the world, let alone walk around ancient Maya cities while sitting in your livingroom.These journeys of discovery are critical to engaging the most varied communities withthe value of cultural heritage. Only by taking risks and by pushing the boundaries of what
is possible can we begin to expand the reach and role of the 21st-century global museum.

7. FUTURE
How can we address the past to forge a better future? We can only do this together,through dialogue and collaboration, by constantly working to establish, in Jullien’s
words, a ‘shared common ground of intelligibility’, with relentless disquiet and empathy.
The collections of the British Museum come from many different cultural backgrounds,
as do its visitors, 75 per cent of whom originate from outside the UK. The Museum
is committed to working with people from all communities to unlock the stories andmeanings that resonate with them and their cultural concerns.
The Museum has embarked on a major campaign to renovate its building and totransform the presentation of the collection: the Rosetta Project. It will set a high priority on showcasing the interconnectedness of cultures in the future display in London.The
Museum seeks to show the achievements of humankind and its many communities, and inorder to do so it reaches out and invites different cultures to join the staff in planning the
new Museum. In working with their representatives, the Museum will reflect their views
and convictions and make other systems of knowledge and expertise accessible. Throughits many partnerships across the globe, the Museum has created a strong basis on which tobuild. Together with colleagues and communities from across the world, the Museum’s curators have over the years developed relationships and established trust and openness, prerequisites to move on to ever more comprehensive, more sustainable and more equitable
relations. The Museum has the responsibility and the desire to listen and learn, and to engage in difficult conversations in order to rewrite our shared, complicated history together.
Another important task is strengthening existing institutions and collaborating inbuilding up new infrastructure that allows people in all parts of the world to engage with cultural heritage, both their own and that of others.Together we can, and must, create a networkof institutions that allows for the circulation of objects, and of the stories, ideas and debates
they can trigger. The British Museum will be a passionate partner in making this happen.
One thing seems absolutely clear: the British Museum is a unique global resourcefor exploring the world in its ever-changing constellations, allowing the developmentof new perspectives on humanity’s shared pasts and investigating fresh responses to theshifting challenges of the present, as we find our way together, towards a better future.

CO L L ECT IO NS ENTA IL R ES P O NS IB IL IT IES

91

GET BACK. ARTIFICES OF RETURN
AND REPLICATION
Simon Schaffer

Simon Schaffer teaches
History of Science at
Cambridge University. Recent
publications include studies of
18th-century material culture
and scientific instruments in
India. He is a member of the
Science Museum Advisory
Board.

OPPOSITE

Malangan figure (detail), 1882–83,
h 122 cm, wood, vegetable fibre,
pigment and shell (Turbo petholatus
opercula), north coast of New
Ireland, Papua New Guinea.
© Trustees of the British Museum.

92

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

T

he work of Factum Foundation is distinguished by impressive endeavours to produce exact facsimiles of objects of cultural and historic significance to the individuals
and societies that have made and shared their lives with them. Think what is at stake
when such a facsimile is installed at the site once occupied by the original, now departed,
dispersed or destroyed. In the process, copy and compensation are often connected. An evident feature of this work is its painstaking diligence, attention to the observable featuresof an object and to the mechanisms through which those features can then be used in thecomplex labour of recovery. In the fraught work of return and repatriation, such projects
join specific cultures’ practices of maintenance and devotion. The significant terms used inaccounts of material restitution are in some salient cases formally sanctioned by UNESCO
conventions and in national legislation. Idioms and principles are debated in museum policy
documents and conservation codes.1 They are vividly contested in dramatically iconoclastic
acts of destruction. Most importantly, they join active and vital campaigns for indigenous
rights. Common idioms used in such campaigns often betray major ambiguities in understanding how activities of replication and restitution are supposed to work together.
In many different ways, the production of a copy, the conservation of an object
through various stages of its replication, must go far beyond mere imitation. In conflicts
about repatriation of the holdings of cabinets and storerooms, galleries and museums,
what is at stake is often not simply the fate of a mute object but rather what must betreated as the career of a person, an active agent whose life and destiny are matters ofcontested concern. Current conventions around collection practice often seek to bringout the urgent need to take care of the significance and function of what is in store oron display, not solely forms of material realisation. For this reason among others, returnis part of a concern with the viable practice and continuing conduct of a culture. These
agents speak out, as diplomats, partners or prisoners. They testify in many different ways
to the potency of the worlds from which they come and to which they refer.
Long histories of theft, loot, appropriation and violence meted out to and resisted
by indigenous communities give the issues of replication and return much of their ethical and political charge. The question is frequently one of power, control not only over
objects but over people, spaces and cultures, the very right to live and engage with themand to establish and determine their significance. The sense of apparently self-evident
activities such as conservation or copying therefore frequently shifts and changes as partof restitution. This is what happens in many projects where Factum Foundation’s collaborative production of facsimiles is negotiated and implicated. The Kamukuwaká cave,sacred to the Wauja people of the Xingu in the southern Amazon basin, was violently
1 Martin Skrydstrup, ‘Theorizing repatriation’, Ethnologia Europaea, no. 39, II (2010): 54–66.

93

defaced and its powerful inscriptions in large part deliberately destroyed. Assyrian deities, lamassu in the form of protective winged lions and bulls with human heads, weresystematically demolished during the occupation of Mosul in northern Iraq. The Griffoni
Polyptych, originally made for a chapel in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, wasprofitably sold off by an eminent 18th-century cardinal and its components dispersed. In
each of these cases, the work of replication and return might perhaps seem straightforward, in little need of further reflexion or justification. Yet different cultures, often thosemost exploited or excluded, sustain very different practices and attitudes around decay
and destruction, maintenance and materiality. It becomes vital to recognise, respect andrespond to the range of senses proper to such restorations.
The Griffoni Polyptych, the Kamukawaká cave inscriptions and the Mosul lamassu haveall been described as sacred, a term used somehow to make sense of agents that are taken
to command great powers far beyond the mundane realm. Replication and preservation
are always peculiarly sensitive when such sacred potencies are at work, even and perhaps
especially when the agent’s original culture has a complex lineage into the present. In thebalance of this discussion, cases from the Americas and Oceania help bring out key features of these dilemmas. In 2006 an exhibition was staged at the then Hawaiian Academyof Arts of objects taken from the Pacific in James Cook’s voyages and held at Göttingen
University in northern Germany. Pride of place was given a wickerwork head covered in
multicoloured birds’ feathers, an embodiment of the great Hawaiian god Ku-.Visitors to the
Honolulu exhibition left offerings in front of this deity. But one Hawaiian commentator
expressed disquiet, since the specific embodiment of the god on show might have been
carefully restricted to specific communicants, not a public figure to be venerated by all.2
The facile assumption that knowledge and display are best unrestricted often accompanies
the faith that restoration through replication is an unambiguous virtue. The example of the
Roman Catholic eucharist, a ritual whose correct repetition is to be understood as bringing
the divine body to presence for each communicant, offers a clear case of a fundamental
relation between religious power and publicly repetitive action. The familiar argument thatsuch rituals of repetition and veneration are peculiarly subject to subversion and especiallyin need of care applies in force when shifted or mimicked. Care is required in stipulating
exactly what is at stake in making a copy and aiding conservation. The powers cultures recognise in these agents can depend, precisely, on their fate in deliberate destruction.
Celebrated cases of complex relations between preservation and acquisition include
those of the malangan sculptures made by specialist carvers in New Ireland in the Bismarck
Archipelago of north-eastern New Guinea, and the Ahayu:da, wooden images of protective
twin gods cared for by Bow Priests of the Zuni people of western New Mexico. Within their
original cultures, both of these extraordinary forms of sculptural work embody fundamental
powers. On their travels, they also exerted remarkable roles in the aesthetics of European
modernism through the 20th century. Malangan are prepared from cut wood left to dry inthe same enclosures that hold the dead before burial. The carvings enclose the threateningly
potent force that accumulates as bodies fall apart. After a completed sculpture is unveiled it isleft to decay in the forest so the vital powers captured in the carving can escape. The peopleof New Ireland have taken to treating these carvings’ cash sale to collectors as appropriate
2 Margaret Jolly, ‘Moving objects: reflections on Oceanic collections’, in Tides of Innovation in Oceania, eds. Elisabetta
Gnecchi-Ruscone and Anna Paini (Canberra: Australian National University, 2017), 87; Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy
and Arapata Hakiwai, ‘Globalizing Maori museology’, Museum Anthropology, no. 39 (2016): 48–50.

94

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

Akari Waurá (right) and his son
dancing on the occasion of theunveiling of the digital and physicalrestoration of the sacred cave of
Kamukuwaká in Factum’s Madrid
workshops in 2019.

substitute for malangan abandonment to rot – revival and contamination are associated bothwith smell and with money.3 Contrast the fate of the Ahayu:da. Once installed in their sandstone shrine, the twin gods replace long sequences of prior carvings which themselves are
set nearby. Ahayu:da’s powers are exerted through these processes of weathering and decay.
They must therefore neither be removed nor must any attempt be made to conserve them.
The Pueblo of Zuni reckons that the appropriation, theft, display and conservation of hosts ofthese carvings have disturbed the world order – for over two decades Zuni have campaigned
effectively for the Ahayu:da to return from private and public collections worldwide.4 In suchcases, power is exercised and unleashed through deliberately organised decay. But there is agraphic and telling distinction between how different cultures deal with what passes away.
The fates of Ahayu:da and of malangan within their own cultures largely dependon the fact that their powers are exercised through their deliberately curated decay. In
contrasting cases of concern, the Mosul lamassu or the Kamukawaká caves, the rationaleof iconoclasm lay instead in destroyers’ view that the object they would obliterate wassomehow granted potency by the culture being attacked. Iconoclasts claim their targets are mere matter; but the targets are chosen because they matter to the iconoclasts’victims. Relations between the deliberation of sacred objects left to fall apart and thepointed violence of defacement are complex. During the Polynesian iconoclasm of theearly 19th century, island peoples in south-eastern Oceania ceremonially transferred god
images to British missionaries for destruction. The evangelical missionaries reckoned
these images powerfully embodied indigenous belief systems, and that their surrenderand annihilation marked islanders’ repudiation of heathenism. The Tahitian high chief explicitly stated that these objects should either be burnt or sent to the missionaries’ collections for display, as though these were equivalent. Across the Society Islands and the3 Susanne Küchler, ‘Malangan: objects, sacrifice and the production of memory’, American Ethnologist 15 (1988): 625–37.
4 Edmund J. Ladd, ‘A Zuni perspective on repatriation’, in The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans andRepatriation, ed. Tamara L. Bray (New York: Garland, 2001), 107–15.

GET B AC K. ART IF ICES O F R ET U R N A ND R EP L IC AT IO N

95

Cook Islands, god houses were set on fire. In some cases a god image was unwrapped,
cut up like an animal before a feast, burnt, and bananas cooked in the ashes and eaten.
These practices of deliberate surrender and destruction might be understood as forms ofsacrifice, part of an ingenious indigenous ritual to help strengthen central authority forthe high chief’s regime in eastern Polynesia.5
In comparable passages in the late 19th-century northeast Pacific, members of the
Heiltsuk nation of the central coast region of British Columbia, though undoubtedly subject
to confinement and coercion, in encounters with Wesleyan missionaries effectively transformed Protestant principles and practices into forms proper to indigenous custom andinstitutions. Elaborate cedar masks, agents that could mediate between spirit worlds, weretraditionally burnt at their owners’ deaths.The custom was adapted during evangelical conversion in ceremonial fires of many masks and other powerful objects.6 Destruction by fireand sale to outsiders were sometimes aligned. Just as the people of New Ireland could treat
the sale of malangan as equivalent to deliberate decay, so for the Heiltsuk and some othernortheast Pacific coastal peoples disposal of their objects to collectors could disperse otherwise threatening and vengeful agents. Apparent iconoclasm and commercialisation could insome cases thus be part of adaptation and innovation within rich cultural tradition.
Arguments around repatriation therefore risk overhasty generalisation and theeffacement of highly specific forms of cultural practice and interaction. This especiallyapplies where debates hinge on the conditions of property and of originality, where notions of ownership and of the character of a copy are in question. The enterprise of
repatriation is a critical component both of the definition of the intimacies of a specificculture group and of relations that extend world-wide along lines of political and economic power and expropriation. Against demands for restitution, appeals are made to
the seeming virtues of universal synthetic accumulations in museums and galleries, to theneeds of scientific access and study, to the mistaken essentialism that it is alleged lurks indefinitions of a homogeneous culture’s rights. It is argued that indigenous peoples often
made their own collections and deliberately set out to take part in commercial exchangeof goods and artefacts. A range of considerations have thus militated against and madetrouble for claims for restoration and return. In several cases in debates about the proper
hosting of cultural heritage in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maori elders have judged that
repatriation demands can sometimes undermine projects for more worthwhile forms ofpartnership.7 Such artefacts may on occasion be understood by their home culture as eloquent representatives, and can thus exert considerable effective diplomatic power whenlodged securely far from their origin. In 2015, a very fine feather dress made among theKanindé of north-east Brazil was donated to the Museu do Índio in Rio de Janeiro by aKanindé spokesman since the collection lacked any such material and, as the speaker put
it, the Kanindé would thus come to exist as a people in the Museum.8 Similar sentiments
were expressed by successive paramount chiefs of Rewa, a powerful province in Fiji,with respect to the possible repatriation of highly sensitive human remains held at the
5 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991), 151–61; Jeffrey Sissons, ‘The Polynesian Iconoclasm’, Oceania, no. 81 (2011): 302–15.
6 Michael E. Harkin, ‘Object lessons: the question of cultural property in the age of repatriation’, Journal de la Sociétédes Américanistes, no. 91 (2005): 18.
7 PaulTapsell,‘Partnership in museums: a tribal Maori response to repatriation’, in The Dead and Their Possessions: Repatriationin Principle, Policy and Practice, eds. Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert and Paul Turnbull (London: Routledge, 2002), 284–92.
8 Renato Athias, ‘Museums, ethnographic collections, and virtual repatriation: new issues for an old debate’, https://www.academia.edu/37105863.

96

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

Working on the scagliola surface
of one of the lamassu facsimiles in
preparation for their exhibition at
the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in
Leiden, prior to shipping to Mosul.

Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The then paramount chief argued in 2009 that it
was perfectly proper for a noble ancestor’s remains to be cared for in a foreign country,
and that this would reinforce the ancestor’s central place in Fijian history.9 Powerful objects can become delegates who act on behalf of their culture elsewhere.
A complementary form of indigenous resistance to repatriation stems from concerns that these objects’ powers can be malevolent or subversive, and that return may
therefore raise real risks. Along the Pacific coast of British Columbia and Alaska, such
artefacts were sometimes traded away or disposed of by their owners in the past precisely
because of such threats. Among the Tlingit of south-eastern Alaska, some elders hold that
their community’s religious welfare might be challenged by the return of these potent
objects from museum collections. The challenge is rendered more pressing for several
Pacific coast peoples and in some groups among Native Americans on the Great Plains
by indigenous elders’ concern that current members have only rarely mastered the practices, some of them highly secretive and restricted, required to control and direct theerrant powers of such agents.10 Such questions of control are also directly implicated inhighly variable models of property relations. Much recent legislation around repatriation
has taken it as read that cultural heritage is a communally owned good. One implicationis that an object on return is thus the shared property of the entire community.Yet often
it is precisely the most ceremonially and ritually significant objects that are treated as theabsolute property of an individual and their lineage.11 Rights to ownership of the artefacts and the knowledge they embodied are understood as exclusive, thus legitimately
capable of exchange and transmission. As example, while the Zuni Tribal Council will not

9 Vasiti Ritova, ‘Ro Veidovi’s grave found’, Fiji Sun (22 November 2009); Adrienne Kaeppler, ‘Two Polynesian repatriation enigmas at the Smithsonian Institution’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 17 (2005): 152–62, on pp. 160–61.
10 Harkin, ‘Object lessons’, 14.
11 Sarah Harding, ‘Cultural property and the limitations of preservation’, Law and Policy, no. 25 (2003): 17–36.

GET B AC K. ART IF ICES O F R ET U R N A ND R EP L IC AT IO N

97

Brass reproduction of a Maoricleaver, cast for Joseph Banksby Eleanor Gyles of London,
Pitt Rivers Museum, inv. no. JC
29 7 2005. © Pitt Rivers Museum,
University.

support transfer of such individually-owned ritual objects outwith the tribe, it equallyrefuses to support repatriation of items subject to individual property rights, preferring
they be subject instead to appropriate curatorship rather than return to the Pueblo.12
The issue of return becomes especially complex in cases where copies are at issue,
precisely the situation in several of the projects launched by Factum Foundation where afacsimile is returned to its original home. Zuni people have been especially concerned withthe status of replicas. This is not least because in the late 19th century the Pueblo hosted
the Smithsonian ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, whose practice was experimentallyto learn how to reproduce his hosts’ carving techniques. One such reproduction of an
Ahayu:da was the subject of a repatriation request by the Zuni in 1993. It was gifted by
Cushing to an eminent Oxford anthropologist and subsequently housed from 1911 at the
Pitt-Rivers Museum. Zuni claims argue that either the Cushing carving is inaccurate, inwhich case the Museum should not use it and it should better go back; or it is, in whichcase it should be returned. For the Zuni, a range of arguments challenges the notion thatsuch copies are in some sense less potent or authentic than the original god figures. In a
museum setting, it is urged, such copies embody powerful information, disrupt traditional
forms of instruction, and can mislead or offend.13 The act of replication is understood as afundamental aspect of Zuni cultural life: and the principle is certainly not restricted to the
Ahayu:da. In the 1770s the eminent Spanish mapmaker and santero Bernado de Miera yPacheco carved a remarkable sculpture of a saint deposited at the Pueblo. It was taken for
the Smithsonian Institution in 1879 and later destroyed by fire. In 1991 the Zuni successfully arranged the repatriation of a replica of the carving to the Pueblo.14 Management ofproperty relations, of cultural heritage, and of the very notion of the copy or the facsimile
are all in question in such processes of requisition and return.
It is therefore possible to reflect, finally, on what the eminent anthropologist andcurator Adrienne Kaeppler calls repatriation enigmas, episodes which throw a peculiarlyclear light on the fundamental issues of agency and identity in the worlds of cultural property and rights. A celebrated case is that of the brass clubs, versions of Maori patu, madefor the naturalist and traveller Joseph Banks in London in 1772. Banks had obtained an
original basalt patu from Maori interlocutors during James Cook’s first Pacific voyage,
then commissioned metal copies to be made and engraved with his coat of arms to use as
12 T. J. Ferguson, Roger Anyon and Edmund J. Ladd, ‘Repatriation at the Pueblo of Zuni: diverse solutions to complex
problems’, American Indian Quarterly, no. 20 (1996): 251–73, on p. 262.
13 Gwyneira Isaac, ‘Whose idea was this? Museums, replicas and the reproduction of knowledge’, Current Anthropology,
no. 52 (2011): 211–33, on pp. 218–20.
14 Ferguson, Anyon and Ladd, ‘Repatriation’, 266.

98

PR E SE RV IN G , S H ARIN G AN D RE S P O NSIBILIT Y

trade goods on a subsequent expedition. Some of the brass patus were taken on Cook’s
third voyage to the northeast Pacific coast in 1778. One brass patu was eventually recovered at Umatilla near the Columbia River in inland Oregon. A local lawyer, keen to backup his theory of ancient American indigenous metal working, claimed in 1895 that thebronze club had been found in an old grave so must be pre-contact in date. It reached
the Smithsonian Institution in 1897. In 2001 representatives of the Umatilla Indian
Reservation made a repatriation claim with a view to the club’s reburial. In her analysisof this dilemma, Kaeppler notes that this is a metal object based on a Maori design, madein a London foundry, marked with the arms of a Lincolnshire landowner, traded between
British, Nuu-chah-nulth and other peoples along the Pacific coast before reaching inland
Oregon.15 The act of making copies and the life-stories of such objects can in this manner
escape attempts at tight and easy definitions of their provenance and their properties.
Similarly, complex reflexions are prompted by the extraordinary career embodied in
the pair of lamassu now installed at the University of Mosul using recordings made in 2004
by Factum Arte of the Assyrian statues from Nimrud held at the British Museum. As is wellknown, the statues were shipped to London under the orders of Austen Henry Layard,
based in the Ottoman Empire as a British political agent during the 1840s. Layard’s view
was that by convincing the inhabitants of the region around the Nimrud site that his interestin the great statues was antiquarian not commercial, the principles of what he described as
civilised justice and benevolence would be disseminated in the region. Meanwhile, admiring
London reviewers of his account of the excavations boasted that Victorian civilisation was
more worthy and more likely to be recalled in the future than that of idolatrous Assyria.
Layard’s colleagues in the diplomatic service encouraged him somewhat more cynicallyto ensure that his finds were publicised as confirming biblical truths, since this would aid
sales and get funds for further expeditions.16 In sum, the political and cultural charge of themid-19th-century unearthing, shipment and display of the lamassu was unambiguous andexplicit. It is a mark of ingenuity to turn that politics around. Nor, of course, is this the firsttime replicas have been made of Layard’s Nimrud finds. On the long sea journey from Basra
to London in 1848 they were landed at Bombay, where casts were made of a series of carved
slabs and a great black obelisk, to be displayed to the public in Bombay’s Central Museum.
All this was part of a somewhat tetchy exchange between the authorities in Britain and in
India about possible damage to the carvings and relics during shipment.17 The burden of thecopy, and the security of the specimen, form fundamental aspects of these long and winding
histories of restitution and restoration. It is all the more welcome, therefore, that in delivering these exact facsimiles to their homeland, the commitment has been made by Factum
Foundation to ensure that the techniques and the practical skills demanded by this work arealso made available in Mosul for the future. This is certainly not adequate compensation forthe deeds and sufferings of the people and their cultures, but it is an important part of thehard work of getting back to what really matters.

15 Kaeppler, ‘Two Polynesian repatriation enigmas’, 152–57.
16 Shawn Malley, ‘Shipping the bull: staging Assyria in the British Museum’, Nineteenth-century contexts, no. 26 (2004):
1–27, on pp. 5, 10–11; Malley, ‘Austen Henry Layard and the periodical press’, Victorian Review, no. 22 (1996): 152–70,
on p. 161; Mirjam Brusius, ‘Misfit objects: Layard’s excavations in ancient Mesopotamia and the Biblical imagination in
mid-nineteenth century Britain’, Journal of Literature and Science, no. 5 (2012): 38–52.
17 Sudeshna Guha, Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts (New Delhi: Sage Publications India,
2015), 75–85.

GET B AC K. ART IF ICES O F R ET U R N A ND R EP L IC AT IO N

99

THEFTS, FAKES AND FACSIMILES:PRESERVING THE BAKOR MONOLITHSOF EASTERN NIGERIA
Ferdinand Saumarez Smith
Ferdinand Saumarez Smithis leading Factum Foundation’s
work in Nigeria, building on
previous projects relating torock art in the Amazon, theSahara and the Levant.

OPPOSITE

A monolith known as ‘Ebi Abu’,
which was documented by Philip
Allison in 1961–62 at the site
Eting Nta (Nta clan) and wassold by Pierre Dartevelle to the
Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
Photo Ferdinand Saumarez Smith.

100

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

Over the past three years Factum Foundation has collaborated with the Trust
for African Rock Art (TARA) and the University of Calabar (UNICAL) on
a project aimed at documenting, preserving and raising awareness about the
Bakor monoliths, also known as the ‘Cross-River’ or ‘Ikom’ monoliths, and locally referred to as ‘akwanshi’ or ‘atal’. The Bakor monoliths take their name from a group of
linguistically and ethnically related communities (‘clans’) in an area of approximately
350 square miles in the Middle Cross River region in which they are exclusively found.
The word ‘Bakor’ means ‘come and take’, a name that was chosen as a collective title
because the phrase is identical in the languages of each of the original eight clans thatmake up the Bakor people. Referring to them as the ‘Bakor’ monoliths, rather than the‘Cross-River’ (the state) or ‘Ikom’ (the nearest large town) monoliths as was formerly
customary, respects the unique ownership of the monoliths by this people. Furthermore,
the meaning of the word perhaps has some ironic value, since one of the main problems
that has beset their preservation has been theft.
The material of the monoliths is primarily basalt or limestone that has been naturally shaped in nearby riverbeds and they generally range from about 40 cm up to 2 min size, with a few exceptional cases reaching up to 3 m. The natural form of the rock isembellished by carvings of facial features, beards, protruding navels and decorative symbols, which distinguish each as a specific ancestral clan leader. These symbols and patterns
serve as visual proof of the connection to the Bakor people: photographic evidence fromthe early 1960s demonstrates that the same motifs of concentric circles which are foundon the monoliths were tattooed, using scarification techniques (Fig. 1), on the faces of local
inhabitants. The age of the monoliths remains the subject of speculation, particularly in theabsence of proper archaeological investigation, although a 2020 dig supervised by UNICAL
and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, will hopefully shed further light on the question. It
seems probable that, since each monolith represents one clan leader, the tradition developed over a number of centuries, gradually falling out of practice over the period of Britishcolonial influence. This must, however, have occurred at some time before direct colonial engagement in the area as the earliest account, Charles Partridge’s Cross River Natives(1905), demonstrates that the inhabitants had already lost the custom of producing them.
The situation of cultural disconnect today has been exacerbated by the strong influence ofPentecostal Christianity in Nigeria, which associates the monoliths with ‘juju’, or black
magic. Nevertheless, some communities still retain practices and rituals associated with themonoliths, particularly at the time of the yam festival in September.
The monolith sites can be roughly divided into three categories: those enclosed
by a perimeter wall (Alok and Emangebe); those which have been subsumed by farmland (e.g. Manden, Nkunkundah); and those which remain in forested areas (Nkrigom,
101

Egunonkwor). Although the first category has helped
combat the problem of theft, concrete walls destroy theatmosphere that can be experienced in the original forest
context. Furthermore, it has not stopped the practice ofburning to remove vegetation, although this is less damaging as the grass is not allowed to grow as much as in the
farmland. Slash and burn farming has caused enormous
damage to many of the monolith sites, with the extreme
heat followed by rapid cooling leading to cracks in themonoliths, which in turn has faciliated theft, particularlyof the carved faces (Fig. 2). The monolith sites in theforest are generally the best preserved and have suffered
the least from theft, although in sites such as Nkrigom
falling trees have also caused damage.
In the course of four trips to the Bakor region (supported initially by the Prince
Claus Fund and later by Jim and Paula Crown, the US Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural
Preservation, and the Carène Foundation), the team visited almost all sites recorded
during fieldwork conducted by Philip Allison in 1961–62. With the particular help ofChief Sylvanus ‘Orlando’ Akong, a number of others not yet documented were also identified. These include Egunonkwor (Allison documented only part of a site by that nameof which we were unable to recognise any monoliths), Ekeleboghor, Ekpara, Lowya,
Manden (Allison’s ‘Manden’ site is actually Mkpananfa) and Nkunkundah. Comparedto the near 300 monoliths identified by Allison, our project has recorded approximately
215 – thus up to one third of the total have been removed since the late 1960s.1 Allison’s
survey was commissioned by John Picton (Professor Emeritus at SOAS), then of the
Nigerian Department of Antiquities (now the National Commission for Museums andMonuments, or NCMM), who donated the archive to the Bodleian Library in 2017.With
access to the entirety of Allison’s material, as well as the local knowledge gathered on
1 This figure is approximate because the borders between obvious fully carved monoliths, broken fragments, lightly
carved monoliths and uncarved stones can be difficult to clarify. Furthermore, these figures should be taken only as
broadly indicative on account of the new sites and not having visited all the sites recorded by Allison.

102

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

Fig. 4: Presentation of a scaleddown reunited facsimile of
the Ntitogo monolith to theParamount Ruler of the Bakor
People, Ntol Emang. Photo
Ferdinand Saumarez Smith.
Fig. 5: Philip Allison’s 1961–62
photograph of the complete
Ntitogo monolith alongside aphotograph of its upper half,
which is now in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Left: Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford,
MS.Afr.s.2535/9. Right: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York.

Fig. 1: The now defunct practiceof facial scarification in the Bakor
region employed similar patterns
to those carved into the monoliths.
Bodleian Library, University of
Oxford, MS. Afr.s.2535/9.
Fig. 2: A monolith damaged as aresult of slash and burn agricultural
practices. Photo Ferdinand
Saumarez Smith.
Fig. 3: The bottom half of themonolith at Ntitogo, whose top
half is now in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
Photo Ferdinand Saumarez Smith.

Fig. 6: A monolith known as ‘Ebi
Abu’, which was documented byPhilip Allison in 1961–62 at thesite Eting Nta (Nta clan) and wassold by Pierre Dartevelle to the
Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
Left: Bodleian Library. Right:
Musée du Quai Branly.

repeated visits, it was possible to gradually piece together a picture of the theft and international trade of the monoliths. The Bakor region is located on the border of Cameroon
and was part of the attempted breakaway state of Biafra. Today the region has been subject to further instability on account of another attempted breakaway state, Ambazonia,
which comprises the Anglophone districts of western Cameroon and has caused an influxof refugees into eastern Nigeria. From the civil war of the late 1960s onwards, a large
number of monoliths were removed from the sites (likely using the heavy logging machinery with which the region’s forests were cut down) and taken over the border, from
where they entered the international antiquities market. According to Professor Picton,
theft was not a problem before the civil war.
Allison’s documentation led to the discovery of several monoliths in prominentinternational collections. In October 2016, Factum recorded the base half of a monolith(Fig. 3) using photogrammetry at a site called Ntitogo (Nnam clan, referred to by Allisonas ‘Ntetakor’), the top half of which was identified by Dr. Abu Solomon Edet and Dr. Ivor

PRESERVI N G THE B AKOR M O NO L IT H S O F EA S T ER N NIG ER IA

103

Miller of UNICAL in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
NewYork (Fig. 5). After securing permission to record the
top fragment in 2018, Factum produced a scaled-down
reunited facsimile that was presented to a conference
on the monoliths at UNICAL in the same year; this wasafterwards gifted to the Paramount Ruler of the Bakor
People, Ntol Emang (Fig. 4). Factum also recorded amonolith identifiable from the site Eting Nta (Nta clan) at
the Musée Quai Branly, Paris, which had been purchasedfrom the Brussels-based dealer Pierre Dartevelle in 1998
(Fig. 6). According to older members of Eting Nta village,
this monolith was stolen in the 1970s and is known to thecommunity by the name ‘Ebi Abu’. During a visit to Eting
Nta in September 2019, an assembled group of elders
broke into an impromptu rendition of the phrase ‘bringback Ebi Abu to us’ to the tune of the song ‘My bonnie lies
over the ocean.’ The name connects the stone to the secret society ‘Ekpe’, which uses uncarved monoliths in its
contemporary rituals and is involved in the transmissionof ancestral knowledge (Fig. 7). Ekpe also uses a symbolic language called ‘Nsibidi’ whichsome practitioners identify with the patterns found on the Bakor monoliths. Dartevelle,
who in the course of his collecting travelled widely in ‘Cameroon, the Congo and West
Africa’, also has another monolith from Eting Nta (in Allison’s reference system ‘E10’)
listed on his gallery’s website (Fig. 8).
Research online also led to the discovery of a monolith not documented by Allison
belonging to the Brussels-based dealer Didier Claes. Upon receiving permission to record
this example, Factum travelled to a warehouse in the outskirts of Brussels to record it in2018. The warehouse manager brought out two examples wrapped in blankets, neither ofwhich proved to be the monolith expected from the picture online. One was identifiablefrom Allison’s archive as originating from the site Oyengi (Nta clan, ‘OY2’, Figs. 9–10),
while the other, which was exhibited in the sculpture garden at Frieze Masters in 2015 andhas abrasive marks down one side, appeared similar to those found at a site not recorded by

Fig. 11: A monolith not recorded
by Allison in the warehouse of theBrussels-based dealer Didier Claes.
Photo Ferdinand Saumarez Smith.
Fig. 12: A monolith recorded insitu at Oyengi by Allison. Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford,
MS.Afr.s.2535/8.
Fig. 13: The same monument from
Oyengi in the collection of Pierre
Dartevelle. Galerie Dartevelle.
Fig. 14: The chief and clan eldersof Oyengi with the last of theirremaining carved monoliths. Photo
Ferdinand Saumarez Smith.

OPPOSITE

Fig. 7: The secret society‘Ekpe’, which is involved in
the transmission of ancestralknowledge, uses uncarvedmonoliths in its contemporary
rituals. Photo Ivor Miller.

Allison called Bonima (Abanyom clan, Fig. 11). In the early 1960s, Oyengi had four carvedmonoliths and one uncarved.Today, only one carved and one uncarved remain; of the otherthree phallic-style examples, aside from the one in the Claes collection, one is missing andthe other is owned by Dartevelle (Figs. 12–13). The chief of Oyengi entreated us to help
return it and the other monoliths to his community (Fig. 14). Another online search led tothe discovery of a limestone example identifiable from a site called Akumabal (Abanyom
clan, ‘AK1’) held in the collection of Jerome and Ellen Stern in East Hampton, USA. Thismonolith was donated in 2018 to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where Factum recorded
it in December 2019 (Fig. 15). Akumabal is the site of the Bakor meeting house, but theoriginal location of the stones is unknown. These case studies are just a selection and manyother monoliths registered on the websites of auction houses could be cited.

Fig. 8: Monolith from Eting Nta
documented by Allison in situ andpictured for sale on the gallery
website of the Brussels-based dealer
Pierre Dartevelle. Left: Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford,
MS.Afr.s.2535/8. Right: Galerie
Dartevelle.
Fig. 9: Monolith originating fromthe site Oyengi (Nta clan, ‘OY2’),
scanned using photogrammetry in
the warehouse of Didier Claes in2018. Photo Ferdinand Saumarez
Smith.
Fig. 10: The same monolith(Oyengi, Nta clan, ‘OY2’)
recorded in situ by Allison in
1961–62. Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford,
MS.Afr.s.2535/8.

104

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

PRESERVI N G THE B AKOR M O NO L IT H S O F EA S T ER N NIG ER IA105

A parallel aspect to the theft, removal and tradein the Bakor monoliths since the Biafran civil war has
been the circulation of monoliths that our project believes to be inauthentic on grounds of style, scale andmaterial. One possible example held in the collection of
the British Museum was verified by Philip Allison, but
the stone it is carved from appears to be granite rather
than basalt or limestone (Fig. 16). In terms of style, it isalmost identical to one held by the Israel Museum andanother acquired in 2019 by the New Orleans Museumof Art; it therefore seems likely that they were producedby the same workshop. Dr. Edet believes that there wasa workshop which produced ‘fakes’ across the border in
Cameroon. In the Bakor region, there are two carvers
active that our project is aware of, Philip Nsuko of
Njemetop village (Nselle clan) and Ekon Nsakpe of Emeakpen village (also Nselle),both of whom are convinced that the British Museum example is not authentic.
The British Museum’s monolith will be the departure point for an exhibition on
the subject of the Bakor monoliths that will open at the museum on 1 October 2020,
Nigerian Independence Day.The exhibition will then run through November and anotherrelevant date: the 50th anniversary of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Meansof Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership ofCultural Property. The exhibition will draw on the research project, asking questions
about the role of digital technology in documentation, preservation and restitution.
Following its conclusion, we hope that contents from the exhibition, including 1:1
high-resolution facsimiles, will be shipped back to Nigeria and displayed first in an exhibition at the Calabar National Museum, then as a permanent exhibition installation at the
Alok Open Air Museum. Other facsimiles will be returned to their original sites as one
aspect of the ongoing community engagement activities aimed at supporting the local
preservation of the monoliths.
The Bakor monoliths project demonstrates that blanket solutions to the questionof how to respond to Europe’s colonial legacy with regard to Africa’s material heritage
are ineffective. Although the Bakor communities have a legitimate claim to the restitution of objects of the highest spiritual and cultural value to them, at this stage it isunrealistic to simply return the monoliths to sites which for the most part are still farmlands and throughout which damaged monolith fragments are scattered. Through the
project and the exhibition, Factum Foundation hopes to present an effective model for
addressing preservation and the problem of restitution, involving the development oflong-term relationships both with national heritage bodies such as the NCMM and local
communities. The first stage in the relationship is documentation. In the present context,
Philip Allison’s survey is ample proof of the necessity of comprehensive recording withthe most up-to-date tools available: in the 1960s a black and white film camera, today
high-resolution 3D scanning. Perhaps more than anything else, this documentation is a
powerful deterrent to theft. The second stage is community engagement. On Factum’s
first visit to the region, a frequent complaint was that university researchers had come to
study the monoliths, received considerable help from the communities, and then failed
to share any of the results with them. Our repeated visits to communities have gradually106

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

built up the trust lost by academics and we have tried to ensure that all the various clangroups are given equal time and attention. A key element of this stage in the project willbe the permanent exhibition at the Alok Open Air Museum, generously supported by
the Carène Foundation, and the activities planned to engage young community members
from across all clans. Without the pride of the local community in the monoliths and theconviction that the sites can be effectively managed, all external attempts at preservation will ultimately be futile. Finally, as to the question of restitution, Factum believes
that returning exact facsimiles can serve a valuable role as a stepping-stone towards theeventual return of originals, with the provision that the context they are returning to isentirely safe. It is hoped that bringing back even a facsimile of ‘Ebi Abu’ will inspire the
Bakor communities to preserve their precious heritage.

Fig. 15: Monolith donated to theIsrael Museum in Jerusalem andrecorded by Factum Foundation in
2019. Photo Ferdinand Saumarez
Smith.

With thanks to the Paramount Ruler of the Bakor people, Ntol Emang and Chief Sylvanus ‘Orlando’ Akong,
and all the clan and village leaders who have helped facilitate our work in the region. Thanks also to the
Nigerian rock art team: Dr. Abu Solomon Edet, Dr. Frank Enor, Dr. Ivor Miller, David Coulson, Terry Little,
Dr. Abubakar Sule, Edith Ekunke, Dr. Clement Bakinde, Dr. Asmau Ahmed Giade, Dr. Mohammed Sanni,
Aliyu Abdu, Salisu Aminu, Mohammed Adam, Uzoma Nwosu, Sam Ntino, Dr. Ekwutosi Offiong, Evelyn
Osuwagu, Dr. Joy Ejikeme, Dr. Angela Ajimase. And to Jim and Paula Crown, the Prince Claus Fund, theUS Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation and the Carène Foundation for their generous support.

Fig. 16: Monolith in the collectionsof the British Museum, withdebated authenticity. Photo
Ferdinand Saumarez Smith.

PRESERVI N G THE B AKOR M O NO L IT H S O F EA S T ER N NIG ER IA

107

THE RESURRECTION OF THE SACREDCAVE OF KAMUKUWAKÁ
Akari Waurá, Shirley Djukurnã Krenak, Nathaniel Mann, Irene Gaumé,
Mafalda Ramos, and Patricia Rodrigues

Akari Waurá is a musician,storyteller and a leadershiprepresentative of the Wauja
community. He lives at Piyulaga,
the main Wauja village in the
Xingu Indigenous Territory, andparticipates in teaching activities
and projects of Indigenous
cultural conservancy across the
Territory. Since 2018, he has
worked with Factum Foundationon the documentationand conservation of the
Kamukuwaká Cave.
Shirley Djukurnã Krenak,a graduate in social
communication, has made it her
life’s work to fight for the rightsof the Indigenous peoples ofBrazil and preserve their heritage.
Her aim is to safeguard thelanguage, culture and traditionsof her tribe, the Krenak, a people
once declared extinct, but who
have reappeared to demonstrate
the strength, sophistication
and wealth of tradition of theBrazilian Indigenous community.
Nathaniel Mann is an awardwinning composer, soundartist, and broadcaster. He hascollaborated closely with Akari
Waurá to produce the BBCRadio 4 Feature Documentary‘Orchestra of the Rainforest’,and to record and produce a
CD of traditional Wauja music,‘Wauja Songs from Upper Xingu’,available on Antigen Records.
Nathaniel is a 2018 Arts
Foundation Fellow and 2019
Paul Hamlyn Award winner.

INTRODUCTION by Akari Waurá
My name is Akari Waurá. I am a singer, a historian, a leader, and I am here to represent
the Wauja people. I live at the Piyulaga village, the Wauja capital village of the Xingu
Indigenous Territory (Mato Grosso, Brazil).
I am here to speak about my people and Kamukuwaká. The Kamukuwaká cave isa sacred place of great significance for all the Wauja and the people of the Upper Xingu.
In that cave, the teachings of our ancestors, the Kamukuwaká people, are engraved on
the rockface. That rock is our history book. It is in the cave that we teach the history of
our people, our culture, and our cosmogony to the young. In the past, the elders andhistorians would take the young to Kamukuwaká to tell the story. Today, since the cave isoutside the demarcated area, we are no longer able to do that.
It was in the Kamukuwaká cave and along the Batovi/Tamitatoala river that our ear
piercing, our painting, our music, the rituals, and even the rules of our society originated.
Kamukuwaká is our history, our culture, and that is why it is so important for theWauja people.
With the demarcation of the Xingu IndigenousTerritory in 1961, the Kamukuwaká caveand part of our sacred river were left behind. At the time, the elders didn’t really understandwhat that demarcation meant, or that it meant we could no longer move around our traditional territory.Then, as our generation grew up and recognized the Territory and its borders,
we realized the cave had been left out of the demarcated area, in private farmland.We couldn’t
visit our historical sites anymore. How could we learn and teach the new generations?
Since the demarcation, we have been fighting for the right to our traditional and cosmogonic territory. Even after the government acknowledged our cave as an important cultural heritage site, protected by IPHAN (the Brazilian government agency in charge of cultural heritage affairs), we keep fighting for the right to our history, our cave, and our river.
Every year, we visit the Kamukuwaká cave. Every year, we see the garbage on theriverbanks, the sand building up in the cave and covering the engravings, the fish dwindling.
This year, when we visited the cave with the Factum Foundation team, what we feared themost had taken place. The engravings in the cave had been vandalised. The fragments werelying on the ground. What can we do about it? That destruction made us very sad. It represents an attempt to destroy the Wauja identity, our memory, our resistance.

>>
OPPOSITE

Shirley Djukurnã Krenak at theunveiling of the re-creation of thesacred cave in Madrid.

108

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

THE SACRED CAVE OF KAMUKUWAKÁ
The petroglyphs in the sacred cave of Kamukuwaká tell the creation myths of the
Indigenous communities of the Xingu, in the Mato Grosso region of the Amazon. But
109

when a Factum Foundation team travelled there in 2018, they found the cave vandalised and most of the petroglyphs destroyed. The team recorded the cave despite thisvandalism and the data has now been used to recreate damaged areas and produce a ‘facsimile’ of the cave as it once was.
The experience of recording and recreating Kamukuwaká has forever changed
our understanding of the complexity of conservation and the importance of technology
for preservation. This project has helped to close the distance between two cultures thatare separated by more than 8,000 kilometres of land and ocean, reminding us in the process of what it is that makes us human.

THE XINGU AND KAMUKUWAKÁThe Xingu Indigenous Territory was formed in 1961 and comprises a protected area ofsome 2,642,003 hectares – almost the size of Belgium – in the heart of Brazil, in the stateof Mato Grosso. It represents the first official demarcation of Indigenous territory in Brazil
and is intended to serve as home to the area’s autochthonous inhabitants, as well as other
Indigenous groups displaced from their former territories across the Central-West Regionof Brazil by the advance of colonial agriculture. The area is now home to 16 Indigenous
ethnic groups, who despite speaking distinct languages, share many cultural traits.
The Kamukuwaká cave lies just beyond the territory’s south-western border, a
6 x 4 m rock face adorned with dozens of ancient petroglyphs, leading into a double chambered cave. It is a sacred place of great significance for all the peoples of the Upper Xingu,
and the Wauja community are considered to be the cave’s caretakers and guardians. The
Wauja make an annual pilgrimage to visit the site, travelling several days by boat and at
considerable expense in order to impart Kamukuwaká’s history to the younger generations.
During these visits, time is spent looking at the petroglyphs, which in turn activates the retelling of vivid legends from the Wauja’s oral traditions. Many of these tales
are told exclusively at the site – including the story of the culture-hero Yakuwixeku visiting the sky-village of the birds to learn the origins of the Wauja’s male ear-piercing rituals. Kamukuwaká’s engraved patterns and motifs not only trigger stories, but they also
directly inform the geometric patterns used by the Wauja when adorning their bodies
with paint or decorating ceramics. Our understanding is that the Kamukuwaká petroglyphs have performed the same function for many generations, and although an ancientsite, it is very much part of a living tradition.

THE XINGU COSMOVISION AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
The Wauja people’s worldview is a cosmovision commonly known as Amazonian animism. From an animistic perspective, one can say that all things are part of a living
world, and therefore embody part of its vital energy. In the Xingu, Apapaatai spirits epitomize the forest’s vital energies. They are the ‘owners’, ‘keepers’, or, more accurately,the ‘growers’ of ecological resources. They are the true essence of all living things, andthe animal species in the forest are merely existential extensions, the inauthentic/corporeal avatars of these owner-spirits. The Apapaatai are connected both to the generative
principles of nature and life and the pathogenic principles of death and disease. These110

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y>>
Irene Gaumé works at
Factum Arte as a digital artist
focusing on the translation ofideas into objects. Trained at
the Koninklijke Academie voor
Schone Kunsten in Antwerp
in traditional sculpture, she iscontinuously developing theart of 3D organic modelling.
Irene performed the digital
restoration of the cave.
Mafalda Ramos is anarchaeologist and scientificcoordinator of heritage
management projects,
specialising in the Pantanaland Upper Xingu regions.
Since 2018, she hascollaborated with the Wauja
and Factum Foundation as
an ethnoarchaeologist andmediator in the documentation
and reconstitution of the
Kamukuwaká Cave.
Patricia Rodrigues worked
from 2015–17 as a scientificcoordinator of archaeological
heritage and Indigenous culturalconservancy projects for a
local NGO in the state of Mato
Grosso. During this period, she
consulted for Wauja community
associations as a pro-bono
expert on a project for thepreservation of endangered
Indigenous archaeological sites(including the Kamukuwakácave) located outside theofficial limits of the Xingu
Indigenous Territory. She iscurrently studying for a PhD in
Anthropology at the Universityof Notre Dame in the USA.

Bird’s-eye view of the protected
Xingu Indigenous Territory, stateof Mato Grosso, shown withina map of Brazil. This largely
green area, with a total sizeof around 2,642,003 hectares(comparable to the size of
Belgium), is encroached upon byyellow patches which reveal thedominance of industrial agriculturein the surrounding area. The Xingu
river runs through the centre of
the protected territory, but all of
its sources lie beyond it, with theresult that agro-chemical wash off
is continually travelling downriverto the Xingu communities.

beings correspond to what is named in the anthropological literature as ‘more-than-human entities’, that is, entities that transcend humanity, sharing our main attributes
such as the capacity for agency and culture but existingin a different ontological realm. Bilingual Wauja people
often translate Apapaatai as ‘spirits’ because they are invisible and can only be seen in dreams or through trance
by visionary shamans or dying people. The Wauja knowthat humans are not the true, original owners of earth’s
resources, so their own relationship with the forest anduse of ecological resources are indissociable from theirrelationship with, and respect for, the Apapaatai.
For many of the Wauja, the world of Apapaatai intersects seamlessly with the worlds of Western technology – ofsmartphones, flatscreen TVs, motorbikes and social media,
all of which are now ubiquitous throughout the Xingu region. However, the worldviews of much of the younger
generation are becoming increasingly outward-looking,their eyes and thoughts drawn towards the cities. This is a
cause for concern for the elders, who fear a shift away fromthe traditional worldviews and ways of life. The protectionof cultural heritage is also becoming a source of anxiety.
Indeed, Akari Waurá, now the principal traditional
singer of the Wauja community in the village of Piyulaga,
Xingu, shared a similar disinterest in the traditional ways
when he was a young man. It wasn’t until he was 27 that
he felt his calling to learn the Wauja’s traditional songs, and it was in part thanks to atechnological intervention by a North American anthropologist, who had recorded his
father’s singing in the 1980s, that Akari was able to recuperate these traditions.
In 2018 Akari wrote: ‘My father was a singer and he died when I was only 14. He
took his songs with him. When I grew up, I decided to rescue the songs that my father
sang and that were recorded on a CD (by anthropologist Emi Ireland). I learned from the
CD. I now thought to myself – I’ll do as my father did. I’ve been looking for support torecord a CD for a while. That was my dream. My father left his recordings for us to listen
to. That’s why it is important for us to record our music on a CD.’

KAMUKUWAKÁ UNDER THREAT
The Wauja community has been struggling to protect Kamukuwaká from the threatof road and railway builders for almost thirty years; most recently the site and the sacred Batovi river which runs beside it have been put at fresh risk by a planning applicationfrom mining prospectors. It was in recognition of these very real threats to the future of
the site that Factum Foundation, in a gesture of solidarity with the communities of the
Xingu, extended an offer to scan the cave for posterity so that, should the worst happen,
at least the communities would have an accurate record of their heritage which could be
used by future generations.

THE RESURREC TI ON OF T H E S ACR ED C AV E O F K A M U K U WA K Á

111

Upon the team’s arrival at the site, however, it was
found that the worst had indeed happened. An unknown
assailant had deliberately and systematically hacked off allof Kamukuwaká’s petroglyphs. For the Indigenous communities of the Xingu the brutal destruction of their most sacredsite represents yet another violent assault upon their territory, culture, and way of life. It also comes at a time of severely increased political and environmental pressure. Every
one of the sources of the Xingu River lies on private land
beyond the limits of the protected territory. This principal
lifeline to all of Xingu’s communities is beyond their control or protection. Pesticides, industrial waste, and chemical
wash-off are polluting the river and tributaries, somethingwhich is having a devastating impact upon fish numbers– a key source of food for the communities. Meanwhile,
President Bolsonaro is deregulating the destruction of the rain forests at an unprecedented
rate and is rapidly normalizing anti-Indigenous rhetoric and policy. On 10 June 2016 on avideo published by Correio do Estado, Bolsonaro stated that ‘This unilateral policy of demarcating Indigenous land by the Executive will cease to exist. Any reserve that I can reduce insize, I will do so. It will be a very big fight that we’re going to have with the UN’.

A DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL RE-CREATIONOver a period of four months, the Factum team worked to make an exact physicalreconstruction of the Kamakuwaká cave from the digitally restored data recorded at
the cave and corrected by the Wauja community. Once the 3D data had been milled
into medium-density polyurethane at a scale of 1:1 and the different segments assembled into the form of the cave, the surface was textured to match the original rocksurface without losing any detail of the milled petroglyphs. The final task was to paintthe surface, exactly replicating the variations of colour found within the rock at theoriginal cave site.

AN EMERGENCY FORUM ON
INDIGENOUS CULTURAL HERITAGE IN BRAZIL
THIS PAGE

Akari Waurá discovering thevandalised cave of Kamukuwaká.
The yellow patches on the surface
are where petroglyphs have been
hacked off by the cave’s attackers.

In October 2019, to mark the completion of the facsimile, a forum was held in
Factum Arte’s Madrid workshops, with the support of People’s Palace Projects (Queen
Mary University, London). Representatives from Xingu, including Akari Waurá, Yanamak Akuma Waurá, and Takuma- Kuikuro attended to lead discussions about the facsimile
and its future. They were joined by Indigenous activist Shirley Djukurnã Krenak of the

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE

A DIGITAL RESTORATIONIn spite of the vandalism of the petroglyphs, it was decided that the cave site should be recorded in full using LiDAR laser scanning and photogrammetry technologies. Following thisrecording, an ambitious plan was formed to attempt to digitally restore the petroglyphs basedon extant photographs of the site. Members of theWauja community helped to contact dozens
of anthropologists and archaeologists who had visited the site over the last few decades, anda database was compiled of images of Kamukuwaká’s petroglyph motifs prior to destruction.
A unique methodology was developed for the digital restoration. Factum
Foundation’s digital artist Irene Gaumé spent many months analysing the database of images and matching them to the vandalised areas on the 3D model. The photographs whichshowed the petroglyphs intact were projected onto the model and turned into ‘heightmaps’ – they were converted from two-dimensional to three-dimensional form. Using the
3D modelling software ZBrush, each of the damaged areas was identified, examined, volumised and adjusted before being merged into the 3D model. This new approach todigital restoration offered the freedom to play with the original and test different theories
on the computer model.
However, understanding the forms of petroglyphs was sometimes a difficult process. Often the mark-making was so subtle that it was difficult to tell natural rock forms
from deliberate engravings, and only someone who knew the original engravings intimately could differentiate them. Factum Foundation therefore sent images of the in-process restoration back to the Wauja community, allowing them to work as epigraphers tocollectively revise and correct the restoration work. This input from the Wauja allowed
for a fresh perspective on the data, and their clarifications, adjustments, additions, andcorrections were assimilated into the 3D model.
112

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT YFROM TOP LEFT

Render of the cave and its
entrance, produced using the datafrom LiDAR and photogrammetry
recordings.
Colour render of an area after theattack; black and white render ofthe digital restoration.
Detail of the vandalised surfaceof the cave; the same area, shownin a photo taken before the attack.

THE RESURREC TI ON OF T H E S ACR ED C AV E O F K A M U K U WA K Á

113

THIS PAGE

The digitally restored images of all
vandalised areas were sent to the
Wauja community as A3 renders.
The community added theirknowledge onto acetate overlays toensure a correct digital restoration.
© Mafalda Ramos.
OPPOSITE

The Wauja community at
Piyulewene looking at the A3
renders of the digital restorationand drawing on top of acetate
sheets. Every decision is collectively
negotiated. © Mafalda Ramos.

Krenak community, as well as academics, activists, fundraisers and producers from someof the world’s most prominent institutions and organisations drawn from related fields,
who engaged in passionate discussion and debate.
When Akari Waurá saw the rematerialized cave of Kamukuwaká in Madrid, hefound he could easily read the engravings from the facsimile. It works as a memory theatre: rather like looking at an album of photographs, very specific memories flood themind. Standing in Madrid before the restored petroglyphs, Akari began to narrate thecreation myths of the Xingu. As they are remembered, they come back to life – they canremain dormant but, like a seed or a pre-programmed sequence of DNA, they revive
when nurtured.
When asked if the facsimile of the cave possessed the same ‘sacred’ qualities as theoriginal, Akari Waurá explained that for him the facsimile is already sacred: ‘it’s sacred ina different way. It’s sacred because it represents support and recognition of our culture
from beyond Brazil. It represents the investment of time, care and solidarity of those who
created it.’For the duration of the event Akari was in continual contact with the rest of theWauja community via Facebook messenger. Through him the community relayed its desire to eventually possess the reconstructed cave, so that future generations could continue its use as a site and trigger for their culture, stories and heritage. But first, it was decided, if the opportunity arises, it should travel the world, as a platform from which thecommunities of the Xingu can amplify their voices, speak of their struggle, enhance theiragency on an international stage and help to share their culture.
The resurrection of the cave represents to the Wauja, and indeed to all Xingu’s communities, their rights to territory and self-determination. As Akari explains, ‘the reconstruction of the Kamukuwaká cave and the engravings is a symbol of our endurance
despite everything they do to undermine us.’114

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE FOR EVERYONE
Many of Factum’s facsimiles are of objects from ancient cultures or which now exist at a
far remove from their original contexts of use. The experience of working with a ‘living’object, which remains the focus of intense and regular activity, was in many respects a
new one and had a profound impact on the approach taken. While it is often the objects
themselves – the original and the facsimile – that take centre-stage in such a process, here
the most important thing was to respect the perspectives of the communities involved,
designing processes which allowed their voices to be heard and seeking to understand thecultural significance of the cave within the worldview of the peoples of the Xingu. It was atransformative and humbling experience for the Factum team to be allowed to collaborate
with the Wauja people on an endeavour of such significance to their lives and identities.

SHIRLEY DJUKURNÃ KRENAK ON THE ARTIFICIAL
NATURE OF A FACSIMILE
The ability of the digital restoration of Kamukuwaká to build a bridge between two cultures was superbly summarized by Indigenous activist Shirley Djukurnã Krenak during her address to the Social
Anthropology Amerindian Research Group at St Andrew’s University, in response to questions aboutthe ‘artificial nature’ of the facsimile of Kamukuwaká:
I want to talk to you about artificiality. My people (Krenak) live in Minas Gerais(southeastern Brazil), where we also have a sacred cave whose paintings have been completely destroyed. The artificial white men came and destroyed everything. Like the communities from the Xingu, we plan to do whatever we can do to return the paintings to
our sacred cave.

THE RESURREC TI ON OF T H E S ACR ED C AV E O F K A M U K U WA K Á

115

THIS PAGE

Securing sections of the re-createdcave into place.
OPPOSITE

Akari Waurá recounting Wauja
myths beneath the re-created cave.

These actions of restoration are not artificial. What is artificial are destructive
actions. As Indigenous people, we already have to live artificially twenty-four hours aday: what is artificial is having to fight against deforestation, against weapons of war,against agro-toxics, against bad people. That’s what is artificial to us, and it comes fromthe cultures that assault us.
What’s happened with the restoration of Kamukuwaká is real, it is not artificial. It
is sacred because it helps us and carries our culture forward.
As Indigenous people, we are continually readapting our ways of living, and we areheavily criticised by researchers and anthropologists precisely because we are adapting
ourselves. For example, today under President Bolsonaro, we are threatened relentlessly,
and one of the weapons we can use to respond to these continual attacks is communication. So, we try to bring our culture into the new modes of communication and make useof them in a way that is positive for us.To what extent is it fair that we should be criticisedfor that? We are not forcing these things upon ourselves.We are receiving and adapting tothese new forms of communication.
There are lots of people who are concerned about us adjusting ourselves to thiscontemporary life. Now that we too are going to university, we too are becoming anthropologists, sociologists, teachers, doctors, lawyers. Eventually, we will no longer need thewhite researchers to do our research anymore. Eventually, we will be together doing ourresearch, hand in hand with non-Indigenous researchers, and bring our own vision andour own culture to this research.
If these attacks and this artificial destruction continue, we may find ourselves in
the future with no sacred mountains and no sacred caves. Yet we can still have our artificial mountains and artificial caves, along with our spirits. Because the spiritualityof Kamukuwaká, or of any sacred cave, is carried by the people that live there, and these
are living cultures.
116

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

THE FUTURE OF KAMUKUWAKÁ by Akari Waurá
How can we protect the river and our territory? Our wish is that the government would
protect the sacred landscape where the Kamukuwaká cave is located. We continue to fight.
I will fight, and I know my children will carry on with my struggle. We will fight for theprotection of our culture, and our culture is the river, the land, the Kamukuwaká cave. We
must take care of them, as they take care of us. They cannot be abandoned, or destroyed.
The reconstruction of the Kamukuwaká cave and the engravings is a symbol of ourendurance despite everything they do to undermine us.
Being able to show it in Madrid is very important to the Wauja. People will learn
about us, about who we are, where we come from, and how we live. They will learn
about our history and our struggle, and perhaps they will be able to join us in the fight toprotect the cave, the river, and our culture.

THE RESURREC TI ON OF T H E S ACR ED C AV E O F K A M U K U WA K Á

117

DEATH AND ENTANGLEMENT.
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE, LOVEAND THE AIMS OF ART CONSERVATION
Alva Noë
Prepared for the workshop‘Conserving active matter:degradation as an aesthetic
value’, Bard, New York City,
7–8 November 2019.
Alva Noë is a writer andphilosopher living in Berkeley
and New York. He writes
about art, mind and humanexperience. His books include
Strange Tools (2015), Varietiesof Presence (2012), Out of Our
Heads (2009), and Action in
Perception (2004). He has beena recipient of a Guggenheim
Fellowship and of the Judd/
Hume Prize in Advanced Visual
Studies. Noë is a professor ofPhilosophy at the Universityof California, Berkeley, where
he is also a member of theCenter for New Media, theInstitute for Cognitive and Brain
Sciences, and the Program in
Critical Theory.

OPPOSITE

Render of a section of the
900-year-old ‘Signing Oak’
recorded in Windsor Great Park.

118

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

B

ack in the early 1980s, when the California Condor was on the verge of extinction,
the pioneer environmentalist and conservationist David Brower, who was one of
the founders of the Sierra Club, opposed efforts to save the species by breeding
it in captivity for later release in the wild. His objection was principled. A condor is at
most 5 per cent blood, brain, bones and feathers. The rest, he argued, is environment.
A condor bred in captivity, in isolation from its environment, is no condor. Perhaps, hebitterly suggested, it is a flying pig.
Brower appreciated that an organism, in this case a bird, is no mere body. It is alocus of activity and this activity is world-involving.The animal, to borrow Susan Hurley’s
phrase, is a dynamic singularity.1 Where do we find it? In its nexus with the wider world.
In my talk today I want to explore Brower’s insight about living beings but in relation to questions of art and conservation. But to do so I would like, first, to warn against
a way of misunderstanding the basic phenomenon he appreciated.
To bring this, the misunderstanding, into focus, let us consider Patricia Westerford,
the fictional botanist in Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory.2 At a crucial juncture in
the story, Westerford ‘describes how a rotting log is home to orders of magnitude moreliving tissue than the living tree … She tells … about the ambrosia beetle. The alcoholof the rotting tree summons it. It moves into the log and excavates. Through its tunnel
system, it plants bits of fungus that it brought in with it, on a special formation on its
head. The fungus eats the wood; the beetle eats of the fungus … She tells … everything
depends on everything else. There’s a kind of vole that needs old forest. It eats mushrooms that grow on rotting logs and excretes spores somewhere else. No rotting logs,
no mushrooms; no mushrooms, no vole; no vole, no spreading of fungus; no spreadingof fungus, no new trees’ [282].
On the basis of reflections such as these, she finds herself entertaining the hypothesis that ‘a tree’s real task on Earth is … to bulk itself up in preparation to lying dead on
the forest floor for a long time’ [282]. Life, she considers, is for death.
Westerford conceives of the living old-growth forest as ‘reciprocal nations tied
together in life’ [282], but her conception has everything to do with death. Earlier in thebook Westerford discovers this. Here is the crucial passage:
She presses on fissures of bark and her fingers sink in knuckle-deep. A bit of
bushwhacking reveals the extent of the prodigious rot. Crumbling, creatureridden boles, decaying for centuries. Snags gothic and twisted, silvery as inverted
1 Susan L. Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
2 Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).

119icicles. She has never inhaled such fecund putrefaction. The sheer mass ofever-dying life packed into each single cubic foot, woven together with fungal
filaments and dewbetrayed spiderweb leaves her woozy. Mushrooms ladder up
the sides of trunks in terraced ledges. Dead salmon feed the trees. Soaked by fog
all winter long, spongy green stuff she can’t name covers every wooden pillar inthick baize reaching higher than her head. Death is everywhere, oppressive andbeautiful.
Powers here gives effective voice to ideas that are growing in popularity – think of Peter
Wohlleben’s bestseller The Secret Life of Trees 3 and Michael Pollan’s article4 a few years
back in The New Yorker about the new plant ‘neurobiology.’ I teach about plant intelligence, so called, in my introductory classes, precisely in order to get students to thinkin fresh ways about what is required for an organism to have a mind, about what mind isor might be. The case for plant minds is all the more exciting when we notice that ‘plantneurobiology’ is a misnomer, for plants have no brains and no nervous system. Maybethese are not required for consciousness or thought?
But this is all an aside. What I’d like us to pay attention to here now is this idea of‘ever-dying life’ that Westerford, Powers’ character, encounters in the old-growth forest. Lifeand death, the idea seems to be, are joined symmetrically in a kind of processual, circular
unity. Death is the source of life which is itself thought of as a condition of steady dying.
From this point of view, life and death are an unending process of metamorphosis
and transformation in relation to which, very importantly, trees and other large-scale
biological individuals – you, me, the California Condor – are but moments or phases; weare living bridges from one state of death or dying to another.
Authentic death is a kind of eternal life, a beautiful oneness with the biomass fromwhich we come and to which we will return.
This impersonal, and perhaps consoling, picture of living death or dying life, of anauthentic death, oppressive and beautiful, is implicitly contrasted with something else,a different kind of end-event, something much more frightening and total and absolutethan the fertile death of the death life circle, namely, the very cessation of the death life
circle itself. This cessation – brought about by the devastation of biodiversity and thedestruction of eco-systems, by human interventions such as clearcutting – is something
new and terrible and wicked. From the standpoint of the ecological naturalism I have been
describing, this mega-death, this sterilization and undoing of four billion years of organic
evolution, is uniquely human and very much the aftermath of sin: short-sightedness,greed, rapaciousness, ignorance, indifference.
But the essential piece in all this, for my present purposes at least, is not the politics, not the very genuine threat, not the moral challenge, but the focus-shift, impliedhere, from the individual, as a unit of significance, to the biomass collective. Ecologicalnaturalism, here articulated by the fictional scientist Patricia Westerford, posits life anddeath as mutually enabling processes and, crucially, it views living agencies – trees, voles,
people – as, in a way, mere epiphenomena: we come and go as the active microbial andfungal matter, which is our real ground, blooms and decays.
3 Peter Wohlleben, The Secret Life of Trees (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016). Published in German in 2015 by
Ludwig Buchverlag.
4 Michael Pollan, ‘The intelligent plant’, The NewYorker, 15 December 2013.

120

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

Now the mistake comes into view. Yes, we are dynamic singularities.We are spread out
and world involving; this is something I have been arguing for the last 15 years.5 We are 95
per cent environment. Brower was right about that. But we are not epiphenomena, and ourrelation to death, and life, is not at all like what the ecological naturalist would have us believe.
We do not just come into life, and then depart, preserving a great continuity.
Rather, we are each of us, every single one of us, born to our human mothers; we arepushed or squeezed, or pulled, sucked or even cut out of her body. We do not emerge
from a living death, a vast pre-conscious unknowing; we emerge from life, from the very
specific, personal, female lives of our specific individual mothers.
And our lives start there, not exactly in medias res, but certainly already in relation toanother person. It is the fact of this inescapable intimacy with our mothers that gives life
its basic asymmetry, its uni-directionality. However you tell the story, ours is the tale ofa break-up, and its final chapter is always the same. We die. But death for us now is not asacrifice to the micro-organisms alive within us and around us, nor is it a spiritual eternal
rebirth. Our deaths, in this way like our births, can only ever be for us great traumas, forthey are forced separations and unwilled goodbyes.
Death is a terrible and undeniable loss of everything we have ever loved andeverything we have ever cared about. In this admittedly somewhat melodramatic telling,
we do not stand in a symmetrical relationship to life and death. And while we are food forthe fishes and fodder for the worms, no doubt, we are more than that. We are persons,
we are agencies, we are protagonists.
This is not melodrama, however; it is what biology teaches.
Consider: the simplest living thing, the unicellular organism, makes itself by intaking energy from the surrounding field and using it to build a wall, the membrane thatliterally defines the cell – or the organism – itself, and marks where the rest of the world
begins. Life is this self-making, autopoietic, but fundamentally xenophobic activity of
producing, preserving, conserving and insisting on the integrity of oneself.
This process also delivers something like meaning and value. For the cell’s universe
spontaneously bifurcates into that which is good for the cell and that which it cannot abide.6
The cell has interests, needs, goals and, in a way, problems, even if, of course, it cannot framethese or think about these for itself. The simplest organism is already a protagonist, and a protagonist is not merely a locus of biomechanical activity.The cell is not a process or a dynamic,
but an it – as opposed to a he, she or they – and it is that in virtue of which it is an it – a kindof unity or integrity – that makes it different from any non-living things that there are.
Now, an amoeba is no person, to be sure. But this much is shared in common. First,
to be a person, no less than to be a bacterium, is to be organized. We are organisms, after
all. Second, neither the amoeba nor we ourselves are mere chemistry; we are characters,
and our stories, whether told by Darwin, or by the journalist or novelist, reveal an orderand meaning that has no reflection, none at all, in mere physics.
I pause here, to recapitulate and to set our signts more clearly on what I’m trying
to do here. Human life and consciousness is not something that happens inside us; it issomething we achieve; like everything else we achieve, it depends not only on our brains,
5 This is the central theme of my books Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), and Out of Our Heads(FSG / Hill and Wang, 2009).
6 This idea, as well as the conception of life as autopoiesis in the previous paragraph, are due to Humberto R. Maturana
and Francisco J. Varela. See their Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realization of the Living (Boston: Reidel, 1980). For a later
development, see Evan Thompson, Mind and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

DEAT H A ND ENTA NG L EM ENT

121

bones, feathers and blood, but on our dynamic involvement with a surrounding environment, including, in our own case at least, the cultural environment. This was Brower’s
insight, and it was the basic argument of my book Out of Our Heads.
But to insist on this world-coupled collective dynamic distributed-ness is not, or
should not be, to eliminate or reduce or demote the existential and the ontological significance of the organism or the person. No living being is merely active matter.
And this has everything to do, first, with the fact that life not only self-organizes but
always does so in the interest of homeostasis. We make ourselves, we self-organize, andwe do this by denying that mere process, that is to say, entropy, can rule us and reduce
us to mere biomass. We make ourselves up. You lose sight of this if you give too muchattention to the fragility of our hold on ourselves and of our vulnerability to, as well as
our productive exploitation of, the fungi and the microbiome.
But there is a second point. To be an organism such as we are is, always, in a way, tobe a slave. In the first instance, a slave to the ceaseless demands of life-making, self-making,self-preserving, self-conservation that is our first order of business. But things are morepoignant still: we didn’t sign up for this, did we? To be an organism is to be organized, organized by the demands of this fundamental, existential, and, in a way, terribly constraining task:
the conservation of ourselves. But none of us chooses this. In fact, for the most part we do
not even understand the ways we are organized and made up by the ways we are organized.
Wittgenstein wrote that a philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know myway about.7 And the aim of philosophy is, in a way, then, to orient, or to enable us torecover our bearings. We need, or we feel the need anyway, to gain an overview of, basically, where we find ourselves.
This is art’s basic work, too.
Art aims at ecstasy. I don’t mean passion, emotion, or pleasure. Its push is forrelease and its point is to undo the stasis that is our ordinary, our normal and our mostfamiliar condition.
The key thing is to appreciate that the conditions from which we seek release – forexample, in the human case, the basic habits, intelligent automatisms and unthinking
skills which constrain us – are precisely that which makes us what we are. Releasemeans something more than enlightenment – Wittgenstein’s coming to ‘know our way
around’ – it holds forth the possibility of reorganization, something kin to liberation.
Two examples:
Choreography. People dance. Dancing is an organized activity. It is an activity built outof habits. Choreography, the art of dance, however, is not just more dancing. Choreography
puts dancing on the stage. It puts the fact that we are dancers, that we are organized
by dancing, on the stage. It puts us on the stage. It offers a representation of ourselves
dancing. Think of this as writing ourselves down, or as the introduction of a perspicuous
representation, like a new notation. And this representation of ourselves changes us, forit gives us new resources for thinking about what we are doing when we dance, and so
finally new ways of dancing.You dance differently in a world in which there is choreography.
Choreography loops down and changes the dancing of which it is the representation.8

7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Macmillan, 1953), §123.
8 This conception of art as looping down and reorganizing us is the main topic of my Strange Tools (FSG / Hill and Wang,2015).The idea of ‘looping’ itself is due to Ian Hacking. See, for example, his The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999).

122

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

Merce Cunningham in
New York City, 1957. It is
likely that Cunningham is here
performing The Changeling.

Second, painting. People make pictures; they use pictures.We have been doing so formillennia, much as we have been talking and thinking, and dancing for millennia. We areparticipants in a picture-based economy of exchange. Pictures – sketches, drawings, photos,
you name it – are tools for showing, a technology of display.We use them for all manner of
purposes. For example, we use them to show something we want to sell, or to record what
happened, etc. Crucially, artists who make pictures are not merely participating in thiseconomy of show and display. They are not simply carrying on this show business, as I call it a
new book.They are not really making pictures at all; they are making art out of pictures, thatis, out of the fact that we are organized by pictures, that pictures occupy an existentiallyorganizing place in our lives. Painting as an art puts all this on display and does so in waysthat give us resources, finally, for making new kinds of pictures and for thinking about theplace of pictures in our lives in new ways. Painting starts with habits, with the ways we findourselves organized by pictures, and then it re-organizes us.
Crucially, again, this is art’s job; its work. This is, to borrow Heidegger’s pun, thework of art.

DEAT H A ND ENTA NG L EM ENT123

If I am right that art serves in this way to unveil us to ourselves and to reorganize
us, that art is, fundamentally, about ek-stase, a breaking up of the stasis that holds us
captive and makes us what we are, then it follows that we must resist identifying theart object or the art thing with the art work. Dewey warned us about this. To do so is
about as wrong-headed as thinking that the California Condor is simply a structure ofblood, brains, bones and feathers. To save the condor you need to save the condor’sworld, for the condor is a way of being in the world. And to save the artwork, or tokeep it alive, as it were, you need to preserve the conditions in which it can provide
us the needed opportunity to unveil and reorganize.
It is useful to re-frame our question in relation to choreography. Useful becausea choreographic work is an artwork, fully-fledged. But also because it is an artwork
where, in a way, the ratio of thing-hood or materiality to true significance is as low
as can be, and so it serves as a reminder that artwork is not thing, but that, rather,
the thing is, at most, a prop. If our job is to conserve or preserve Cunningham’schoreographies, for example – a subject of some concern as we now celebrate his
centenary – what else is there for us to do but, as it were, stage his works anew? Or
perhaps our job is in some other less specific way to carry on an art making practiceinaugurated by him.
But isn’t that what we need to do too if we wish to preserve paintings, sculptures,
films or videos, architectures, or whatever? It isn’t just that we need to resist the microbes and the fungi and so keep things from falling apart; we need to preserve theirvery environment, or our access to their very environment, in which alone the works are
actually even works of art in the first place.
And that isn’t something we can do, as it were, conditionally. We can’t pretend
art objects can serve to open up new possibilities for us or give us new resources
for understanding if they no longer really do. Art preservation, art conservation,
isn’t just historical excavation. Thought of as artifacts, artworks are just shards, or
pictures, or traces.
But there is another lesson choreography teaches. Every living work of art, ofwhatever kind you care to select, is, in the sense once articulated by William Forsythe,a choreographic object.9 It choreographs us. Recall Barnett Newman’s note on the wall of
the Betty Parsons gallery urging visitors to step in close to the works. Newman’s notebrings out that every painting sets the viewer in motion, bodily, but also cognitively andemotionally. It is in this setting into motion that the work of art happens.
Of course, it is we who set the work into motion by caring about it. So that’s themain job of the conservator. To make it possible for us to care about the work of art.
Perhaps we should say: every work of art, then, is a kind of choreographic score;and our question is, how to play it? or, do we want to play it? or why should we play it?
Art conservation, then, is about keeping it real; about re-staging, about maintaining theenvironment, the whole contexture, in which the work can afford what it affords, canscore what it can score.
Now this may and very often will require that we target the object itself. That is, it
is important that the old master paintings and other treasures of that sort receive the kindof careful maintenance that lets them remain physically intact. For their material survival
is essential to what they are and to their continued existence, in any form, for us.

Sarcophagus of Raphael,
the Pantheon, Rome.

But this is not always the case and this need not always be the case. Which is thetruer artwork: Veronese’s painting in the Louvre, or Factum Arte’s copy, returned to theoriginal Palladian refectory (heavily restored in the 1950s) from which it was stolen by
Napoleon’s troops?
I end with this: there was an engraving on Roman pre-Christian head-stones thatwas once as common as RIP is today on ours: NF F NS NC – non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.
Translation: I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care.
Perhaps it is sometimes good and right that we let artworks die their natural death.
It is terrible and scary let things we love go, but there is no genuine alternative.

9 William Forsythe, ‘Choreographic objects’, https://www.williamforsythe.com/essay.html.

124

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

DEAT H A ND ENTA NG L EM ENT

125

DISCRETE OBJECTS AND COMPLEXSUBJECTS: FROM MOSUL TO LONDONAND BACK AGAIN
Nicolas Béliard
Nicolas Béliard is the Directorof Communications for Factum
Foundation and Factum Arte,and was the organizer of theinitiative to transport thelamassu facsimiles to Mosul.

OPPOSITE

Scanning the lamassu in the British
Museum in 2004 using a NUB3D
Scanner.

126

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

S

ince 2004, Factum Arte and Factum Foundation have been working with the
British Museum on a project to send facsimiles of two lamassu to Mosul in Iraq.
The colossal statues were excavated in the mid-19th century on the site of ancient
Nimrud, a few miles from modern Mosul, but they were shipped to London in 1851.
Although the lamassu were scanned at the British Museum in 2004, it was not until autumn 2019 that the facsimiles finally made the journey from Factum’s Madrid workshops
to Iraq. They are now installed at the entrance to the student building at the University ofMosul, next to the burnt-out library where over one million manuscripts and documents
were destroyed in 2016 by war and fundamentalism.
Lamassu are Assyrian protective deities whose hybrid bodies are part human, partbull or lion, and part bird. The two lamassu now in the British Museum originally stoodguarding the internal threshold to the throne room in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II (kingof Assyria from 883 to 859 BCE).
The first excavations at Nimrud were undertaken in the 1840s and 1850s, conducted by a team led by Austen Henry Layard, a young British archaeologist and imperial
agent, and Hormuzd Rassam, the first acknowledged Assyriologist from the Ottoman
Empire. The two lamassu sculptures were among the most spectacular of their finds, andfollowing excavation they were transported to London, where they entered the collection of the British Museum to great public acclaim.
In 2004, Factum Arte (before the creation of Factum Foundation in 2009) recorded
the original statues at the British Museum using a high-resolution NUB3D Scanner and composite photography. Alongside the lamassu other reliefs from the eastern end of the throneroom of the Northwest Palace were scanned, both in the British Museum and elsewhere– the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, the Sackler
Museum at Harvard University and Princeton University Art Museum. These low-relief
scenes once formed a coherent narrative cycle. Originally they were fully coloured and musthave inspired awe when viewed in the palace where the walls and ceilings were painted andthe floors were covered in carved and woven patterns.The Factum team was scheduled to record all the fragments that remained on site in Nimrud in 2006 along with other pieces that
had been moved to Mosul and Baghdad. This trip was called off due to the deteriorating security conditions and the increased risk of kidnapping in the area. Watching the lamassu andthe panels being destroyed in 2016 by Islamic State in a highly public iconoclastic attack
reinforced the importance of recording whenever possible in times of peace.
The high-resolution scanned data was processed and milled on 3- and 5-axis machines at Delcam’s research institute in Birmingham. At the time it was the largest
high-resolution routing project undertaken for conservation purposes and the polyurethane ‘originals’ that emerged set standards that have seldom been matched.
127

THIS PAGE

The lamassu sculptures inthe exhibition Nineveh at the
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden,
Leiden, 2017–18.
A flamenco concert organised in
Mosul by the Spanish ambassador
to Iraq, Juan José Escobar
Stemmann, to celebrate the arrivalof the lamassu facsimiles. This was
the first concert by an internationalgroup to be held in Mosul since theend of the conflict in 2017.
OPPOSITE

The lamassu were recreatedusing scagliola (plaster marble),a material that can be made toclosely resemble the Mosul marble
from which the original statues
were carved.

The lamassu were routed in sections, assembled, moulded and then cast in scagliola. A
final coat of wax completed the imitation of the original Mosul marble surface, bringing
the colossal winged lions back to life in Factum Arte’s Madrid studios. They were thenexhibited together at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, which had facilitatedthe creation of the scagliola replicas.
After several stalled attempts, facsimiles of the lamassu finally reached Mosul
in October 2019, a feat which would not have been possible without the help of Ali
128

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

Aljuboori, the director of the centre for Assyrian studies at the University of Mosul,
and the support of the British Museum in London, Mosul University, the Rijksmuseum
van Oudheden, the Spanish Ministry of Defence, the Spanish ambassador in Iraq andthe Iraqi Government. It is hoped that their installation will mark the start of further
collaborations between Factum Foundation and the University of Mosul.
High-resolution recording, exact facsimiles and digital restorations can never replace the Assyrian carvings that were destroyed in Nimrud and at the Mosul Museum,
but they can play an important role in keeping their memory alive and in sharing theircultural and political significance. The hope is that the installation of the facsimiles will
be seen as a gesture of solidarity and a sign of hope for the role that technology andcultural heritage can play in the reconstruction of the Republic of Iraq. Amjad, a remarkable welder who helped to install the facsimiles, said in a very moving interview:‘Our Heritage will never die; our enemies and our friends know this. We don’t care if
this statue is made of marble or gypsum. It’s a statue. It’s a symbol. It’s our Identity’.
Some of the sculptures destroyed in the Mosul Museum were plaster casts. Many
were not. As with medical imaging, different types of technology can generate datathat will act as a repository of information for future generations. This will be of great
use to monitor conditions when works are attacked and vandalised. It is all that is leftwhen an object is totally destroyed. The lamassu that were removed by Layard arestill in the British Museum. The ones that were left on site are not. It’s not possible topredict what will happen. The British Museum could have been hit by a bomb in the
Blitz, resulting in the destruction of the original sculptures. It is possible to launch amass campaign of high-resolution recording that will create a new local economy andresult in a greater understanding of specific objects and of ways in which the evidenceof the past can inform our approaches to them in the present. A training initiative is
now being launched which will enable graduates from the University of Mosul andlocal archaeologists to record, analyse, digitally restore and archive their own heritage
using cutting-edge 3D recording technologies.

FROM M O S U L TO L O NDO N A ND B ACK AG A IN

129

SHARING SKILLS AND TECHNOLOGIES:TEACHING PHOTOGRAMMETRY IN ALULA
Otto Lowe

Otto Lowe is one of theprincipal technicians working
for Factum Foundation’s 3D
scanning team, specialising inphotogrammetry. He has spent
the last three years working on
projects in Saudi Arabia andaround the world recording
cultural heritage for Factum
Foundation.

OPPOSITE

Two students conducting
photogrammetry at Abu Ud.

130

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

Training and the transfer of skills are a vital part of Factum Foundation’s work.The
Foundation’s educational activities stretch from institutions with a long history ofengagement with cutting-edge conservation methodologies (a Factum-led course
at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation is
now in its fourth year) to locations where the use of digital technology for conservation
purposes has no secure existing foothold (teaching programmes have been establishedat Luxor in Egypt, Makhachkala in Dagestan and Upper Xingu in Brazil). A special emphasis is placed on training people to record their own heritage and on contributing tolocal economies – a recognition of local actors’ privileged perspective on, and privileged
access to, heritage assets in their regions.
One important recent programme to support the dissemination of digital recording skills and technologies was that undertaken in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia inautumn 2018. KSA is currently undergoing important shifts in its relationship to its cultural heritage: five sites have been newly recognised by UNESCO since 2008 and there
is increased interest from scholars and tourists from both inside and outside the country,
while Saudi Vision 2030 has identified culture and tourism as important pillars of the
kingdom’s economy and identity in the years to come. As such, this is a critical time forthe accurate documentation of KSA’s archaeological sites and cultural monuments, manyof which have never been recorded at high resolution. These sites include the remainsof ancient kingdoms such as the Lihyanites and the Nabateans as well as the artistic andarchitectural vestiges of centuries of Hajj pilgrimage, visible in particular at Mecca and at
the historic port town of Jeddah.
The 2018 project was a collaborative pilot between Factum Foundation, Art
Jameel, and the Royal Commission of AlUla (RCU). Factum Foundation led a two-weekcourse in the town of AlUla in the northwest of the country, where a group of fifteen
students – ten of them female and five male – learnt to record cultural heritage using
photogrammetry. After several classroom sessions explaining the core concepts of recording and processing, the students spent seven days recording at three different sites
in the vicinity of AlUla.
The first site chosen was the Lihyanite ‘library’ at Jabal Ikhmah, a valley that served
as a meeting place for the Lihyanite kings. Now part of the UNESCO world heritage siteof Al-Hijr, the sides of the valley are covered with hundreds of inscriptions recording
their laws and edicts. The other sites were a cliff-face and a gully nearby, whose surfaces
are also covered in petroglyphs and inscriptions. One of these sites was suggested as asuitable subject for recording by one of the students on the course.
Onsite at Jabal Ikhmah, the surfaces to be recorded were divided up to ensurecomplete coverage of the target areas, and the first day was devoted to photogrammetric131

THIS PAGE

Jawharah Albalawi recording the
Sepulchre of Cardinal Cisneros in
Alcalá de Henares. The Sepulchre
was badly damaged during the
Spanish Civil War.
Abdulrahim Sugair recording the
Sepulchre of Cardinal Cisneros.
Jawharah Albalawi and Abdulrahim
Sugair processing data.
OPPOSITE

Otto Lowe demonstrating
photogrammetry at the Shaden
resort in AlUla.

recording of areas of specific interest. On the second day, students worked together,
spaced out along the walls of the valley at intervals of 4 m, to record the site using
panoramic photography. Once these results had been processed in the classroom, thestudents moved on to the second and third sites. Over the course of the two-week period, more than 74,000 images were recorded, with the total data collected amounting
to over 1.29 TB.
Two alumni from that course have now undertaken a specially designed advanced
course in Madrid, with the aim of allowing them to troubleshoot on complex photogrammetry projects and to teach fellow Saudis how to record cultural heritage in the
future. As part of the course, the students recorded the Sepulchre of Cardinal Cisneros,a monument located in the Chapel of San Ildefonso in Alcalá de Henares that was badly
damaged during Spain’s Civil War. While processing and archiving the data for this complex object, the team learnt a lot about the obstacles that will need to be overcome inorder to create effective systems for performing and teaching photogrammetry in Saudi
Arabia; a first step will be the translation of an instruction manual into Arabic (something which has already been done for the Lucida 3D Scanner) and the establishment ofprecise archiving conventions. But although challenges remain, this initiative has given
all participants new confidence that it will be possible to build a local team capable of
documenting and safeguarding the remarkable cultural heritage of the region.

132

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT YTEACH ING P H OTO G R A M M ET RY IN A L U L A

133

DIGITISING THE MANUSCRIPT HERITAGE
OF DAGESTAN
Eva Rosenthal

The digitisation project has
also been supported by the
Makhachkala- and Moscowbased Ziyavudin Magomedov
Charitable Peri Foundation.
Eva Rosenthal has beenleading Factum Foundation’s
digitisation and training
programmes in Russia since2015, including the recordingof tombstones at KalaKoreysh (Dagestan) and thephotography of the Ferapontov
Monastery (Vologda region).

W

hen Dagestani Qurans dating from the 18th and 19th centuries were discovered for sale on the London art market, disguised as more expensive
Southeast Asian manuscripts through the addition of forged colophons, it
was almost impossible to identify the forgeries.1 Dagestani manuscripts are almost unknown in Europe and America; there are few high-quality images available to researchers;
and little recognition of their beauty and originality.They are still being treated as objectsof low cultural and monetary value – a situation that endangers their survival.
Since 2015, Factum Foundation has been working in Dagestan, a mountainous region in the Russian northern Caucasus, on a long-term project to record thousands ofIslamic manuscripts in the area. Over 3,000 of these are held by the Institute of History,
Archaeology and Ethnography (IHAE) in Makhachkala, whose world-class collection
contains, amongst other things, notable Qurans of Middle Eastern origin. Perhaps moresignificant because of their rarity and obscurity in contemporary scholarship, however,are manuscripts of Dagestani origin dating from the 15th century onward: exquisite
illuminated Qurans and Sufi tracts, copies of scientific and philosophical texts, historicalnarratives including several on the feats of the famous 19th-century military leader ImamShamil, and original works of Dagestani literature.
Dagestan’s manuscripts are a vital aspect of the region’s cultural history. Despite its
importance, the IHAE archive represents only a small minority of the over 30,000 manuscripts thought to exist in private Dagestani collections maintained by individuals living
in mountain villages, as well as in the countless mosques and madrasas in the region. It
is becoming increasingly urgent to document these smaller collections, which are testament to the vibrant manuscript culture that has existed in the northern Caucasus since
the Middle Ages. As more and more villagers move to cities in Dagestan and beyond, it islikely that at least some private collections will be lost, alongside valuable history about
how and when they were assembled.
Shamil Shikhaliev, Head of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts at the
IHAE, had early recognised the importance of digitisation and the Institute had beenslowly recording manuscripts in its archive for some years before Factum became
involved. Factum’s contribution since 2015 has accelerated the digitisation project.
The Foundation has provided two custom-made scanners that produce sharp, beautiful
high-resolution images – a ‘static’ and a ‘portable’ scanner – and many hours of remotesupport and training for Habib Seferbekov and Khalisat Shikhalieva, the two main operators at the IHAE.

OPPOSITE

Over 3,000 manuscripts are heldby the IHAE in Makhachkala.

134

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

1 Annabel Teh Gallop, ‘Fakes or Fancies? Some “Problematic” Islamic Manuscripts from South East Asia’, Manuscript
Cultures, no. 10 (2017): 101–28.

135

THIS PAGE

The Portable Manuscript Scanner.
OPPOSITE

Khalisat Shikhalieva uses Factum’s‘static’ book scanner to record
a manuscript at the IHAE.
ManuCapture application open
on the computer during
digitisation using the Static
Scanner © Gennady Viktorov
for Factum Foundation.

The initiative has thus far resulted in an archive with high-resolution images ofover 1,200 manuscripts – or over 40 TB of data. In 2020, the project will continue witha significant increase in digital storage capacity thanks to a generous donation from Pauland Jill Ruddock. The new year will also bring the publication of a digital library withdescriptive metadata for the IHAE’s manuscripts, a key resource for scholars working on
the region; and although it is a complex and expensive undertaking to make the high-resolution images instantly available via an online library, Factum and the IHAE are studying
different options to publish the data for interested researchers.
A parallel programme – which originated from chance conversations between
Adam Lowe, the artist Rachid Koraichi, and Bassam Dagestani, an expert on Islamic manuscript conservation from the Juma al Majid Center for Culture & Heritage (Dubai) –is focusing on manuscript conservation. As well as providing training for three young
women from Makhachkala, the Juma al Majid Center has equipped a conservation laboratory with state-of-the-art equipment, making the IHAE into one of the foremost manuscript conservation centres in Russia.
In coming years, the IHAE and Factum also want to use the ‘portable’ scanner todocument as many of Dagestan’s private collections as possible – an initiative that would
ensure the region’s rich manuscript heritage is maintained for future generations.

136

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

DI GI TI SI N G THE M A NU S CR IP T H ER ITAG E O F DAG ES TA N

137

THE RETURN OF AN INTERPRETATIONOF CARAVAGGIO’S NATIVITY
Bernardo Tortorici Montaperto

Bernardo Tortorici
Montaperto is President
and founder (since 2001) of
the Association of Friendsof the Sicilian Museums, andin this role manages eightmonumental spaces in Palermo
in collaboration with the Cultural
Heritage Office of the Curia ofPalermo. He has collaborated
with the regional administration
for the enhancement of the‘itinerari serpottiani’, with themunicipal administration for
the realisation of the Kals’art
festival, and with the Universityof Palermo for the constructionof the ‘Vie dei Tesori’. From2002 to 2016 he was Presidentof the Italian Historic Houses
Association (Sicily section), andoversaw 20 editions of theevent ‘Cortili aperti’ in various
cities of Sicily; he also promoted
restoration projects, exhibitions,conferences and publications on
the theme of historic buildings
and villas. From 2008 to 2012 he
was a councillor in Salemi with
the Sgarbi council, with a special
focus on the town’s museums,
the historic centre, the landscape,tourism, and cultural heritage.
In 2017 he became a memberof the Cabinet of the Regional
Councillor for Cultural Heritage,
Professor Vittorio Sgarbi. Since
2019 he has been President of
the Week of Cultures association,
which promotes the festival of
the same name in Palermo.
OPPOSITE

The re-creation of the Nativity was
unveiled in 2015. The sheet in frontof the artwork shows an imageof the empty frame following thetheft of the painting in 1969.

138

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

The story of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence (1600) is one of theworst unresolved art thefts of the 20th century. At some point between 12 and18 October 1969, the painting was stolen from its location above the altar of the
Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, never to be seen again.
Over the intervening years, a range of different theories have been proposed by
the Carabinieri, journalists, and mafiosi ‘pentiti’ (mafiosi turned state witnesses). A repeated theme is the idea that the painting has been destroyed since the theft, although
this remains unproven and rests on largely contradictory accounts.The prevailing current
line of investigation links the theft to Gaetano Badalamenti, a major player in the Sicilian
heroin trade with the US who died in 2004 in a US prison, and as the decades pass thelikelihood of finding the painting and unravelling the events surrounding its disappearance becomes less and less likely.
At the time of the theft, only one medium-format colour photograph taken in 1968
by Enzo Bray existed. For many years, a blown-up version of this photo (almost 2 m wide
and over 2.5 m high) was exhibited above the altar. The low resolution and the faded
colours of its surface after a few years of display offered a clear reminder to visitors that
this was only the ghost of a vanished original.
In December 2014, Peter Glidewell invited Adam Lowe to Palermo to meet me in
my capacity as the head of the Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane and of the Amici dei
Musei Siciliani, and director at the Oratory of San Lorenzo. As a result of this meeting,
Factum Foundation was commissioned by Sky Arts to embark on a full-sized re-interpretation of the lost painting, which would occupy the space above the altar of San Lorenzo
for as long as the original remained missing. The production of the new version of thepainting became a central element of a documentary about Caravaggio, the theft, andwhat had happened to the artwork.
In re-creating the painting, the Factum team were able to draw on six largeformat black-and-white photographs taken by the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in
the 1950s during a restoration of the painting.They also made extensive use of the data
they had recorded on a previous project, undertaken in 2009–10, where facsimiles had
been created of three paintings by Caravaggio for the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi inRome. In the first stage of post-processing, Gabriel Scarpa and Anna Paola Ferrara digitally merged the tonal detail of the larger black-and-white photos with colour data fromthe San Luigi dei Francesi recordings and Bray’s photograph.
The resulting file was then printed out at the size of the original painting, showing
Caravaggio’s distinctive working method (merging a rough ground with directional
brushmarks and a process of wiping off a tonal glaze) as well as cracks and later restorations. It was impossible to recreate the texture of a work by Caravaggio using purely
139

Jordi García Pons adding paintto a digital print of Enzo Bray’s
photograph.
Rafa Rachewsky printing theNativity. The process of printing,repainting, digitally correcting
and then repeating this process
several times gradually gave
the re-interpreted painting thenecessary qualities.

FOLLOWING PAGES

As part of a seven-part televisionseries for Sky Arts produced byBallandi Multimedia, Factum Artere-created seven paintings thathave been lost or destroyed in the20th century. One of these was
Graham Sutherland’s 1954 portraitof Winston Churchill. Printing,overpainting in a transparent whiteand reprinting were part of therecreation process.
Van Gogh’s Six Sunflowers in a
Vase was painted in Arles in 1888and destroyed in a fire during theAmerican bombing of Ashiya in
1945. In order to recreate theartwork, a 3D scan of the Sunflowers
in in the National Gallery in
London was used to record Van
Gogh’s brushmarks. These werethen isolated and distorted to fit
the imagery of the painting thatwas destroyed in Japan.

digital methods; so interventions were also made by hand using oil paint. The modified canvas was then re-photographed to integrate the manual interventions into thedigital file, and printed again – a process that was performed several times before thefinal version was reached. The final colour information was printed onto a canvas coatedwith a layer of animal glue and a half-chalk ground. Factum’s flat-bed printer, capable ofprinting several layers of colour in perfect registration one on top of the other, was critical in the recreation of the deep blacks and rich colours used by Caravaggio.
The Nativity was unveiled in December 2015 in the presence of the President of
the Italian Republic, and remains in the Oratory of San Lorenzo. It is not a facsimile:
it is a ‘performance’ after the original, a work informed by Caravaggio’s painting technique. Because there are so many uncertainties about the original painting andCaravaggio’s working method, the recreation involved large numbers of decisions on
the part of Factum’s team; these choices could have been made differently, resulting
in a different final piece, and if a future version is ever made, it may not be identicalto this one. Where Factum Foundation decided to replicate some of the damage to theoriginal canvas visible in the black-and-white photographs, another version could havesought to return the painting to its condition in Caravaggio’s own time. But while therecreation can only ever be partial, the process of making also brings us closer to theoriginal, forcing us to consider the options faced by Caravaggio himself and to engage
with the conceptual and material processes involved in creating it.
The recreated Nativity was the catalyst for another development, a series of sevenprogrammes on ‘lost’ paintings (by Johannes Vermeer, Vincent van Gogh, Graham
Sutherland, Gustav Klimt, Tamara de Lempicka, Franz Marc, and Claude Monet)
which were recreated for the Sky Arts television series Mystery of the Lost Paintings, developed as a collaboration between Peter Glidewell, Ballandi Arts and Factum Arte in2017. The series explored the possibility of re-interpreting and recreating paintings
that were lost, destroyed, or irreparably damaged in the 20th century, using existing
photographs, historical research and comparison with other works by the same artists.
The emphasis is not so much on the recreations themselves, but on the ways
in which close study and discussion invites renewed reflection on an artist’s biography,
the character of the original artwork, and the complex history of each painting. In
some of the cases the originals have been lost forever, in others their existence andwhereabouts are unknown. Ironically, several of the paintings that were the focus of
the television series have achieved greater celebrity because of their disappearance.
The seven paintings were displayed at Palazzo Abatellis at the end of 2019, an exhibition that also embraced the Nativity in the Oratory of San Lorenzo. The story of
Caravaggio’s Nativity continues to be the focus of media and public attention – hopefully it is a story that is not over yet.

Monet’s Waterlilies (1916) was
severely damaged in 1958 ina fire at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Factum recorded
the burnt canvas and createda version of the artwork with aremodelled surface following othercontemporary waterlily paintings
by Monet.

140

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

THE RETURN OF AN I N TERPRETAT IO N O F C A R AVAG G IO ’S N ATI V I TY

141

142

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

THE RETURN OF AN I N TERPRETAT IO N O F C A R AVAG G IO ’S NAT IV IT Y

143

144

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

THE RETURN OF AN I N TERPRETAT IO N O F C A R AVAG G IO ’S NAT IV IT Y

145

146

PR E SE RV IN G , S H A RIN G A N D RE S P ONSIBILIT Y

THE RETURN OF AN I N TERPRETAT IO N O F C A R AVAG G IO ’S NAT IV IT Y

147

CHAPTER 3

NEW INFORMATIONGENERATINGNEW KNOWLEDGE

148

149

ATELIER CANOVA: A NEW VISION
OF ANTONIO CANOVA
Chiara Casarin

Chiara Casarin has adoctorate in art history. As
Director of the Musei Civici
di Bassano del Grappa, she
has developed a project thatcombines ancient collections
with contemporary art and has
worked on studies of the useof new technologies for theconservation and enhancementof historical and artistic heritage:
Atelier Canova (Venice: Marsilio
Editori, 2019).

PREVIOUS PAGE

A point cloud of thephotogrammetry data for
Canova’s terracotta maquetteof the Three Graces, showing thelocations of the photographs taken
during the recording process.
OPPOSITE

A bronze model of Canova’sequestrian statue after digital
restoration, reproduced at a scaleof 1:10.

150

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

P

alazzo Bonaguro is one of the locations that make up the Musei Civici di Bassanodel Grappa. In the storage units on the ground floor of the building, two large
open crates containing plaster fragments of various sizes have been preserved for
decades: many parts only a few centimetres in diameter, others much larger. Deformedby their own weight and inflated by the humidity that prevails in these rooms, the fragments are part of a masterful work of sculpture and, when correctly assembled, make up
a colossal horse by Antonio Canova.
The large plaster – intact, powerful and elegant – was exhibited in a hall of themuseum until 1968, when the then director, Professor Bruno Passamani, asked the
Soprintendenza (cultural authorities) about the possibility of dis-assembling it.1
Arriving in Bassano after Canova’s death, the horse formed part of the collection of works that his half-brother, Monsignor Giambattista Sartori Canova, retrieved
from the Roman studio and left in his will to two neighbouring cities, Possagno andBassano, as a way of perpetuating the undying memory of the Maestro. To Possagno
went most of the plasters and paintings, to Bassano the drawings, monochromes, andtwo colossal equestrian statues. One of these, the model for the monument to Charles
III in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, was completely destroyed during the bombing
raid that struck the Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa on 24 April 1945. The second,
now preserved in storage in Palazzo Bonaguro, emerged unscathed from the world war
but was always mistakenly considered the model for the other Neapolitan equestrianmonument for Ferdinando I. We will see how, thanks to the new technologies usedby Factum Foundation, it has been possible to write a new chapter in the history of
Canova’s creativity by identifying the existence of a third horse, never previously hypothesized, which was never cast in bronze and which, in fact, was the one dismantled
by Passamani. Over the years, only the head had been recovered from those crates and,once restored, displayed again at the last exhibition dedicated to Antonio Canova in
Bassano in 2003. Between the time of its dismemberment and the present day, when
the dramatic fragments can still be seen, these crates have been moved several times
from one location to another, from warehouse to basement within the city, without
any sort of protection.
1 One can see the long correspondence between Professor Bruno Passamani and the Superintendent in the documents
fully reported in Antonio Canova. Atelier, ed. Chiara Casarin (Venice: Marsilio, 2019). It was possible to ‘dismember’ thecolossal statue thanks to an internal structure made in wood and iron by Canova himself. The components of this structure, which allowed its transport from Rome to Bassano and enabled it to be rebuilt exactly as the sculptor would havewanted it, are still evident today in the cut-off areas. For some obscure reason, described in great detail in the document(ibid.) signed by the restorer who was commissioned in 2004 to assess the conservation status of the fragments, thegreat horse was not disassembled along these lines, but ‘brutally sawn without following Canova’s assembly instructions’.

151The day I took up my post as Director of the Musei Civici of Bassano del Grappa
coincided with a visit to the museum storage facilities and this horse, if one can believe ina certain symbolism of coincidence, soon became my primary object of study. Returning
to the museum headquarters, I asked to see any existing photographs of how the colossal
horse had been displayed and to have access to the archive containing all the registeredrequests and correspondence between the Musei di Bassano and the Soprintendenza, atthat time under the direction of Professor Michelangelo Muraro.2 It didn’t take morethan a few hours, as I flipped through this incredible and simultaneously fascinatingly
documented story, before I made the decision to call Adam Lowe. I had met Adam in
Venice in 2007 when he was unveiling to the public the extraordinary restitution of
Paolo Veronese’s Nozze di Cana (Wedding at Cana), in facsimile form, to the Benedictine
refectory on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. At that moment, I was in the midst of
frantic research for a doctoral thesis focused entirely on the problems of authenticity inart.3 Thus, the Factum Arte project for the Cini Foundation was extremely interesting:the famous work by Veronese, now exhibited at the Louvre in Paris in the same room as
the Mona Lisa and admired all over the world, had been taken from Venice by Napoleon
as a spoil of war after the defeat of the Serenissima and since then, despite the many
promises of the French government, has never been returned. Lowe’s team produced
a work not only to the highest technological standards, but also demonstrating refined
philological study and craftsmanship. With the most up-to-date digital instruments, hescanned the original in Paris and created a facsimile for Venice, for the refectory designed
by Andrea Palladio for which it had first been painted. Paolo Veronese had collaborated
with Palladio in the construction of the large painting, making it one with the architecture that housed it; Factum’s intervention therefore meant that the work was, in a certain
sense, finally back home in the place for which it was designed and created.
My initial goal, that first August, was to find our whether Factum Foundation
would be interested in 3D scanning all the hundreds of fragments in order to hypothesize
a virtual restoration of the great Canovian horse. To be able, at the very least, to visualise
it as a whole: how would it look if I could reassemble the plaster? The desire to approach
Factum was informed not only by the Venetian experience of a decade earlier, but also
and above all by the fact that in the meantime their skills had been refined via a series ofhigh-profile projects completed in some of the world’s richest deposits of artistic culture.
Not least among these was a project for the Victoria and Albert Museum of London forwhich they studied and made facsimiles in different materials of Antonio Canova’s Paolina
Borghese. They were, therefore, the only ones with the abilities necessary to undertake
this operation. Lowe didn’t hesitate and, during the same phone call, he promised methat he would come as soon as possible. A few months later, standing in front of thecrates, our shared feeling was one of amazement mixed with enthusiasm, incredulity, andthe desire to act immediately.
It is often the case that large projects are born from one initial element, from asingle object of study, and then grow, refining themselves as they broaden their rangeof action. They then allow surrounding case-studies to flourish and contribute to a

2 The letter of Michelangelo Muraro, Superintendent of the Galleries and Works of Art of Venice, sent to Bruno
Passamani, reads ‘Dear Passamani, after so many uncertainties, the Ministry has authorised the dismantling of theCanovian horse under the agreed conditions (storage in a dry place)…’ The letter dates to 25 January 1969.
3 Chiara Casarin, L’autenticità nell’arte contemporanea (Treviso: ZeL Edizioni, 2015).

152

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

The plaster statue in the Museo
Civico di Bassano del Grappa
prior to dismemberment in
1969. The statue was intended
for an equestrian monument
commissioned by Giuseppe
Bonaparte in 1807, which
remained unfinished at Canova’s
death in 1822.

harmonious and comprehensive project. This is how Atelier Canova was born – a namethat with merciless concision refers to the study and application of the finest digitaltechnologies in order to conserve and better understand the Canovian heritage of
Bassano del Grappa. Starting from the necessity – which could no longer be postponed– of reconstructing, or better, virtually restoring the fragments of the colossal horse in
Palazzo Bonaguro, we soon came to the conclusion that we could and should do more.
Bassano houses the most important collection of Canovian drawings in the world: 99
per cent of all those in existence. These almost 2,000 drawings collected in ten large
study albums, as well as eight travel notebooks rich in visual notes, were known to few
people. Due to the conservation requirements of the paper, these graphic masterpieces
are not often exhibited, restricted to only a few temporary loans to the multiple exhibitions on this Possagno artist who is sought after by the whole world. How, then, tonarrate this rich heritage? How to offer visitors to the Museo Civico the chance to experience this extraordinary corpus? To offer the opportunity to leaf through the drawings
in a way now permitted only to experts, to facilitate closer contact, to allow a closer
look without the barrier of glass and a frame, to transmit the feeling of the texture of
the paper chosen by Canova: these were the outcomes that we wanted to deliver to thevisitors. The creation of facsimiles immediately seemed a good solution: very high-resolution scans of every single sheet, paper made specifically to have the same rendering as
the original paper used, even covers which would be indistinguishable from those thatheld together Canova’s specimens. I chose two representative albums: Album A, that offemale positions, and Album B1, that of the male proportions – the priceless results ofCanova’s intensive studies in the academic style. In Canova’s production practice, thesedrawings would first have become maquettes in terracotta, then plasters, and finally

ATELI ER C AN OVA: A NEW V IS IO N O F A NTO NIO C A NOVA

153

marble or bronze sculptures, passing on the way throughthose wonderful and modern monochrome paintings thatconsiderably enrich Bassano’s heritage.
Until the mid-1960s, the original drawings werepermanently exhibited in the Museum and were therefore
accessible to the public during visits to the collections.
On 16 November 1966, the Superintendent Professor
Michelangelo Muraro emphasised the need to ensure thepreservation of this legacy by ordering all sheets to be
returned to, and guarded within, the Museum’s prints anddrawings cabinet ‘to prevent the light from damaging the
precious material’. As concerns about light mean that thedrawings still cannot be viewed, it was decided to create
a complete digital database in high resolution in orderto ensure optimal preservation conditions. It was to thisend that Oak Taylor Smith of the Factum Arte team cameto Bassano and began the delicate work of recording anddocumenting all the drawings.
But there was another work by Canova that could
be included in this study, demanding the same level ofattention as the drawings, and subject to similar limitations due its fragility: the famous terracotta maquette of
the Tre Grazie (Three Graces),4 the most celebrated workof Antonio Canova, modelled by the gestures of the artist’s own hands in a plastic material prior to execution inplaster and then marble. The small sculptural group, pale
brown-pink in colour, about 25 cm high, which carries
several of Canova’s fingerprints, had been kept in a glasscase for decades, only leaving the Museo Civico di Bassano for a brief exhibition held in
nearby Possagno. In the case of this small sculpture, a number of elements had to be analysed in order to assess the feasibility of the project: was it possible to have a scan so accurate and detailed as to provide minute references in case of any damage or micro-cracks
in need of restoration? Could I realise the dream of a model that could be touched by theblind or visually impaired? At that time I was preparing a project, now completed to thegreat satisfaction of interested users, for greater accessibility to the permanent collections for visitors with sensory disabilities. Otto Lowe, Adam’s son and a vital Factum collaborator, arrived in Bassano with equipment equal to that of a film production company.
He was not only able to build an archive of digital data of the maquette that was detailed
enough for even the smallest details to be preserved, but thanks to Factum’s thoroughstudy of materials and their ability to refract light, it was possible to create a facsimile ofthe maquette of the highest scientific and curatorial standard, accessible to the touch of
the blind and which could be lent to exhibitions.
This was the beginning of Atelier Canova. More than three years after my first visit
to Palazzo Bonaguro, we exhibited all the results obtained so far in the Canova Hall of
4 On the sculptural group of the Tre Grazie, see the essay by Fernando Rigon in the cited volume Antonio Canova. Atelier.
Regarding the maquette in terracotta, see C. D. Dickerson and Emerson Bower, ibid.

154

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

THIS PAGE

Otto Lowe recording the headusing photogrammetry.
Recording elements of the horseusing structured light scanning.
OPPOSITE

A model of the horse at 1:10 scale
made using 3D-printed parts, used
to inform the digital restoration.

the Museo Civico di Bassano, retracing and recounting the exciting journey of a projectthat had initially seemed too difficult to accomplish. In fact, two stories should be told
in this volume: on the one hand, that of a neoclassical sculptor who left to the wholeworld an inheritance which in some aspects is still little known, a heritage that has been
hidden and defiled, and in many cases not sufficiently protected despite the tools we have
today. On the other hand, however, this book would be the ideal opportunity to explain
how difficult it still is to solve the problems of conservation and to enhance visitors’
experiences through the creation of facsimiles that use the non-invasive techniques andmaterials required by law. Shedding new light on Antonio Canova and his creations alsomeans updating the theoretical tools of museology and museography.
The Museo Civico di Bassano houses 60 plaster casts, including sculptures andbusts, which were damaged in the bombing of April 1945. Among these casts, we findmany that clearly show the so-called repères, the black nails placed at precise points on
the sculptures, indispensable for reproducing the work.5 The manual modelling of theplaster allowed for the formation of physiognomies and accurate details that were thenenhanced by chiselling the marble in the most accurate way possible. Several, if not many,
examples of each work could be produced. Another fact of particular relevance – the5

See the essay by Adam Lowe in Antonio Canova. Atelier.

ATELI ER C AN OVA: A NEW V IS IO N O F A NTO NIO C A NOVA

155

reasons for which will shortly become clear – is the consideration that Canova, whencommissioned to create a monument in bronze, would deal with all parts of the design,from the drawing through the terracotta maquette and up to the assembly phase of thelarge plaster casts for equestrian monuments. Certainly, Canova did not directly deal
with the casting – he declared as much in some of his letters – because the bronze did
not allow him to give the famous ‘finishing touch’ that made his marbles so velvety, therecognizable sign of the artist.
The main theme of this delicate part of our work is therefore the question ofauthenticity. Can a museum exhibit work not directly by the artist? Can a director
endorse the possibility of exhibiting facsimiles? Can heritage conservation use the information preserved by replicas as a basis for decisions about restoration work? The
school of thought is not univocal, and during the development of the Atelier Canova
project there was frequent discussion on these topics. In the case of this particular
project at Bassano del Grappa, one requirement of the Code of Cultural Heritage
seemed particularly relevant: the Code holds public appreciation and understanding
to be of equal importance to conservation. It considers and inaccessible collection as
detrimental to our shared knowledge.
The creation of the two facsimiles of Antonio Canova’s drawing albums has
made it possible to exhibit them in the Canova Salon, inside elegant display cases that
preserve their beauty and functionality. Alongside them is a label reading ‘Album of
Antonio Canova’s drawings. Atelier Canova. Facsimile created by Factum Arte for theMusei Civici di Bassano del Grappa, 2018’. Close to this, on a base that seems to havebeen created specifically to receive it, is the facsimile of the terracotta maquette of the
Tre Grazie. Lacking the glass case of the original, a work of formidable perfection andidentical working just a few metres away, the maquette invites tactile encounters on
the part of visitors.

156

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

THIS PAGE

Test for the facsimile of Canova’s
Album A, a sketchbook offemale poses.
OPPOSITE

Technical display of a pointing
machine, used by Canova and his
workshop to create accurate
copies of statues, at the Museoe Gypsotheca Antonio Canova
at Possagno.

And what of the colossal plaster horse? Today, a screen in the Canova Salon showsa film with strong emotional impact, describing all of the phases of the horse’s virtual
restoration. Next to the large plaster head is a small bronze horse, a 1:10 scale reproduction, showing us how the sculpture would look if it were reassembled today.
Before I arrived in Bassano, there had been important studies conducted on thefeasibility of a physical restoration of the impressive plaster. But due to the conditions inwhich it had been preserved, in rooms that were not climatically controlled and in crates
that did not allow for the correct preservation of the fragments, it would have been impossible to carry out an intervention that was not extremely long, expensive and, no lessimportant, arbitrary. We firmly believe that Antonio Canova did not model the plastercasts for their own sake, but that these were simply models for the realization of a final
sculpture that, in this case, would have been cast in bronze by a master founder. It seems afascinating and natural consequence of the work done so far to create a monument of thishorse dedicated to Antonio Canova, to be placed at a central point of the city of Bassanodel Grappa as a tribute to the collections housed at the Musei Civici and in memory ofthe donation that his half-brother Giambattista Sartori Canova made in 1858 to the city.
Almost two hundred years after the sculptor’s death and exactly two hundred years fromthe creation of the horse in plaster (and fifty years after its destruction in 1969), this celebration stands out as a moment of great openness to the world of Canova’s background,creating an opportunity for new awareness about the necessity to update the methodologies of interpreting and enjoying our cultural heritage via state-of-the-art technologies.

ATELI ER C AN OVA: A NEW V IS IO N O F A NTO NIO C A NOVA

157

RESTORING THE CORPUS
OF ARCHIE CRESWELL
William Owen

William Owen is a founderand partner at Made by Many,a company of designers,
engineers and inventors making
their way through the outerreaches of digital commerceand culture.

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP LEFT

Pendentives of dome of themosque of al-Mahmudiyya, Cairo.
Dome of the mausoleum of
Mamluk Amir Qawsun.
Pendentive of dome in themausoleum of al-Sawabi, Cairo.
Minaret of the mosque of Ahmad
Ibn Tulun, Cairo.

158

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

I

n 1958 Archie Creswell wrote to the art connoisseur and collector Bernard Berensonthat ‘Following my principle – the only sound one – of always going back to original
sources, I had photographs made of about 14 pp of the MS of Ibn Asakir preserved at
Damascus which no orientalist, even those living on the spot, had thought of doing, andthe result was a pricked bubble’.1
And so he settled a decades-old debate about the origins of the Umayyad Great
Mosque in Damascus: it was an original Islamic building, not a conversion of an earlier
Byzantine church.
Creswell’s first principle is a good one, but sometimes hard to follow when theoriginal source is packed away, undigitised or uncatalogued, in a library stack or museum vault. Our understanding of great works becomes immeasurably greater when
they – and their records and representations – are connected with the objects, ideas andindividuals with which they are associated; and yet we spend much more time, moneyand effort on recording the individual artefact than we do on works about those artefacts
or the many components that form a complete study or body of work. This might bebecause until quite recently, the cost has been too great for items considered awkwardly
numerous and relatively prosaic.
Our opportunity now is to appreciate the potential of the digital archive to remove the kind of physical constraints that Creswell overcame through his despatch toDamascus for copies of the Hadiths of Ibn Asakir; it’s a way of bringing together any
variant of a work or group of works, across both time and space, no matter what their
original physical form.
The benefits of reconnecting fragmented works through digitisation have become
evident in practice. Factum Arte has made successful demonstrations by recording andremaking the scattered parts of the tomb of Seti I and by reuniting as facsimiles the
16 paintings that once formed the Polittico Griffoni in Bologna; at the Cini Foundation,
meanwhile, it transformed millions of photographs of the art of the Veneto into a digitalarchive. Made by Many has redirected the lessons it learned in making the world’s largest
digital archive of advertising to one of the great photographic collections, creating prototypes that experiment with ways in which a collection can be organised according tothemes, narratives and personalities.2 These are early steps towards the high ambition ofdigitising the entire output of an individual mind or collective cultural impulse.

1 Archie Creswell, letter to Bernard Berenson, 31 January 1958. Berenson Archive, Villa I Tatti, Harvard Library.
2 Made by Many worked with the V&A through 2015–17 to redefine its digital strategy and build a new digital platform.
In the course of that work we created a number of prototypes that demonstrated ways in which the photographic collection(recently enlarged by the acquisition of the Royal Photographic Society collection) could be made accessible online.

159

By reuniting the corpus and its many components, digital representation and distribution enables scholars to drive new paths through it and see the individual pieces in
the context of the whole, often for the first time. The result is inevitably illuminating,producing new ways of seeing and making new connections.
Creswell own life’s work is a good case in point.
Over 61 years from 1912 to 1973, Archie Creswell created a body of work thatwas instrumental in establishing Islamic Studies as an academic discipline. Using his
own detailed survey drawings and introducing the art of photography to the makingof archeological records, Creswell measured and analysed hundreds of significant examples of Early, Medieval and Ottoman Islamic sites in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia,
Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and, most extensively, in Egypt. His conclusions were informed by studying the writings of Arab antiquarians and sometimes scoffing the thinly
evidenced theories of his European contemporaries. The result was a panoptic history
of Islamic architecture and comprehensive bibliography of Islamic arts, crafts, sciences
and architecture.
Creswell’s work now lies in fragments, some large, others small, mostly hidden;
it is spread across half a dozen of the world’s leading museums and libraries in a stateof mean, partial or restricted accessibility. The component parts are three major
works of scholarship, numerous essays, innumerable bibliographies, thousands of
topographical photographs, precise survey notes, sketches and drawings, precis andworkplans, correspondence with institutions and patrons, and an immense collection of rare books.
These scattered pieces are now destined to be reconnected, returned to theirproper order and laid alongside each other, not simply so that we can read both sides of
Creswell’s correspondence at the same time and in the same place – which would be abonus – but to appreciate the extensive and intricate knowledge embodied within thesum of the work.
Creswell’s legacy is not well known beyond a circle of historians of Islamicarchitecture and of photography, primarily in his adopted home of Egypt, where
he taught for six decades, but also in Europe and the United States. If it were notfor the three archival digital records of his photographic prints at the Victoria andAlbert Museum, Harvard Library and Ashmolean Museum, his legacy would be virtually obliterated.3 Even now, although each of these institutions has digitised thephotographic records, these are available to the public at inadequate resolution; theAshmolean Museum has withdrawn public access. Until very recently, none of theletters, documents or drawings were digitised and many were not even catalogued.
This may soon be changing in a programme of work that aims to create a public digital record of Creswell’s entire output.
The most important component of the work, Creswell’s books – sumptuous,
rare and expensive – are all out of print. His masterwork, the elephant folio twovolume Early Muslim Architecture, sponsored by King Fu’ad and published by Oxford
University Press in 1932 and 1940, was revised for a 1969 edition and last reprinted in
New York in 1979; the two-volume The Muslim Architecture of Egypt published by OUP
in 1952–59 was an edition limited to just 550 copies gorgeously printed in 13 colours,
3 The largest collection of Creswell’s prints is at the American University of Cairo; it was until very recently undigitisedwith only a small part available online.

160

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

Portrait of K. A. C. Creswell.

an example of which is advertised for sale at time ofwriting for just under £16,000; The Mosques of Egypt(1946, with several reprints, the last in 1992), writtenwith Al-Bakouri and Ahmad Hassan, is available for between £2,000 and £5,000 from good antiquarian booksellers; the relatively compact Pelican edition of A Short
Account of Early Muslim Architecture is easier and cheaper
to come by, especially the Beirut edition; A Bibliographyof the Architecture, Arts and Crafts of Islam (begun in 1912,
completed in 1960, and published by AUC in 1961) has
been digitised in two different editions by Google Books
but neither has been distributed as an eBook. The assiduous cataloguer of Creswell’s life’s work will find afurther 60 academic essays and articles in vintage periodicals and academic journals.
The last immensely valuable piece, Creswell’s vast personal library of rare books on
Islamic arts, remains intact in his former study at the American University of Cairo.
I first stumbled across K. A. C. Creswell in 2015 when my company, Made byMany, was advising the V&A on its digital strategy. While examining the photographycollection in the digital archive, I found a photograph of a colonnaded apse in Byzantine
style that I recognised from a visit to Aleppo in 2004. The caption – ‘A view of Syria’and ‘Interior looking south’ – was uninformative and the photographer, Creswell, unfamiliar. A quick Google search turned up an identical image in the Harvard Librarycollection; this was an inferior reproduction at low resolution and seemingly inverted
from the negative but, unlike the V&A example, was correctly identified as the madrassa al-Halawiyya. There I found two more interior and two exterior photographsof the madrassa, also by Creswell. Looking further in both the Harvard Library andV&A there were hundreds of his views of sites in Aleppo taken between 1916 and1919. In 2015, at the height of the civil war and with the city undergoing widespreaddevastation, one could see immediately the value of the archive as a record for future
restoration or reconstruction.
At the V&A, it turned out that there were others interested in Creswell and hiswork. Erika Lederman, a photography curator, was researching the correspondence
and transactions that described Creswell’s relationship with the V&A. In the 1920s,
during visits to London he had given talks on Islamic architecture that had packed
out the museum’s lecture theatre. Omniya Abdel Barr, an Islamic scholar, was using
Creswell’s photographs to identify ornament and fixtures looted from Mamluk sites in
Cairo after the 2011 uprising.
The story unfolded. There were, it transpired, 3,374 of Creswell’s photographic
prints in the V&A, all digitised, but imperfectly. Most of the images online were
low-resolution versions of high-resolution masters. The mounts were only partially
recorded and the descriptions they contained were absent from the digital catalogue.
That single digital record of the apse in the madrassa embodied both the value of thecollection and the constraints imposed by its incomplete recording and accessibility:
when we obtained a high-resolution image of the apse and enhanced it, an apparently
black tablet above a shrine was revealed to have an inscription – the only asymmetricsubject on the image – that confirmed it was the V&A print that was inverted, probably by Creswell who did all of his own darkroom work; the caption, ‘Interior looking

RESTORI NG T H E CO R P U S O F A R CH IE CR ES W EL L

161

south’, should have read ‘west’; the name of the site wasrecorded on the mount and missing from the catalogue;
one of the six known images of the site was missing, aprint of the fabulous wooden mihrab in the madrassa;
this was later rediscovered in a file inside a cabinet, stillundigitised, now catalogued.
Abdel Barr made an audit of the complete known
Creswell photographic archives; it turned out that the
V&A holdings were a part of a corpus of some 12,000
images scattered across at least six institutions in threecontinents. The American University in Cairo has thelargest portion, 7,850 prints and some negatives; others
are at the Harvard Fine Arts Library in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the Berenson Archive at Villa I Tatti in
Florence and (a smaller collection of prints) at the Met
in New York and in private collections in Cairo. Creswell willed his 8,000 or so large
glass and plastic negatives to the Ashmolean Museum, and in 1974, one year after his
death, they were transported from Cairo to Oxford on a Royal Navy destroyer via Port
Said and Portsmouth. The Berenson Archive has Creswell’s letters to Bernard and Mary
Berenson, who supported Creswell financially over many years, while the Ashmolean
has Berenson’s replies to Creswell as well as an extensive collection of other correspondence, survey notes and sketches. This is soon to be transferred to an institution within
the University of Oxford that might be better suited to keeping it: the Bodleian Library.
The urgent question now began to arise: ‘What if these could all be brought together as asingle archive of Creswell’s work, including the content of the great books?’This question begs others, of course: Who was Archie Creswell and what is
the sum of his achievement? Giving him his full title, Sir Keppel Archibald Cameron
Creswell, he was an anachronism, a Victorian living in the 20th century. He was aformidable and self-taught surveyor, historian and photographer; ‘an eccentric anddelightful personality’4 who ‘could not abide any form of cruelty’; a perfectionist
and a dandy, vain and apparently insecure; an occultist, imperialist, anti-semite andnoisy racist;5 he was funded in part by wealthy Americans, and the cost of producing
his books was affrayed by the patronage of two Kings of Egypt, where he lived andtaught for most of his working life. A Briton, he remained in Cairo through the Suez
crisis but lost his living at King Fa’ud University only to find another for himself andhis library at the American University in Cairo. Sometimes feted and lately knighted
by his own country, he is today largely unknown there, but in death he was able tocommand the resources of the British Navy to safeguard his archive. (This last act
may have been at the behest of Robert Hamilton, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museumfrom 1962–72).
There is a friendly but revealingly frank memoir of Creswell by Hamilton, published by the British Academy after Creswell’s death in 1974.6 It tells us, in summary, that

THIS PAGE

The apse at the madrassa
al-Halawiyya as shown in the
prototype for a digitised archive.
OPPOSITE

The apse at the madrassa
al-Halawiyya photographed by
Creswell, c. 1919.

Archie was born in London in 1879 and educated at Westminster School, where he excelled at mathematics and physical fitness. He trained as an electrical engineer, working
for Siemens, and developed an interest in photography (note his background in technicalsciences rather than the humanities). He was a member of Golden Dawn, the occult masonic sect that included W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Aleister Crowley and others, where
Creswell nurtured an enthusiasm for the Qaballah and ancient Egyptian mysticism. In an
unsuccessful application to join the Archaeological Survey of India in 1914, he expressed
his appreciation for Muhammedan – but explicitly not Hindu – architecture. On theoutbreak of war he joined the Royal Flying Corps and in 1916 was posted to Palestine;
three years later he was made General Allenby’s inspector of monuments in the occupied
territories. Stationed in Aleppo initially, this set him on a lifelong career of surveying,recording and analysing buildings out of which evolved his detailed explanations of theorigin, chronology and form of Islamic architecture.
Creswell was not an a priori speculator. Everything he did was grounded in fact
and the facts were often represented in numbers. ‘Archaeology was for him an empirical discipline directed strictly to measurable facts.’7 The words methodical and meticulous are often applied to his work, with the criticism that his ideas were too rigidly
fixed in chronology and in the form of architecture rather than its place in peoples’
lives: humans are present in his photographs for the purposes of providing scale, notcharacter. The letter from Creswell to Bernard Berenson in 1958 concerning the origins of the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus says more about both his method
and motivation; it records his victory in a dispute with Réné Dussard, Watzinger and
7

Ibid.

4 Margaret S. Drower, Flinders Petrie:A Life in Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995 [1985]), 348.
5 R. W. Hamilton, ‘Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell’, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/
60p459.pdf, accessed 4 January 2020.
6 Ibid.

162

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGERESTORI NG T H E CO R P U S O F A R CH IE CR ES W EL L

163

OPPOSITE

Prototype of homepage for the
Creswell digital archive created for
the V&A in 2017.
Prototype page for Creswell digitalarchive created for the V&A in2017.

Wulzinger, Lammans, Herzfeld, Marcais and Strzygowski, all of whom had proposedor repeated the ‘impossible theory’ that the present mosque is merely the church of St
John the Baptist ‘converted’.8
Creswell discovered that eight out of nine of the varying versions of Ibn Asakir’s
original manuscript stated that the church remained a church, until al-Walid pulled it
down, with one varying version, according to which the church was converted:
By a curious fatality, Ibn [Sharkir, who based his history of Damascus on Ibn
Asakir’s hadith] has incorporated this divergent version only, and Quatremère’stranslation has given it 120 years of publicity.
You will find all this in detail in my fourth chapter, and many other things, for example
architecture… and argument to show that a church like the sanctuary of the Great Mosque
can never have existed.9
This is Creswell as both ‘a perfect model of scholarly devotion, research, persistence
and acumen’,10 and also an impish, proud and gleeful intellectual jouster. In the
fourth chapter of Early Muslim Architecture he devotes 4 out of 13 pages on the Great
Mosque to this particular theme, recording his researches, debunking his more elegant, aesthetically inclined and less scientific (or scientist) academic opponents andapplying his ‘elegant decisive draughtsmanship and calligraphy’ to personally surveyed plans and elevations and his technically precise and carefully composed – factual – photographs.
And so while there might be an excess of emphasis on the origins of the building,there is also a complete and accurate record of its form in different media, some of which
is present in the books, most of which remains in museum storage.
Oleg Grabar, who edited an entire edition issue of the journal Muqarnas11 devoted
to Creswell and his work, is very precise about the limitations and strengths that makethis a sound foundation of scholarship – to be built on – and therefore (if we project
his views forward thirty years) a grounding that should be made available in each of its
many parts online: photographs, written descriptions, drawings, diagrams, sources, correspondence, etc.
It is essentially a collection of monographs on individual monuments, it is nota history of early Islamic architecture … it avoids hypotheses and prefers thepractical concrete statement to the theory and to the interpretation …
The book is a superb dictionary of forms and of monuments.
…
Creswell shares with the Dictionnaire Larousse two unusual features… that it
is indispensable for so much more than the definition of words and that it needs
constant revision … Creswell did not lie or fudge willingly and rarely interpreted
wittingly. He may not have said everything there was to be said, but it is always
8 The author can attest that in the 21st century this story is still repeated by guides to the Great Mosque.
9 Creswell to Berenson, 31 January 1958.
10 Donald N. Wilber, review of ‘The Muslim Architecture of Egypt, I. Ikhsh ds and Fa-t.imids, A.D. 939–1171’ by K. A.
C. Creswell, The Art Bulletin,vol. 36, no. 4 (December 1954).
11 Oleg Grabar (ed.), ‘K. A. C. Creswell and His Legacy’, Muqarnas, an Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture, vol. 8(Leiden: E J Brill, 1991).

164

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGERESTORI NG T H E CO R P U S O F A R CH IE CR ES W EL L

165

possible to add new information, new facts, even new interpretations, provided
they are documented in the same careful and footnoted manner.12
Grabar continues:
In short, Creswell’s books are always perfectible, they are never finished. The
heavy green bindings are not protectors of an absolute and definitive truth,
but holders of a constantly evolving knowledge. Just as he annotated the booksof others, so are we allowed to annotate his, to add bibliographies at the endof his long lists, to modify dimensions or change plans as new or alternative
information arises.
Today, the collective development of this knowledge is tied to the timescales andvicissitudes of conventional academic discourse – the book, the journal and theconference – as well as being hidebound by inadequate access to the original work. This
is why a digital archive of Creswell’s complete works is such an attractive proposition.
Those who are able to study them will no longer be islands of individual thought – they
will be able to connect to each other and share their own additions or revisions. Not
only is the complete work absent today from public view, but so are the connections
that could be made between Creswell’s foundation and contemporary Islamic studies.
Each of its parts can be brought together without being subject to the rationing necessitated by print. Creswell’s entire photographic sets on each site can be made available(there are over two dozen of the Great Mosque; he spent 49 days photographing themosque at Al Azhar, Cairo, of which only a fraction of the dozens of images made appear in the printed edition).
Independently of Grabar’s position, a team loosely centred around the V&A, AUC
and Made by Many and including representatives of the Berenson Library and Ashmoleancame to the same conclusion that the site or monument is the unifying element, the basic
atomic matter and organising principle of all of Creswell’s work. Made by Many createda design prototype that tested this assumption alongside a secondary classification according to chronology, typology, material form and location (as in Ayyubid/madrassa/
dome/Aleppo). The prototype explored how each of the different representations of
the site in text or image – wherever they may be held and accessed, via APIs or locally –could be brought together as a coherent body and related to relevant thematic commentaries or analysis.
Alongside proving the concept, a grant from the Barakat Trust has enabled Omniya
Abdel Barr to pursue the digitisation of the keystone photographic archive across each of
the five main holding institutions. All of the 2,810 prints at the Berenson Archive weredigitised at high resolution in 2019; in 2020, the letters and other documents will follow.
Digitisation and indexing of the 7,850 prints and negatives at the American University in
Cairo is well under way under the direction of photography curator Ola Seif, and should
be completed in 2020.
The gap between digitising the images and making them accessible to the public
is a wide one. The value of a public digital Creswell archive can be released in three
12 Oleg Grabar in International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (April 1972), in ref. Early Muslim Architecture,
2nd edition 1969.

166

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

ways: first, by making the entire record of photographic images available; second, byconnecting the photographic site records to available texts, plans and survey drawings,
notes, correspondence, etc.; third, by enabling a layer of public annotation, commentaryor revision to the record index or Creswell’s original texts.
The challenges now facing the team working on the archive are not really technical but ones of organisation, fundraising, design and diplomacy – keeping five institutions in four countries aligned – and in particular, obtaining the release of any residual
rights. The immediate priority is to make the complete collection of photographic
images available to the public at the highest available resolution through a common
server or API13 protocols, viewable and annotated using iiiF open source standards,14
and to implement a proposal for a common standard for indexing – a substantial task –alongside translation from English to Arabic and the enabling of annotation of images
or public commentaries.
Discussions are to commence with Oxford University Press to secure access tocopyrighted material. Further conversations will be needed following the transfer of themain archive of documents from the Ashmolean to the Bodleian Library. When funds
become available, we can start work on implementing common storage and indexing andon the design of the public archive. This is an enticing challenge.
The huge presence of the books as artistic objects in their own right raises interesting questions about the design of a digital archive. Their literal size and heft was ameasure of the huge physical and intellectual effort that had gone into their production.
Creswell demanded and got the highest standards of printing and design. However, weare not producing facsimiles of gorgeous books, but bringing together a body of knowledge.The opportunity we have to solve is to aspire to the same virtues of craft and carefulmeasure in new ways, to represent adequately the beauty of the subject matter and toenable the making of the most rewarding pathways through it.

13 Application Programming Interface.
14 International Image Interoperability Framework.

RESTORI NG T H E CO R P U S O F A R CH IE CR ES W EL L

167

THE RAPHAEL CARTOONS AT THE V&A:
CLOSE-RANGE DIGITISATION
AT A MONUMENTAL SCALE
Carlos Bayod Lucini
Carlos Bayod Lucini is
an architect and Project
Director at Factum Foundation,
where he is responsible forthe digitisation of paintingsand oversaw the recording of
the Polittico Griffoni (2012–15).
He is Adjunct Professor ofHistoric Preservation at
Columbia University and isa PhD candidate at Madrid’s
Universidad Autónoma, where
he is writing a thesis on therelief of paintings.

OPPOSITE

The Cartoons were recorded using
panoramic photography, infra-red
recording, and the Lucida 3D
Scanner, 2019. © Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II.

168

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGEIn August 2019, a team of 3D-scanning and photography specialists from Factum
Foundation carried out the recording of the Raphael Cartoons at the Victoria andAlbert Museum in London, probably the most important series of artworks from the
Italian Renaissance in the UK, which have been loaned to the Museum by Her Majesty
the Queen from the Royal Collection. This project was one of Factum Foundation’s mostambitious digitisation projects undertaken to date, more logistically complex even than
the recording at the Prado in 2019 of the entire series of Goya’s Black Paintings, andhas broached new frontiers in the large-scale, high-resolution digital documentation of
low-relief surfaces.
The project employed non-contact digital technology to capture detailed information
for the surfaces of the seven monumental Cartoons, and provided the original and processeddata to the V&A for study and dissemination. In the first phase of the project, a total area of
about 115 square metres was digitised using two complementary methods: four Lucida 3D
Scanners were employed simultaneously to record the relief of the Cartoons at a resolutionof 100 microns (generating render images at 254 dpi at 1:1 scale), and panoramic photography was employed to obtain accurate colour and infra-red information (with a capture resolution of 400–450 dpi at 1:1 scale).The Lucida 3D Scanners were fixed and secured to scaffolding towers, reaching a maximum scanning height of about 5.5 m and with the laser head
positioned at a constant scanning distance of 10 cm from the surface of the artworks. Scannerstability was essential to guarantee the highest level of safety and optimal data quality.
In order to complete the recordings, a team of specialists from Factum Foundation
worked around the clock in three shifts for a period of five weeks, during which time thegallery was closed to the public. By following a carefully planned schedule it was possible
to coordinate the recording of the Cartoons with the removal and replacement of thevast frames, production of conservation condition reports and other tasks carried out by
the Museum’s staff. Fluent communication and coordination between the different teams
was key to the success of this first phase of the project.
The second phase, underway at the time of writing, consists of processing the digital information captured on site in order to prepare data sets in a format compatible
with different applications. In order to do this, the raw files have to be edited and stitched
together to compose full panoramas. Since the 3D data recorded by the Lucida system isgenerated as greyscale depth-map and shaded images, it is possible to employ panoramiccomposite software like PTGui to align the tiles; a similar semi-automatic process isfollowed with the photography and infra-red images. As a result of these stitching operations, three panoramas are generated for each Cartoon: a 3D render panorama (which
is used as a base), a colour panorama and an infra-red panorama, each with a final resolution of 300 dpi at 1:1 scale.
169

THIS PAGE

Making a facsimile of Raphael’s
Sacrifice at Lystra, a tapestry cartoon
recorded by Factum at the Victoria
and Albert Museum, London, 2020.
The Cartoons have been loaned
from the Royal Collection by Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
OPPOSITE

Putting the finishing touches tothe re-creation of Raphael’s
Christ Falls on the Route to Calvary(‘Lo Spasimo’, c. 1517), 2019.

Viewing files like these presents its own problems. Simply to open one file of
40GB (the size of one of these panoramas) will freeze an ordinary computer for sometime, and to compare three different datasets is even more memory-intensive. But
such multi-layered navigation is key to understanding the surface of complex artworks
like the Cartoons. Thanks to the multi-layered browser, an application that has beendeveloped and perfected by the Factum Foundation in the last years, paintings andother low-relief artifacts can now be studied and shared as the complex subjects thatthey are, in ways that render their historic trajectories evident and traceable. Thisability to focus on a specific detail and to turn the different layers (relief, colour andinfra-red information) off and on in an intuitive way constitutes a radical new way of
approaching the study of pictorial art.
The vast amount of data from the recording of the Raphael Cartoons gives riseto practical questions that go beyond the complexity of the scanning itself. How can arecording project of this scale transform the way the data is processed, stored, disseminated and displayed? To what extent can modern technology bring to life previously
unknown capabilities and qualities of an object? While the monitoring and safeguardingof a work of art through new technologies and high-resolution recording methods involves decisions that can only be made by the owner of the object, an organisation like
Factum Foundation can contribute to this process by developing innovative, repeatableprocesses to ensure imaginative, consistent and secure digitization. Factum software engineers are continually working to improve the automated processing of data: to speed
up processes, improve alignment, and understand and exploit the elasticity of the cloudin which the data is stored and through which it is processed. The recording, processing
and outputting of data from the Raphael Cartoons project has proved an important spurto the development of such processes, opening the field for new reflection on the role of
AI in the preservation of cultural heritage.
170

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

TH E R A P H A EL C A RTO O NS AT T H E V &A

171

MALEVICH’S BLACK SQUARE
Eva Rosenthal

This significant project wasstrongly supported by thegovernance of the State
Tretyakov Gallery andrealized thanks to the manyefforts of their departments
and staff. The researchcomponent was provided
by the Advanced Research
Department of the State
Tretyakov Gallery, particularly
Yulia Dyakonova, Irina Kasatkina,
Andrey Mareev, Nikolay
Mitrakov, Kirill Shumikhin andYulian Khalturin as Head of the
Department.
Eva Rosenthal has beenleading Factum Foundation’s
digitisation and training
programmes in Russia since2015, including the recordingof tombstones at KalaKoreysh (Dagestan) and thephotography of the Ferapontov
Monastery (Vologda district).

OPPOSITE

Render showing the 3D relief(right) and colour registered onto
3D relief (left) for Malevich’s Black
Square (1915).

172

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGEL

ook closely at the surface of Kazimir Malevich’s original Black Square from 1915
and you will see that the black paint is crisscrossed by a network of fine cracks thatreveal the bright colours of earlier compositions below. Black Square’s extraordinary
texture is evidence of the urgency with which Malevich created this ‘first’ Suprematist
work – the white paint did not even have time to dry before the black was applied.
Cracks started forming soon after the painting was finished, to such a degree that theartist painted another version of Black Square in 1929.
The Black Square’s surface can be appreciated in an intriguingly different way when
its colour is ‘removed’. This is what Factum Foundation did in 2018 as part of an innovative research project with the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow). With enthusiasm
from both sides and an unusual approach to 3D scanning, the initiative was an excellent
example of international cooperation in the arts. A Factum team used a high-resolution
laser scanner – the custom-built Lucida 3D Scanner – to isolate the 3D texture of Black
Square (1915). The render of the 3D data uncovered cracks and brushstrokes alike inminute detail, enriching our understanding of the creation and history of this iconic
work. As part of the recording, the team also captured a high-resolution colour image
that was later precisely registered or ‘mapped’ onto the 3D to create a ‘digital facsimile’of the painting.
When studying a painting like the Black Square, however, one must look beyond
the surface. In 2015, X-ray images taken by the Advanced Research Department at the
Tretyakov Gallery revealed a series of abstract shapes below the black square that were interpreted as belonging to at least two different compositions.With improved technology in2018, the Tretyakov Gallery was able to produce higher-resolution X-ray and infrared data,
which was mapped onto the ‘digital facsimile’ to create a ‘multi-layered archive’ – a multidimensional record that stores extant information on a work of art in one place, making iteasier to access data from different time periods and of different types.
The Tretyakov Gallery/Factum project went one step further. If the digital images– colour, 3D, infrared and X-ray – are loaded into one of Factum’s custom data viewers,
the layers of information can be seen in relation to one another rather than in isolation.
For instance, it’s now possible to study Factum’s colour data showing the vivid blues,
yellows, greens and reds visible through the cracks simultaneously with the X-ray image
revealing the works underneath. Beyond its usefulness for monitoring the painting’s condition, the multi-layered ‘digital facsimile’ has become an important tool for specialists
at the Tretyakov Gallery working to decipher the hidden compositions.
It was only in the 1970s that art historical research unequivocally demonstrated thatthe ‘original’ Black Square was painted in 1915, rather than in 1913 as the artist wanted
the world to believe. More than forty years later, Malevich’s avant-garde masterpiece
173continues to challenge preconceptions about its genesis, history and meaning within theartist’s oeuvre. The experimental approach facilitated by the ‘digital facsimile’ and data
viewer is allowing researchers at the Tretyakov Gallery to compare and juxtapose thepainting’s multiple layers – a novel way of looking at the Black Square that may in timekindle new answers to the complex questions it still poses.

THIS PAGE

Eva Rosenthal recording the relief
surface of Black Square in the State
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2018.
© State Tretyakov Gallery.
Carlos Bayod Lucini recording with
the Lucida 3D Scanner. © State
Tretyakov Gallery.
OPPOSITE

3D and colour data for Black Square(1915).

174

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

M A L EV ICH ’S B L ACK S Q U A RE

175

Re-SEARCH
Clare Foster

Clare L. E. Foster is a British
Academy Post-Doctoral
Fellow at CRASSH looking at
the Western concept of the‘original’. An affiliated lecturer
in the Faculty of History at
Cambridge, she has taught
theatre, film and classicalreception studies at Harvard,
UCLA, UCL, Birkbeck andCambridge. From 1994–2009
she was a full-time screenwriter
based in Los Angeles. She
currently runs the ‘ReNetwork’, an interdisciplinary
research network investigating
how and why cultures repeat,
reframe, restage, remember,etc. and why this is a topicalquestion in a digital era.

OPPOSITE

Photography students from ISIA,
Urbino, use photogrammetry torecord busts and statues in the
Palazzo Grimani, Venice, 2019.

176

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

A

nyone who visits Factum’s workshops in Madrid can feel the excitement that
underpins the work that is going on. But this activity has yet to be systematically researched: that is, described, studied, transmitted to others, and given
theoretical foundation. This matters because the recording and rematerialising software and hardware that Factum Arte has bespoke-designed arguably represents a revolutionary change in the context in which all artworks now exist. The ability to capture
an exact material state in the form of digital data, and to re-produce it exactly, again
and again, opens new channels of access and ownership. Use-values multiply; potential
future applications expand. Stakeholders are re-empowered to engage once more withworks that have been lost, damaged, sold, or removed. Most obviously, this technology
promises to transform the fields of preservation and conservation. Institutions like
Britain’s National Gallery and the British Museum are now beginning to record theirworks using Factum’s scanners, whether as a guard against future damage, prior toirreversible processes of ‘restoration’, or simply so that visitors can continue to experience works without the physical conditions of display causing further deterioration.
But art history departments, and art colleges, are not yet pushing for policy change
towards recording as a national arts funding priority, as part of their mandate to preserve. Nor are there many calls, yet, for replicas to be made so that artworks whoseparts have been separated, or that have been deracinated from crucial contexts, canbe appreciated once more in their original state. Why is there not more celebrationthat a material object can now co-exist with its compositional digital data, as a kind of
re-performable text, or score? Instead, replication is associated with fakery, danger,
and a lessening of value.
Part of Factum’s contribution to knowledge, in the broadest sense, has been to draw
attention to how many different kinds of values are simultaneously at play in art objects.
Once copies can be made that are materially identical to originals, attention inevitably
turns to the people who engage with, care about, and care for these objects, and how
many different (often conflicting) kinds of stakes are involved: owners, curators, authors,authorities, communities. The idea of an ‘original’ is revealed as a highly social phenomenon, agentive, culturally and historically specific (to the West and the 19th century), anda complex nexus of commercial and attributed values. A focus on original, unique, verifiable objects is also the foundation of many of our modern academic disciplines, which,fighting to be taken seriously in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, needed above all
to have a clear and distinguishable subject matter. Factum’s work demonstrates the needto rethink this foundational object-focus in a digital world – i.e. a world of reproduction
and recognition, with entirely new potentials of equivalence, access, identity and existingin an interactively- and continuously-produced public sphere. Here what matters is why,177

Students from Columbia’s
Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation record
a tiled wall within the Casa de
Pilatos, Seville (2018), as part of
the annual Advanced Preservation
Technology Studio taught atColumbia and on-site by membersof the Factum team.

need, or question, rather than what was last said in this or that secondary literature. But
it is usually left to individuals to take the initiative to raise the funds piecemeal for one-off
temporary research projects at such centres, from grant-giving bodies such as the ERC,
UKRI, Leverhulme or other major organisations. This can be as labour-intensive andrisky an investment of time as the Factum Foundation’s own direct fundraising efforts toreconstruct and enable the restitution of a specific art object.
The scale of the potentials and stakes involved here deserve attention beyond
such random processes of individual initiative. There needs to be a systematic thinking
through of who should own digital data, and how it is to be preserved for the long term.
Commercial operations, under the guise of protection and preservation, are already recording at extremely low levels of quality, or using methods that damage original objects.
They are eager to be the first to claim ownership of rights to datasets about objects andbuildings of world heritage status for which no clear legal framework exists. It is worth
asking how academics, bound by their national and institutional competitive funding priorities, could better support understanding of these profound global changes, of the newtheoretical questions being raised, and of the unprecedented ethical issues and risks involved. How can research become more responsive to rapid, urgent change? If we could
figure this out, what Factum is learning by doing would, perhaps, already be at the centreof our debates.

and above all, for whom, something is being redisplayed, reframed, revisioned, re-enacted,
revived, replaced, reconsidered, restored, rematerialized, etc.
For academic disciplines, a foundational preoccupation with ‘originals’ has persisted partly because of the economic structure of academic institutions. Principles ofacademic validation and evaluation are driven by tradition. Competing disciplines, anxious to establish themselves and then to demonstrate continuing relevance, defend theirterritories. Publishers need distinct markets to appeal to, which sustains disciplinary
categories. Interdisciplinarity, although highly valued in theory, in practice is the luxuryof those who already have security in some disciplinary base or another and can afford
to do something for which there is no existing teaching demand. So academic environments, in direct contrast to business environments, have inbuilt reasons to be resistant tochange. They tend to be precedent-driven, and risk-averse. This makes them ill-equipped
to cope swiftly with the changes brought about by the digital era – until recently, associated with science and technology rather than the arts and humanities. Unsurprisingly,
art historians and computer scientists have entirely separate funding streams and systems of validation: they exist in discrete ecosystems or communities of knowledge, using
often incompatible vocabularies, skillsets, and outputs. Factum’s work, an extraordinary
marriage between applied technology and the art world, not only falls outside any one
discipline’s purview, but struggles to be recognised against this long-naturalised division:indeed, it troubles that distinction itself. But the fact it promises to challenge some of theassumptions on which current disciplinary traditions are based is one of its values. Likeworld-changing digital practices of other kinds, it helps alert the Arts and Humanities tothe need to rethink its conventional approaches, categories and concepts. Many universities, and some cities, have centres or departments for interdisciplinary study, designed
specifically to fund research that crosses disciplinary boundaries: that follows a current
178

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

R e - S EA R CH

179

RETHINKING OUR THINKINGABOUT THINKING: EPISTEMOLOGY,ARCHITECTURE, AND WORLD
Brian Cantwell Smith
Adapted and extracted from
Brian Cantwell Smith, The
Promise of Artificial Intelligence:
Reckoning and Judgment(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,2019). Henceforth Promise.
Brian Cantwell Smith is Reid
Hoffman Professor of Artificial
Intelligence and the Human in
the Faculty of Information at
the University of Toronto. He
came to Toronto as Dean of
the Faculty in 2003, following
positions at Xerox PARC,
Stanford, the University ofIndiana, and Duke. He was afounder of the Stanford Centerfor the Study of Language andInformation, first Presidentof Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility, andPresident of the Society for
Philosophy and Psychology.

There is an idea – associated with Descartes, but of much longer pedigree – thatthinking, at its best, involves moving rationally and logically between and among‘clear and distinct’ ideas: ideas with unambiguous meanings, determinate extensions, and context-independent implications. For centuries this idea has served scienceand mathematics well; it has also had enormous impact on contemporary models of epistemology. The idea also underwrote the development of the modern computer, whose
foundations are formulated in terms of digital states (modeled on ones and zeroes),discrete symbols, and strict and unambiguous logic. In turn, the success of computation
has reinforced the sense that logical moves among discrete conceptual ideas must be an
intrinsic norm on rationality.
This ‘logicist’ conception of rationality holds such sway in the contemporary intellectual imagination, in fact, that those who believe that human mental life is not best
or fully captured by it often conclude that there must be more to ‘good thinking’ thanrationality – turning for additional resources to such alternative categories as emotion,affect, and qualia. Others, such as devotees of the enactive and embodiment camps ofcognitive science, argue that focusing on the mind as a way to understand intelligence isitself misguided.
But these projects that focus on alternatives are relatively recent. It is no surprisethat the first serious attempts to model human thought on computers, in the first wave
of artificial intelligence (famously dubbed ‘Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence’,or GOFAI, by philosopher John Haugeland), developed architectures to implement theclassical model of discrete conceptualist thinking. Perhaps the most extreme examples
were theorem provers and other systems explicitly based on formal logic. But even whensome of the most restrictive strictures of logic were eased, such as in the replacementof logical theorem-proving with a more practically-oriented idea of ‘satisficing’,1 mostof the logicist conception was retained: the idea that thinking involved clearly separable
concepts, represented in discrete symbols, on the model of discrete words in a language.

OPPOSITE

Fig. 1: Islands in Georgian Bay (amasked version of Fig. 3, with land
clearly separated from water).
Fig. 2: A computer-generated
diagram showing the shape andlayout of the islands in Figure 1.
Fig. 3: The original aerial
photographs of islands in Georgian
Bay, revealing the submarine
topology.

180

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

1 The term ‘satisficing’ is most strongly associated with Herbert Simon, an early AI pioneer who promoted the idea thatrationality was best understood as having the goal of coming to conclusions that were good enough for the purposes athand, not as aiming for logical perfection. Persuaded by Simon’s argument, and motivated by the unrealistic resources required for theorem proving, many projects in ‘first-wave’ AI research focused on the development of heuristics – methodsof coming up with practicable answers in a reasonable amount of time using modest resources. But as stated in the text,
this and other themes in first-wave AI amounted to adjustments, rather than rejections, of the classic ‘logicist’ framework.
It was not until the development of second-wave AI that logicism as a model of rationality was replaced.

181

It was assumed that the vast variety of the world could be captured by combining thesesymbols, according to the rules of a conceptual grammar, into logical complexes analogous to full sentences, on what was called a ‘compositional’ model of meaning.2

1. SECOND-WAVE AI
Recently a new computational architecture, based on networks of interconnected nodes
running parallel statistical algorithms, has transformed AI’s approach to modeling cognition. The approach was catalysed by the development of a particular architecture called‘deep learning’, though various generalized and alternative forms have been developed
within the same general architectural approach. So successful has the new approach been
to a class of previously unsolved problems that AI has entered a new phase, called ‘second-wave AI’. Second-wave architectures are now often referred to under the generallabel ‘machine learning’, but since (i) there have been proposals for machine learningsince AI’s early days, and (ii) it is presumptuous to assume that the particular form oflearning currently being investigated covers even a significant fraction of the full range ofpossible epistemic techniques to acquire knowledge and skill through study, experience,or instruction, I will use ‘second-wave AI’ as a label for the entire new class of system.
Second-wave AI systems work in a manner that is almost the exact opposite of theclassical model. Rather than using one or a small number of serial processes to carry out explicit inference over conceptually symbolic structures, these new systems consist of thousands or millions of nodes in a network or graph performing, in parallel, relatively simple
numerical calculations.Their forte is the prediction and exploration of the consequences ofhuge numbers of extremely weak correlations between and among vast numbers of numerical or statistical weights. In addition, and of great consequence, these statistical correlation
machines are capable of what is called ‘learning’. When ‘trained’ on enormous troves ofdata, they can adjust the weights used in their calculations so as to home in more and moreaccurately on the outcomes desired, and therefore reinforced, by their users and designers.
Second-wave AI techniques have been stunningly successful when applied to a variety of problems for which classical (first-wave) AI proved inadequate. Perhaps the mostdramatic successes are in the realm of perception and classification. Face recognition,
image classification, handwriting recognition, etc. are now well-developed technologies
that rely on these second-wave AI techniques. But the triumphs of second-wave AI are
2 Conceptually structured representations of a similar sort are far from unique to AI. They are familiar in myriad otherforms – databases, computer-aided design (CAD) systems, architectural blueprints, government records and so forth.
Discrete conceptual representation is also the model on which programming languages are constructed. Though conceptual structuring is most obvious in the case of digital representations of the sort we have been talking about (written
language, logic, programming, classical AI, etc.), at a more abstract level it also underlies traditional analog representations – those that represent continuous quantities in the represented domain (the domain of the problem to be solved)
with continuous quantities in the representation itself. Imagine constructing an analog representation, in an electricalcircuit, of air flow through an organ pipe, or of wind in a weather system. To do this, one would set up a correspondence
between a selection of conceptually articulated properties of the electrical circuit and conceptually articulated propertiesof the moving air. Given this discrete mapping of concepts, real-valued quantities in the represented domain (air pressure,wind velocity, etc.) would then be modeled by real-valued quantities in the representing domain (voltage, current, etc.).
Traditional first-order logic can thus be considered first-order conceptually discrete; standard analog representations
such as these, second-order conceptually discrete. Classical physics also represents continuous quantities in the represented
domain, such as mass, velocity, charge, etc., but it does so by employing digital (discrete) representations: ‘27.342 kilograms’, ‘xf = xi + vit + ½ at2’, etc. So, like logic, it too is first-order discrete. What distinguishes analog representations
is continuity in the representation, not continuity in what is represented.

182

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

not limited to perceptual and classificatory tasks. In the fall of 2017 Google changed thetechnology underlying its vaunted machine translation service to use second-wave techniques, unleashing a dramatic advance in the quality of the resulting text.
Indeed, the triumphs of second-wave AI have been sufficient to trigger a public
wave of sometimes almost unbridled enthusiasm, leading to predictions (and fears) thatin many areas humans will be replaced by more competent machines, and that so-called‘general purpose artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), of a quality equal to or greaterthan that of people, is just around the corner.

2. ONTOLOGY
Why do second-wave AI systems work so much better than first-wave – at least in theareas in which they excel?
The answer is ontological. First-wave AI was based on an assumption that the worldconsisted of what I call ‘formal ontology’: discrete objects, exemplifying distinct properties, standing in well-defined relations, grouped together in sets, etc. That is, first-wave
AI presumed that the ‘furniture of the world’ – the stuff of reality itself – consisted ofarrangements of such familiar ontological kinds as objects, types, properties, relations andsets, such as people, cars, trees, rooms, countries, mountains, conversations, and the like.
Suppose a room was represented, in a first-wave AI system, as containing a table, fourchairs, a rug, a sideboard, and three people. Then if the representation was ‘correct’, it
was assumed that what it represented corresponded exactly to what was ‘out there’, fundamentally and ontologically: a table, four chairs, and the rest. Issues of abstraction andidealization were relevant only to perception – to identifying those objects correctly, andto recognizing the properties they exemplified (their distinctness, their chair-ness, their
rug-ness, their humanity, etc.). The representer’s task (human or machine) was to comeup with a representation that was true – that corresponded to what was really the case in
the represented domain.
Second-wave AI was developed as a (computationally implemented) mental architecture – not as an ontological thesis. But the way it works, and the fact that it is so
successful, suggests a very different picture. The task of perception is not assumed simply
to be a case of looking out and figuring out what is ontologically ‘out there’, as if God’slabels for pre-individuated reality could be read off the incoming data stream. Rather,
the realm that perception is trained on is treated as a potentially unbounded and vastly
variegated (often quite low-level) data stream, to be clustered and clumped and ‘coarsegrained’ for the purposes at hand, into a resulting classification.
It is easiest to understand this approach in terms of a metaphor. Figure 1 is a photograph of some islands in Georgian Bay, in the Great Lakes north of Toronto. Already,one can see that the real-world topography fails to support the cut-and-dried ontologicalregistration that GOFAI assumed. Figure 2 ‘cleans the picture up’ in a way reminiscentof logic and GOFAI, making the islands, though still relatively detailed, ‘clear and distinct’, and also internally homogenous, in the way that is assumed in conceptual models,such as in data bases and logical statements such as ‘ISLAND(X)’. The question of ‘how
many islands are there’ may have a determinate answer in Figure 2, but the same is nottrue of the world depicted in Figure 1. As I put it in Promise, ‘distinctness flees, as realism
increases. In the world itself, the question lacks a determinate answer’ (p.33).

RETHI N KING O U R T H INK ING A B O U T T H INK ING

183

More telling yet, though, is Figure 3. This is the photograph on which Figure 1 wasbased, revealing the submarine topography (i.e. with the filter used in Figure 2 removed,
which blocked the transparency of the water). Compared to the world’s messiness, theimage is still simple: gravity is a single dimension of salience, the water line is relatively sharp, the image is gray scale, and so on. Nevertheless, if the islands in the image
are taken as analogs for properties, then the images suggest what in fact is true: that if
viewed through the imposition of conceptual boundaries, then the distinction between
and among ideas may seem sharp, but as soon as one relaxes the imposition and presses
for detail, distinctions multiply without limit. A richly connected texture is exposed that
underlies and interconnects all of the parts that happen to project above the surface.
Whereas first-wave AI assumed that the ontology of the world was given, thatis, the suggestion implicit in Figure 3 is that reality itself is arbitrarily detailed, andthat any ontological ‘parse’ into discrete objects and properties results from how it isviewed – or as I put it, how it is registered. What we do, that is, not only in the courseof pragmatically navigating the world and conducting our projects, but in thinking andreasoning about it, is to register the world – render it intelligible in ways appropriate
to our projects and perspectives.
Discrete concepts – those expressed by words – have perhaps misled us into
thinking that the world comes discretely articulated. But two facts, both highlighted
in the metaphor, belie the simplicity of that conception. First, ‘beneath the level of theconcepts’ – beneath the level of the objects and properties that the conceptual representations represent – the world itself is recognized to be permeated by arbitrarilymuch more thickly integrative connective detail. It is not just that our concepts do
not always meet the standard of being ‘clear and distinct’ and instead sometimes havevague or unclear boundaries. It is that the facts we conceptually represent – whether
vaguely or not – tell on a world that itself is not clear cut. Secondly, and crucially, it
is only in part with reference to the registration scheme (in conjunction, needless tosay, with references to the world thereby registered), that questions of identities andboundaries can be answered. Taking the water level to represent the conceptual ‘cut’
imposed by the registration scheme, that is, there are no facts about identity except at
least in part with reference to it.
Is an obstreperous child the same as or different from a rambunctious child – oran obstreperous CEO? If we are climbing an 8,000 m peak in Nepal, and there is anotherlocal maximum 400 m away from the summit we have reached, do we need to go overand climb that one as well? Where does one ‘fog’ end and another start? If a bacterium
splits, is the result two new bacteria, or one old and one new, or a bipartite old one?
Reality will not tell us. If we want ‘clear and distinct’ answers, we need to employ conceptual schemes that impose them – schemes that register the world in terms of imposed idealizations, abstractions, and cuts.

3. REGISTRATION
What are the consequences of these insights for AI? What follows from recognizingthat the nature of reality is as suggested in Figure 3: a plenum of surpassingly rich differentiation, which intelligent creatures ontologically ‘parse’ or register in ways thatsuit their projects?
184

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

Overall, it means that AI must take on board one of the deepest intellectual realizations of the last 50 years, joining fields as diverse as social construction, quantum mechanics, and psychological and anthropological studies of cultural diversity: that taking
the world to consist of discrete intelligible mesoscale objects is an achievement of intelligence, not a premise on top of which intelligence runs. AI needs to explain objects, properties, and relations, and the ability of creatures to find the world intelligible in terms ofthem; it cannot assume them.
How we register the world – how we make it ontologically intelligible in such a
way as to support our projects and practices – is in my view the most important task towhich intelligence is devoted. Developing appropriate registrations does not involve
merely ‘taking in what arrives at our senses’, but – no mean feat – developing a wholeand integrated picture accountable to being in the world. It is not just a question offinding a registration scheme that ‘fits’ the world in ways locally appropriate to theproject at hand, but of relentless attunement to the fact that registration schemes necessarily impose non-innocent idealizations – inscribe boundaries, establish identities,
privilege some regularities over others, ignore details, and in general impose idealizations and do an inevitable amount of violence to the sustaining underlying richness.
This process of stewardship and accountability for registration, never imagined in the
GOFAI project, is of the essence of intelligence.
And it is from this perspective that we can begin to understand the power of secondwave AI. It is an architectural approach that starts to give us a handle on registration.

4. EXAMPLES
Three examples will illustrate. First is the game of Go, long considered one of the world’s
most challenging board games. Even recently, many AI researchers believed that a computer program capable of playing championship Go was unlikely to be constructed formany more years (with some even doubting that it would ever prove possible). In March
2016, however, an AI program called Alpha Go3 defeated Lee Sedol, one of the best Go
players in the world. Over the next couple of years, a successor to Alpha Go defeated Ke
Jie, then ranked as the best Go player in the world, and subsequent versions are recognized as playing Go better than any humans ever have, or likely ever will.
A second example of a second-wave AI success: reading x-rays. Research on using
deep learning programs in radiology has recently been a subject of intense investigation,and just as this was written Nature reported on an AI system capable of surpassing humanexperts in breast cancer identification in mammograms.4 Similarly, another cancer diagnosis AI system, in this case for prostate cancer, has just been reported, which identified
features indicating cancer more accurately than those developed by humans.5
A third example is a proposed joint project by Factum Arte and Case Western
Reserve University to use deep learning to identify the brushstrokes in paintings
3 Developed by the Deep Mind division of Google. See D. Silver, J. Schrittwieser, K. Simonyan et al., ‘Mastering thegame of Go without human knowledge’, Nature 550 (2017), 354–59.
4 Scott Mayer McKinney, Marcin Sieniek, Varun Godbole et al., ‘International evaluation of an AI system for breast
cancer screening’ , Nature, 577 (2020): 89–94, doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1799-6.
5 https://www.itnonline.com/content/artificial-intelligence-identifies-previously-unknown-features-associated-cancer-recurrence.

RETHI N KING O U R T H INK ING A B O U T T H INK ING

185

attributed to El Greco. The aim is to accomplish something that has to date been beyond
human ability: to discriminate strokes painted by the master himself from those painted
by others – including by painters working under his direction in his studio.
What distinguishes these cases, and others like them, is that the identifying ‘signs’
or ‘signature’ of the phenomenon being looked for (a winning strategy for Go, the presence of cancer indicated by an x-ray, the hand of El Greco in the case of the paintings)
is almost certainly not betrayed by any single, or even by a few, local, conceptually articulable properties of the underlying image. Rather, just as humans are now believed to
identify faces by recognizing extremely complex patterns of very weakly correlated microvariables in the images of those faces, second-wave AI systems use deep learning andother associated techniques to similarly compute complex correlations over thousands oreven millions of similar microproperties.

5. EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
Many of the epistemological consequences of the success of second-wave AI approaches
remain unexplored.
The most obvious consequence is their prowess. It is evident, in part because
they are able to retain vast amounts of detail, to pour through extraordinarily massive
data sets, and to operate at millions of times the speed of the human brain, that second-wave AI systems are liable to – and in many cases already do – demonstrate muchgreater prowess than that of which humans are capable, at least on the tasks at which
they excel.
Another implication that has received attention is pragmatic, having to do withjobs, employment, and deployment of human skill. Computational devices have for along time been so much better than people at complex arithmetic tasks that it would
be quaint for a person to persist in doing arithmetic computations ‘by hand’, rather
than employing a calculator or computer. By analogy, it may be that if automated second-wave AI systems are more accurate at diagnosing cancer in mammogram images
than radiologists (reducing both false negatives and false positives), it will becomecomparably quaint (and likely dangerous) to insist that people shoulder the task ofreading x-rays without computational aid.6 And if that and similar reconfigurations oflabor come to pass, the disruption and reconfiguration of the employment landscape
may be substantial and disruptive.
Other issues have attracted attention, such as the resulting bias of algorithms
trained on datasets infected with human prejudice, but many of the deepest epistemological questions remain open.
One issue explored in some depth in Promise has to do with whether such systems
can be said genuinely to recognize people or cancer (as opposed to merely sorting imagesof them), to actually ‘make decisions’, or in fact to be the locus of anything genuinely
epistemological. Another, not explored there but worth briefly examining here, has to dowith what, if anything, we humans will learn through computers developing such ‘skills’,
however it is that we end up choosing to characterize them.
If a second-wave AI system performs better than people at some task, for example,
6 As opposed to prescribing treatment as a result of such diagnoses, which is likely to require judgment; see §6.

186

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

will people become better as a result? Strikingly, Lee Sedol, at least initially, was not
dismayed at being beaten at Go by a machine; he was reputed to be thrilled that Alpha
Go gave him a glimpse into previously unexplored regions of the game – regions thathe might never have known about without its leading him into them, but that he could
now study, understand, and perhaps even master. It should be noted, though, that in2019 Lee Sedol retired from playing Go, commenting that ‘with the debut of AI in Go
games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one throughfrantic efforts. Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated’.7 Overall, it is fair to say that the impact on the Go community has been huge
– an impact with which it is still coping. And while it may be that humans will neveragain defeat the best AI programs, it seems very likely that human play is improving invirtue of their existence.
Whether radiologists will learn how to read x-rays better because second-wave AI
systems can do so is not immediately clear, but it, too, is by no means impossible – especially since this will be more a case of collaboration than of competition. Suppose a radiologist and an AI system ‘read’ the same x-ray, but differ on their conclusions. Suppose,too, that in due course it emerges that the AI system was correct, and the radiologist
wrong. It may become possible, in such a situation, for the radiologist to examine whatpart of the x-ray was crucial to the AI system’s diagnosis, or to examine artificially constructed images that differ only minimally from the real one but that would have led the
AI to the alternative diagnosis, and to learn thereby how to make discriminations thatthey had previously been incapable of making.
Similarly, if an AI system is able to distinguish brushstrokes made personally by El
Greco from those made by others in his studio, art critics may be able, again by examining examples of each, to develop the capacity to make such discriminatory judgments
themselves.8
Why not simply ask the AI system to describe which aspects of the image werecritical to its diagnosis? Essentially that is the aim of a major research effort currently
underway, under the heading ‘explainable AI’: to build transparent second-wave AI systems that can explain how and why they reach the conclusions that they do. It is my sense,
however, that any such dream may be unrealistic, and possibly even counterproductive– because of facts that reach directly into the fundamental reasons why second-wave AI
is successful in the first place.
The difficulty is that the full scope of ‘reasons’ why a second-wave AI system comesto the conclusion that it does may not be ‘effable’ – may not be conceptually articulable,
expressible in a finite and comprehensible linguistic form. As we have already seen, theAI’s conclusions are likely to rest on thousands or millions of extraordinarily weak correlations between and among innumerable microproperties of the original image. It is
exactly because of its ability to make use of vast numbers of weak correlations that second-wave AI systems are as powerful as they are. Asking for explainable AI is in some
7 https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/27/20985260/ai-go-alphago-lee-se-dol-retired-deepmind-defeat.
Downloaded 19 January 2020.
8 At present, suppose we are unable to make this discrimination. Then we may at present have two sets of paintings orfragments of painting for an art critic to study: some made by El Greco himself, and some made by either El Greco oranother painter in his studio. What we do not have, though, is the comparison set that might be critical for learning: one
set by El Greco, and another set not by El Greco but by one of his studio painters. If the AI system could learn to makethe discrimination, then it could be used to construct these non-overlapping comparison sets, which might enable humanpainters to learn to detect the difference.

RETHI N KING O U R T H INK ING A B O U T T H INK ING

187

sense asking for second-wave AI systems to revert to being first-wave AI systems. And
there was a reason that first-wave AI failed at the very sorts of task on which second-wave
AI succeeds.9
If the reasoning processes of second-wave AI systems are intrinsically ineffable,
however, does that mean that can never be communicated to us at all – that they will remain forever alien and incomprehensible? No, that does not follow. It would only be true
if the conceptualist model of thinking that underwrote first-wave AI were true of humancognition. But as I have been at pains to suggest, not only is there no reason to supposethat it is constitutive of human cognition (i.e. no reason to suppose that we think purely
conceptually), but if it is true that second-wave AI is starting to implement processes ofperceptual registration that people already do extraordinarily well, then the ways thatthese new systems work may not remain alien after all.
How, and in what ways, could we understand, or be affected by, such systems?
The answer – or at least a glimpse of it – requires understanding how we end up in the
cognitive states that we do, and with the relation between our cognitive states and thewords we utter and understand. In particular, suppose a perceptual registration system(human or AI) ‘outputs’ or reports the result of a perceptual registration in a single
word or token. Nothing about such behavior implies there that the state of the systemthat manifests such behavior must thereby be reduced to a single choice selected froma set corresponding to the set of conceptual terms we use for such expressions. To
think that would be to presume that, like first-wave AI systems, we think solely in termsof conceptually formulated representations. But it is that very assumption that we arechallenging.
Suppose in particular that, as the result of looking at a facial image, a system generates a 1,000-dimensional array, with an 8-bit number entered as the value for eachdimension representing the image. Such a representation would require just 1 kilobyteof computer storage – very little by present standards. Yet the value of such an array
identifies one point in a space of 2561,000 (≈10 2,408) possibilities. Suppose further that
only a tiny fraction (let’s say 0.001% or 1 in 10,000) of these potentially representable
images are comprehensible (recognizable as human faces expressing emotions), and thatfewer than 1% of those are classified as representing ‘anger’. That still means that there
are 10 2,400 different images representing anger. If, given one such image, the systemwere to make an inference as to what that particular angry person might do next, there
is no reason that that inference process might not rely, in reaching its conclusion, on thedetails of the representation of that person’s facial expression. That is: just because thesystem can ‘effably’ report the emotion it has perceived using the single word, nothing
mandates that the complexity of the system’s state representing that emotion – the state
9 It could be argued that there is at least one sense in which these states could be given conceptual form: simply tolist, in English, the values of the weights on all the nodes and links in the network. However, not only would the result
be pragmatically useless; it is not what ‘explainable’ means. A listing of gigabytes of data, consisting of massive numbersof triples of node labels and an 8-bit value of the strength of the connection between them (‘0.147 on the link fromnode #3,227,019 to node #9,234, 972’, for example), and of pairs of node labels and similar 8-bit node values, would
provide absolutely no epistemological insight into the rationale for the resulting output – and not merely because of theincomprehensible mass of the data. One could as well claim that conscious emotional states could be ‘rendered effable’ bylisting the total configuration of organic molecules in the brains of people in such states. Having one particular such list
would yield no insight on what other configurations of nodes and weights (or arrangements of organic molecules) would
lead to the same output (or underlie the same emotional state), and thus would be incapable of supporting any attempts
to generalize or identify regularities. In essence, the problem is that the articulation would be at a wholly wrong level ofabstraction or implementation.

188

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

being reported – need be thereby reduced to the simplicity of the verbal expression
used to express it.
The question of whether the state of ‘being angry’ is an effable state, in otherwords, is far from straightforward. On the one hand, there is a sense in which ‘being
angry’ is almost tautologically effable, since we have just demonstrated a way to express
it in words: ‘being angry’. On the other hand, it would surely be widely agreed that atleast the first-person phenomenology of anger should be deemed ineffable, since the full,
nuanced, multi-faceted10 experience of being angry is vastly richer than can anything thatcan be ‘captured’ in words. What the discussion of face recognition suggests, however, issomething stronger: that ineffability need not be limited to the first-person case. As thediscussion of face recognition suggests, and other modalities would amplify and support,
an external observer’s sense of someone else’s anger, though plausibly radically simpler
than that of the person who is the subject of the anger, may at the same time be indescribably richer than anything that mere words can encompass. Even if, in terms of Figure 3’s
metaphor, our words are in some sense restricted to labeling what is ‘above the waterline’, there is no reason why those of us who use language, even in the midst of verbally
expressing our thoughts, ever need to abandon the submarine richness that is leading us
to utter those words.
For another example, consider laughter. Suppose someone says ‘they laughed at him
because of what he was wearing’, or ‘she could make anyone laugh, no matter the situation’. We hear such statements, and understand them, in part because we understand theword ‘laugh’. But what does that understanding consist in? Does it mean that in our thought
we merely instantiate some mental analogue of ‘LAUGH (x, t)’? Not necessarily. On themental model we are considering, our reception of the word may index or trigger someor many of the million-dimensional ineffable state(s) that we know, first-person, from ourselves having laughed, and from having interacted with others who laugh. Is that ineffablerichness part of the ‘meaning’ or ‘content’ of the word ‘laugh’? Has that ineffable richness
been communicated? On the logicist model the answer might be thought to be no. But what
second-wave AI systems are suggesting is that that negative answer may not be correct. At
a minimum, if the ineffable state unleashed by hearing that someone laughed is used as thegrounds for further inference or reflection, there is no reason to suppose that the bare (logicist) conceptual framing ‘LAUGH (x, t)’ need figure as the premise or argument for any
subsequent conclusion. Rational deliberation, that is, and the interpretation of linguistic expressions, may just as much involve a wealth of ineffable submarine detail as does perception.11
It is this kind of conclusion that starts to open up the real epistemological implications of the successes of second-wave AI. If meaning or content refers to what resources
a statement supplies in for a competent hearer to use in reasoning and deliberation, thenmeaning or content should perhaps be understood as the richness that utterances of words
evoke or signify, not merely an analog of the bare skeletal form of the utterance itself.
There is no doubt that the successes of DL systems with respect to language translation,
inferences from Big Data, etc., suggest that it is these systems’ capacity for employing
10 The term ‘multi-faceted’ implies that the space of angry feelings has conceptually separable dimensions – as does
the suggestion that it might be represented in a DL system by a 5,000 dimensioned array. But in the latter case the arraymight well be best characterized as an implementation of a representation of anger; the rich regionality of anger at the level
relevant to a person’s phenomenal experience may not be higher-order conceptual at all.These and other such issues
should be explored in a fuller discussion.
11 This likely in part explains the success of Google’s new language translation algorithm.

RETHI N KING O U R T H INK ING A B O U T T H INK ING

189

the richness that the networks are capable of representing that leads to their inferential
success. Perhaps in fact the whole idea of a ‘third-person’ stance on language, and theconception of what a ‘competent language user’ is, should be questioned. If, for example,‘x laughed’ can only be understood by a creature who has laughed, or who has had ineffably rich contact with others who laugh, perhaps we need to adopt the idea that language
and communication should be understood as second-person plural (‘we’) phenomena –where ‘we’ means those of us who have laughed.12
Second-wave AI is surreptitiously powerful. Epistemology should take note.

6. JUDGMENT
Given the successes of second-wave AI, should we expect that general-purpose AI (AGI)
is just around the corner? Will computers soon be as intelligent as humans?
Not remotely. Even in our three examples, the limitations of these second-wave
systems is as evident as their successes. Alpha Go and its successors may play Go well, atleast in some sense of the word ‘play’, but they have no sense of what a game is – no sensethat Go was invented in China thousands of years ago, no sense that it has been viewed
as a game of such difficulty as to challenge people’s sense that it would ever succumb tocomputational approaches, no sense of the magnitude of their own accomplishment. By
the same token, no current ‘x-ray reading’ systems have any sense of what lung cancer is,
no understanding of chemotherapy, no sense of whether an elderly person will want tosuffer worse quality of life in order to extend their life expectancy. Similarly, what makes
an artwork significant – what brings it together as a whole, what its subject matter orstyle or expressive quality signifies, etc. – all these things not only fall outside the scopeof a deep learning system, not just a little bit, but profoundly and completely.
In fact, nothing in current approaches gives these AI systems any sense that the data
they deal with represent anything at all. They may present us with symbols or images or
responses, but in a literal sense they have no idea what they are talking about. They may
produce labels associated with particular patterns (damezumari, adenocarcinoma, El Greco)
but to them those words are yet more meaningless patterns. They mean something to us,
and we configure the systems, tune and debug them, deploy them in specific situations,and feed them with data in ways that mean something to us. But so far that is all. To them
it is all merely an endless play of signifiers.
To use language developed in Promise, first-wave AI systems automated a kind ofcomputational reckoning – the sort of calculative prowess that we are familiar with fromall manner of computational system, including spreadsheets, databases, web searches,
and the like. Though their ontological assumptions are different, and their architecturesdifferent, and because of those facts they are strikingly more capable in many types ofsituation, second-wave AI systems are still reckoners – still instruments that amplify our
intelligence, but not themselves genuinely intelligent at all.
We humans, in contrast, possess or at least aim for what I call judgment – a kind of
dispassionate13 deliberative assessment of a situation, appropriate to the entire context inwhich it occurs, ethically responsible, and accountable to the world as a whole. By judgment, that is, I mean what we get at when we say that someone ‘has good judgment’ – thesort of judgment that we require in a baby-sitter, so that even though it is impossible toput into words – to register in advance – every conceivable situation that could comeup (keep in mind the ontological picture sketched above), the baby-sitter is neverthelessheld accountable for dealing with any situations that arise in a way that is accountable to
the world, to the child being cared for, etc. Critically, accountability is not ultimately to language, but to the world that language registers.
What does judgment require? The bulk of Promise is devoted to an exploration ofthat question. Here I can say just this: judgment of an entirely different order from reckoning. Moreover, judgment will not even be seen, let alone understood or approached,and perhaps not even acknowledged, through anything like research of the sort that hasbrought us first- and second-wave AI. I see nothing on the horizon – in scientific or technological or intellectual imagination – that suggests that we are about to construct, or
indeed have any ideas as to how to construct, or are even thinking about constructing,systems capable of full-scale judgment. As I argue in the book, judgment can only be aproperty of:• Systems existentially committed to the world they register, represent,
and think about;• Systems that will go to bat for the truth, reject what is false, balk at what is
impossible – and know the difference;• Systems not only in and of the world, but for which there is a world – a world thatworlds, in the sense of constituting that to which all is ultimately accountable;• Systems that know that the world that hosts them, the entities they reason
about, and all of humanity and community as well, must be treated withdeference, humility, and compassion.
It is this kind of judgment, I believe – a seamless integration of passion, dispassion, andcompassion – that ultimately underwrites what matters about human cognition.
Where does that leave us? We should be humbled by the inadequacy of first-wave
AI, given the depth of the very real insights on which it was based – and open to a potential radical reconfiguration of rational deliberation that uses staggeringly complex ineffable (subconceptual) states as its ingredients. We should honor, but be cautious about,the successes of second-wave AI – respect and make use of its merits, and appreciate its
epistemological implications, but remain forever mindful of its limitations and restrictions. But mostly we should stand in awe of the capacity of the human mind, and of theachievements of human culture, in having developed registrational strategies, governingnorms, ontological commitments, epistemic practices, and existential forms of beingthat allow us to comprehend, exercise judgment, and go to bat for the world as world.

12 Cf. Wittgenstein’s famous remark in the Investigations: ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’.
13 In the original sense of the word, as not being ruled or swayed by personal emotions, self-interest, etc. – i.e., ascloser to impartial than to lacking motivational force.

190

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

RETHI N KING O U R T H INK ING A B O U T T H INK ING

191

THE HAND OF THE ARTIST:GRAPH ANALYSIS AND EL GRECO
Adam Lowe

Adam Lowe is the Director of
Factum Arte and the founder ofFactum Foundation for Digital
Technology in Conservation.

OPPOSITEThe digital recording and digital analysis of El Greco’s paintings will significantly
enhance our understanding of this artist, famed for his idiosyncratic and highly
personal paintings. He is the epitome of the individual artistic genius. Doménikos
Theotokópoulos was an artist from Candia (the name given to Crete during its period asa colony of the Republic of Venice) who had worked in Venice and Rome before moving
in 1577 to Toledo, where he ran a successful studio until his death in 1614. Artistic
practice in Spain in the late 16th century was controlled by strict professional codes.
Theotokópoulos worked with a team of painters and assistants including his son, Jorge
Manuel Theotokópoulos, who continued to run the workshop for some time after his
father’s death.
The analysis of the painted surface, recorded using high-resolution 3D laser scanning and confocal profilometry, will provide the data for a new graph-analysis softwarethat is being developed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. This research
project is an initiative of the Factum Foundation and Case Western Reserve University,
in collaboration with the Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli and The Auckland
Project. The analysis involves AI machine-learning (ML) techniques using neural-net
methods reacting to the three-dimensional characteristics of the surface relief. The aim is
to identify different hands at work during the production (and restoration) of El Greco’s
paintings. The individual technique of each artist leaves its trace on the painted surface.
These traces can be clearly read if they are recorded with enough detail. With El Greco,
there are often several hands working together to produce a single coherent and recognisable style.
The Baptism of Christ has already been recorded in the chapel of the Hospitalof Cardinal Tavera, Toledo. The Annunciation, in the collection of Banco Santander, isscheduled for recording in the spring of 2020. The aim is then to record the otherpaintings from the Hospital of Cardinal Tavera that are amongst the last produced by
El Greco and Jorge Manuel. Permission will be required from the National Gallery of
Greece and the Metropolitan Museum to 3D scan the Concert of Angels and The Openingof the Fifth Seal in their collections. The aim is also to record and analyse two very
similar crucifixions by El Greco or his studio belonging to the Cleveland Art Museum
and The Auckland Project. The close similarity of these two paintings suggests that El
Greco’s studio may also have been using a system to improve the speed and accuracyof the copying. This collaboration between institutions will hopefully help establish theimportance of recording the surface of paintings and reveal new information about theworking practice of El Greco’s studio.

Colour data for El Greco’s
Bautismo de Cristo, 1608.

192

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

193

MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES
Artificial intelligence (AI) for image recognition and image analysis has been successful inrecent years, with applications ranging from art to ecology, national security to healthcare.The same techniques for clustering and recognising images can be applied to any 2Darray of image data, such as a render of surface topography. In the case of the El Greco
paintings, one experiment will be to train a machine learning (ML) algorithm on regionsthat a specific connoisseur has attributed to El Greco (Category A) vs. regions attributed
to his son (Category B). Then we will apply the trained algorithm to the unknown regions. By applying the algorithm to unknown regions, the AI will suggest with a numerically defined certainty that these regions fit best into one of the trained categories (e.g.,
Category A with 85% certainty). We expect the results to illuminate the physical qualities used in determining attribution, and perhaps lend insight into the role of reconstruction and damage in this determination. Further, information encoded at different lengthscales within the paintings will contribute to these results. Understanding which lengthscales the algorithm weighs highly for its determination could result in novel analyticaltests for studying paintings. Additionally, we plan to study various imaging modalities,
such as panoramic photography, for the ML algorithm, and understand the robustness of
the results, so that we can begin to identify the surface information (height, directionality, colour, etc.) contributing to the attribution.
Finally, clustering via AI can be applied to the measurements of the paintings. With
clustering, the AI will group similar patches of the paintings with no training. By using
various metrics to cluster the data spots or spot sizes, we may see groupings arise within
and across the paintings. Then, meaning can be designated to the groupings using knowledge obtained by archival and art-historical research. This method has been known tolend support to conclusions and enlighten new roads of interpretation.
Initial tests on the ability of machine learning to differentiate between artists using
surface profile images have been carried out using a methodology developed at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Working with high-resolution 3D recording
and data analysis software in a scientifically controlled environment, the team was able
to identify the brush-marks made by two different hands with more than 90% accuracy
after initial analysis. The three paintings by El Greco contain more ‘noise’ and have undergone several undocumented interventions that will obscure some data. By use ofdifferent models and careful training using sections of each painting, it is hoped that wewill be able to allocate characteristic traces to the way each hand applies the paint. It is
anticipated that this will reveal the presence of several hands at work on each canvas.
The project aims to offer a unique look at these paintings by El Greco through thefilter of cutting-edge technologies. It is hoped that through digital analysis we will provide new data about how works are made, who made them, and how they have been conserved, demonstrating that paintings are both complex and dynamic in terms of content,
context and material evidence. The recording and ML analysis will hopefully contributeto the knowledge and appreciation of some of the most representative works of the laststage of El Greco’s career. Factum Foundation has been committed from its formation
to the recording of the surface of paintings as a way to learn more about their historicaland artistic significance. The link with Case Western Reserve University will result in thewriting of new software to analyse the 3D information.

194

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGEOPPOSITE

3D relief data for El Greco’s
Bautismo de Cristo, 1608.

G R A P H A NA LYS IS A ND EL G R ECO

195

BUILDING A MIRROR WORLDFOR VENICE
Frédéric Kaplan and Isabella di Lenardo

Frédéric Kaplan holds the
Digital Humanities Chair
at ÉPFL, where he directs
the Digital Humanities
Laboratory (DHLAB). He
conducts research projects
combining artificial intelligenceand cultural heritage digitisation.
He is the coordinator of theTime Machine European project,president of the Time Machine
Organisation and a founding
partner of ARCHiVe.
Isabella di Lenardo is a
researcher in Digital Humanities
and Urban History at ÉPFL.
She is a specialist in cultural
heritage digitisation and digitalurban reconstruction. She has
worked on many projects
in collaboration with leading
European institutions suchas the Bibliothèque nationale
de France, Louvre, Institut
National d’Histoire de l’Art,
Getty Research Foundation andGiorgio Cini Foundation. She
coordinated the Replica project
held by ÉPFL in collaboration
with Factum Arte, digitising one
million photos of artworks in
the Giorgio Cini Foundation(Venice) and producing apattern extraction througha search engine for visual
similarities.

OPPOSITE

Photogrammetry point cloudof the Tetrarchs on the façadeof St Mark’s, Venice.

196

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

V

enice is known to face the combination of two major threats: flooding due tothe continuous sinking of the city and rising of global sea levels, and social petrification caused by the increasing imbalance between the number of the city’s
inhabitants and its tourists. As UNESCO recently warned by putting Venice on its ‘endangered’ place list along with war-devastated sites, the situation is critical. Although many
scenarios can be envisioned for the future, a first step for any urban policy should be toprovide a tool for monitoring the current state of the city and its yearly evolution, andfor linking these dense urban models with maximum information about the city’s past.1
Between 2012 and 2019 ‘The Venice Time Machine Project’ developed a new methodology for modelling the past, present, and future of a city. This methodology is basedon two pillars: (a) the vast digitisation and processing of the selected city’s historical
records, (b) the digitisation of the city itself, another vast undertaking. The combinationof these two processes has the potential to create a new kind of historical information
system organised around a diachronic digital twin of a city.
A digital twin can be considered as a one-to-one digital overlay, directly mapping
information to each street, door or stones of the current city, a digital representation not
only as vast as the territory itself but adding deep historical thickness, directly connecting
the present with information and models of the past. In 1992, David Gelernter coined theterm ‘Mirror World’ to describe the usage and experience associated with such high- resolution digital twins of evolving cities.2 In his book, he not only developed many scenarios
in which decision makers could use the Mirror World to manage and administrate the city
in a more efficient manner, but also discussed what it changed for citizens themselves. In
the early 1990s, the kind of interface that would allow the editing and visualisation of such
representations was difficult to imagine. The concept of a Mirror World as ‘a universe ina shoebox’ recalled ancient iconographic figures of emperors and kings holding in theirhands an orb containing the entire representation of the world. Its potential was perceived
as immense, but technological solutions were lacking to implement it.
The advent of Mirror Worlds may inaugurate in the next decade a fundamental new
way of using and structuring information, as the World Wide Web did 30 years ago.3 In
the post-web age, the Mirror World is now conceived as a dense information skeleton, a
consolidated reference structure for organising data in 4D (3D + time). In principle, it
could be accessible from any digital device, but in the same way that the Web found its
1 Frédéric Kaplan and Isabella di Lenardo, ‘Is it too late to save Venice?’, Apollo Magazine (January 2019), https://www.
apollo-magazine.com/is-it-too-late-to-save-venice/.
2 David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds or the Day Software Puts the University in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will
Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
3 K. Kelly, ‘AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform – Call It Mirrorworld’, Wired (February 2019).

197

THIS PAGE

Point cloud model of theBasilica della Salute, Venice.
OPPOSITE

Point cloud model of CampoSant’Angelo, Venice.

canonical usage on the desktop, and social networks on smartphones, the Mirror World
may be experienced primarily through augmented reality interfaces, made for rich andsituated digital experiences.
It is relatively easy to estimate the efforts involved in building a first ‘basic’ Mirror
World for a city, a representation of the city in its current state. In the case of Venice,a prototype was developed in 2019 for the district of San Barnaba.4 It consists of a 3D
reconstruction, documenting precisely the state of the city. The San Barnaba district consists of 640 m of Venetian calle. It was documented taking about 4 photos per linear
metre, at a rhythm of one photo every 10 seconds (6 photos per minute). Using a photogrammetric pipeline, a high-resolution 3D model of the district was obtained along withmetadata about the precise location and time of each photo.
Estimating the total length of Venice’s street network at 225 km plus an additional
100 km for canals, 1,300,000 photos should be enough to build a 3D model of Venice.
This corresponds to 3,600 hours of work. This means that a hundred volunteers canmake the 3D model of the entire city in one week of intense work or, more reasonably,
in a month, working part-time. On this basis, the model could be updated every year,
documenting the evolution of the city in time as a continuously changing 4D model. In
a not so distant future, this updating of the model may be done seamlessly with the same
augmented reality device making it possible to interact with it.
The million photos that serve to create the first 3D model of the entire city are
extremely precious assets. Each photo can be segmented into distinct regions corresponding for instance to the object seen in the picture. This can be done manually or
using state-of-the-art machine vision algorithms. These segmented areas are first projected onto the 3D model and then retro-projected onto all overlapping pictures. Thismeans that a single annotated region can automatically lead to dozens of subsequentannotations. In addition, the resulting segmentation directly structures, with one-to-one
mapping, the underlying reality, like an invisible digital layer on top of every object or
4 The San Barnaba 3D subcentimetric model was produced by Albane Descombes based on the photographic survey byFrancesca Zugno, Davide Drago and Valentine Bernasconi.

198

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

architectural element from the physical world.5 In such conditions, each 3D segment becomes a symbolic anchor that can be annotated, linked to, searched for, or assigned withan unambiguous unique identifier like any page of the World Wide Web.
This rich and dense representation of the present of a city is the starting point forreconstructing its past. The relevance of a historical map or ancient photo is directly
linked to the possibility of connecting its content with the dense 3D models of the city
through the matching of pairs of ‘homologous’ zones identifying the same underlying
stable reality. These networks of homologous pairs permit the merging of high-precision
measurements of the present with the documents of the past.
This principle motivates a specific selection and prioritisation of certain types of historical records.The order in which the sources are digitised and articulated with the Mirror
World, progressively densifying its 4D structure, is key to the efficiency of the resulting
reconstruction. Priority should be given to the sources which can be linked through a maximum number of pairs of non-ambiguous homologous zones to the 3D segments of the
Mirror World model, thus extending their virtual existence deeper in the past.
Ancient photos, paintings, engravings, drawings and other iconographic sources constitute a first family of records that can be directly incorporated into the growing 4D structure.
Each iconographic source can itself be segmented and annotated, allowing for instance theidentification of multiple views or of elements of an ancient construction that are now destroyed, and making it possible to reconstruct a partial 3D model of the missing parts.
Cadastral maps provide further important information linking clearly defined parcels of land with entries in large tables. Both the maps and the tables can be automatically parsed and read with satisfactory results using ‘cadastral computing’ approaches.6
These sources offer direct access not only to the ancient geometries of the city but to the
population of owners and tenants. Each person mentioned in cadastral sources receives
5 The related concept of epiderme numérique (digital skin) has been developed by Livio de Luca. See for instance
Livio de Luca, ‘Étudier le passé avec les technologies du futur’, TEXxAvignon, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=WPMmcpCt1Is.
6 Sofia Ares Oliveira, Isabella di Lenardo, Bastien Tourenc and Frédéric Kaplan, ‘A deep learning approach to CadastralComputing’, Digital Humanities Conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 8–12 July 2019.

BUIL DING A M IR RO R WO R L D F O R V ENICE

199

THIS PAGE

Point cloud of Campo Sant’Angelo,
Venice.
Point cloud of San Giacometto,
Venice.
OPPOSITE

Point cloud of the façade of
St Mark’s, Venice.
Point cloud of Piazza San Marco,
Venice.

a unique identifier that can sometimes be matched with names and addresses in otherhistorical records like directories and almanacs.7
The population model extracted from the totality of cadastral sources and directories serves as a node around which can be organised additional sources like fiscal documents, testaments and inventories, compiled genealogical sources, birth and death certificates and an ocean of other typologies of notarial documents. Thus, the Mirror World
extends its information branches, grabbing more and more data from isolated archival
records. As it extends, the resulting spatiotemporal architecture facilitates disambiguation of names, detects and helps resolve unknown incoherencies, and allows the planning(in an agile manner) of complex digitisation logistics in order to progress with the construction of a coherent and unified set of ‘Big Data of the Past’.8
In practice, a single digitisation hub may be enough to digitise an entire city and toprogressively organise the continuous scanning and processing of its historical records. In

7 Isabella di Lenardo, Raphael Barman, Albane Descombes and Frederic Kaplan, ‘Repopulating Paris: massive extraction of 4 million addresses from city directories between 1839 and 1922’, Digital Humanities Conference, Utrecht,
The Netherlands, 8–12 July 2019.
8 Frédéric Kaplan and Isabella di Lenardo, ‘Big Data of the Past’, Frontiers in Digital Humanities 4, no. 12 (2017): 1–12.

200

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

the case of Venice this hub is the ARCHiVe centre on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. It
was created as an alliance between the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Factum Foundation and theDigital Humanities Laboratory of ÉPFL to record, analyse and archive digital data. Several
different types of scanner, both purpose-built and off-the-shelf, permit the recording of awide variety of documents of different types. These range from large ancient maps to verysmall 3D objects.This centre is also the operational base from which the logistics of the city
digitisation are planned and where volunteers, most of them from the city itself, can betrained. ARCHiVe intends to be the prototype of a generic digitisation hub, easily replicablein any city across the world that wishes to build and update its own 4D digital twin.
The urgency of providing Venice with a way of harnessing its historical records
to help make decisions related to its survival is an incentive to push the boundaries ofurban modelling. Cultural heritage preservation and management of climate change areinterlinked issues, especially in Venice. Many forms of knowledge are currently isolated
and unconnected, lost in their own safe storage. These need to converge into a single
consolidated 4D model. The Venice Mirror World may be a first node of an international
network of connected sites, progressively densifying a new global information platformthat should fundamentally change our relationship with our past and our future.

BUIL DING A M IR RO R WO R L D F O R V ENICE

201

ARCHiVe: ANALYSIS AND RECORDINGOF CULTURAL HERITAGE IN VENICE
Adam Lowe

Adam Lowe is the Director of
Factum Arte and the founder ofFactum Foundation for Digital
Technology in Conservation.

A

RCHiVe, the centre for Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice,
is a collaboration between the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Factum Foundationand the Digital Humanities Laboratory of the École Polytechnique Fédérale deLausanne (DHLAB-ÉPFL). It is primarily funded and supported by the Helen Hamlyn
Trust. ARCHiVe is dedicated to innovation in the recording, archiving, interpretationand sharing of the world’s cultural heritage. Its main areas of work are:I) Developing and applying diverse recording technologies: Understanding theright technology for a specific task is critical. The main areas of focus at ARCHiVe
are high-resolution 3D recording and composite photography (colour, infrared,
ultraviolet), but other recording technologies are required for specific tasks.
These are being developed, pooled and shared according to need. In each case thedata is recorded in ways that are repeatable and scientifically verifiable. The data
must contain the history of its capture, processing, and all stages involved in its
transformation and mediation from one state to another.
II) Transfer of skills and technologies: Transferring skills and technologies tolocal communities is not only possible but has now been demonstrated on threecontinents. This approach ensures local guardianship and has the potential togenerate income at a local level. The data gathering seeks to identify, record andarchive written documentation, photographs and works of art building on thearchiving work of previous generations. Simply bringing data together in a place
where it can be located and accessed is fundamentally important.
III) Archiving: Plans must be put in place to establish long-term archiving andto ensure compatibility and easy access without expensive proprietary software.
Long-term archiving of digital data is a significant task on which there is little
existing professional agreement. Metadata systems and archiving protocols canensure it is possible to find digital data when it has been misplaced. The data inthe public domain should be prepared so that it can be accessed easily and freely.
Ensuring future generations have access to archives in a post-crisis scenario
is an important consideration.

OPPOSITE

Recording the surface of a painting
from the Giorgio Cini collection,
part of a workshop for IUAV
graduate student at ARCHiVe.

202

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

IV) Data ownership: ARCHiVe’s policy is that all rights to the data that isrecorded should belong to the custodian of the object for all current and futureapplications that can generate income. In return for this clear statement ofownership, the ‘custodian’ will agree to make it freely available for academic
203and conservation applications. Data ownership (both current and future) is a key
issue. Sharing and providing access to the data nurtures understanding and helps
in the development of knowledge and human skills; it can generate new audiences
and reveal the importance of cultural heritage as evidence that communicatesacross temporal, religious and cultural divisions.
V) Condition monitoring: The uses of high-resolution archives are extensive.
Monitoring the condition of objects is one of the most critical. Demonstrating therate of decay provides an objective basis for decisions relating to the protectionof objects. Providing forensically accurate evidence before and after restoration
procedures is also important.
VI) Digital restoration: The recording work that is being carried out is 100 per centnon-contact. It aims to provide the data required by conservators and restorers
for in-depth study and analysis. Digital restoration is a fast-growing applicationof digital technology. Through diverse types of high-resolution information, it ispossible to understand the physical nature of all objects and to create a forum inwhich consensus can be reached before any actions are carried out on original
objects. Another important element of digital restoration is reuniting fragments of asingle object that have been separated over time in both digital and facsimile form.
VII) Data presentation: Digital technologies used to be associated with virtual
representations. Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality are rapidly
developing and will become a popular platform for sharing and communicating
the importance of cultural objects. But the primary target is to preserve theevidence of the past at the highest resolution allowed by the diverse technologies.
Data can always be optimised to make it easier to access and share, but if it is notrecorded correctly this possibility does not exist. Evidence of the quality of thedata can be seen when it is rematerialised as a physical object. Visualising 3D andcolour files on screen requires less information than re-materialising the object
using additive or subtractive technologies. This level of resolution normally
produces vast files that cannot be handled by most computers. The packaging andpresentation of data is of critical importance to ensure the widest access.
VIII) Intelligent computer-vision software: Software developments are
increasingly demanding high-resolution images that can be used with self-learningneural networks. Increasingly historical records, cartography and 3D models arebeing merged to produce ‘four-dimensional maps’ of the past. As the algorithms
get more precise, and as the data becomes freely available, these technologies
will redefine the relationship between the past and the present.
Other important aims of ARCHiVe are to record the Cini Foundation’s archive and tooffer its services to assist in the recording of other archives and collections. Sharing
knowledge and training are also central aspects of ARCHiVe’s approach.
In its first year, it completed the digitisation of the Cini Foundation’s entire photolibrary using Factum’s purpose-built Replica scanner (the Replica project was the foundation upon which ARCHiVe was built). Over 439,700 double-sided A3 documents
204

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

Gabriel Scarpa uses panoramic
photography to record a Banksymural threatened by rising watersin Venice.

were recorded in about 10 months. Each document was recorded at 700 DPI at 1:1,
producing an archive of 879,400 files (a total of 43.93 terabytes) that was automaticallycollated and downloaded with specially written software.
There have also been extensive educational and training projects at ARCHiVewith 121 people receiving varying levels of training. This included practical work with
graduate students from Columbia’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
recording the altar, tombstones and frescoes in the Knights of Malta’s headquarters in
Venice. The University of Urbino recorded a selection of sculptures in the Sala della
Tribuna at Palazzo Grimani for Venetian Heritage. While this was going on, a Factum
Arte team was installing a facsimile of Giuseppe Salviati’s painted ceiling, The Disputeof Minerva and Neptune (recorded at the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris) into the nextdoor room. Between the three partners, many interns, training courses and educational
initiatives have run in parallel.
The shared belief is that digital technology is opening many doors. The potential
is vast, but structures are needed that can facilitate genuine research. ARCHiVe has thepotential to respond rapidly and is growing the infrastructure to support the individuals
who are asking questions and experimenting. The research and development are being
conducted within the field of digital preservation in an independent and open-minded

A R CH i Ve

205

THIS PAGE

Participants in a 3D scanningworkshop at ARCHiVe inspecting
a sample of elevated printing.
OPPOSITE

In one of the first projects carriedout by ARCHiVe, Guendalina
Damone and Fabio Martinello
record the surface relief ofVeronese’s painting of the Prophet
Isaiah, part of a diptych owned by
the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The
painting was scanned both before
and after conservation by theconservation company Open Care,allowing comparison between
these two states.

way. The scholarship, hardware, software and resulting data are being made freely available. The focus is on the study, protection and preservation of cultural heritage in its
diverse forms. Related to this is a focus on developing inexpensive hardware that can bebuilt and repaired even in relatively remote locations.
Data storage is a major challenge faced by ARCHiVe. If data is to be made widely
available and has to be stored indefinitely, there must be a focus not only on increasing
the speed of data capture and improving the quality of the resultant data, but also on simplifying file formats and developing capacity for long-term data storage in physical form.
Rune Bjerkestrand at PIQL in Norway, Ken Singer at Case Western Reserve University(both have partnership agreements with Factum Foundation), Professor Peter Kazansky
at Southampton University and others are all working on this issue. ARCHiVe can hopefully benefit from and apply their innovations.
ARCHiVe is an ambitious venture. In order for it to succeed, it is vital that others
follow the lead of the Helen Hamlyn Trust and provide enlightened support allowing
recording technologies to be developed and disseminated, and the resulting data to beprocessed, archived and used. The outcome is designed to be inclusive, drawing together
digital pioneers from across the world. This will offer global resonance and access tohighly localised cultural heritage, while at the same time leaving agency in the hands of
local actors and contributing to local economies and skills.
In 2019, Gianluca Vacca, Undersecretary at the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage
and Activities wrote that:… as a ministry we are working on a single control room, so that all digitalisation
projects can be set within the same framework … The model launched at
ARCHiVe (the Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice) by the
206

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

Giorgio Cini Foundation in collaboration with Factum Foundation and ÉPFL
brings together philology, recording and the analysis of data. This mix ofknowledge and technology is urgently required.1
Many managers of cultural heritage are still from the generation of post-war ‘baby
boomers’ brought up in a pre-digital world. A new generation of managers are starting
to shape the debate, and their relationship to technology is more intuitive.The ‘digital natives’ are also coming of age and their ability to work with and apply digital technologies
will lead to an explosion of new recording and display technologies. If the technicians are
given the funding, framework and computing power they require, this new generation
will shape the future by providing the high-resolution information needed for in-depth
study, AI self-learning programmes and the forensically accurate analysis and dissemination of cultural data.

1

Gianluca Vacca in Antonio Canova. Atelier, ed. Chiara Casarin (Venice: Marsilio, 2019).

A R CH i Ve

207

ARCHiVe CASE STUDY:EXPLORATION OF AUTOMATIC
TRANSCRIPTION FOR THE INDEX CARDSFROM THE DANIÉLOU COLLECTION
Rashmi Gajare
Rashmi Gajare is apreservationist, Indologist, andarchitect with a Masters in
Preservation and Planning from
Cornell University. She carriedout the Daniélou research
project at ARCHiVe while
attending the master’s programin Digital Humanities at the
Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice.
She is currently pursuing a PhD
in Architecture at the Universityof Texas at Austin.

THIS PAGE

Automatic transcription of anindex card, with mark-up revealing
the degree of accuracy of the
OCR software.
OPPOSITE

In a separate initiative relating totypography, Factum Foundation
has been working with the Type
Archive, London, on a pilot project
to establish digitisation methods
for their unparalleled collectionof historic type matrices. The
Foundation used a focus stacking
scanner (in collaboration with the
Natural History Museum, London)and CNC milling to produce a newpositive from the original matrix
for this Gujurati character.

208

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

E

arly digitization projects created vast amounts of data in formats that might not beeasily adaptable to ever-evolving technological processes. The current challenge is
twofold – to make older data usable in the present day and to ensure that future
digitization projects consider the inevitable process of technological obsolescence.
In 1949, Alain Daniélou, a French musicologist living and studying Hindustani classical music in India for over a decade, launched an ambitious project to create an archiveof all available treatises on Indian music – Sangita Śa-stra.The process he followed involved
recovering the texts, making copies (microfilms), transcribing the works into modern
Devanagari script, and comparing them with other manuscripts of the same works. A
translation of the texts followed. During this process, almost 300,000 index cards weremade with key information about the manuscripts, the authors, various musical instruments, Ragas and so on.
From 2001–04, a majority of the Alain Daniélou collection index cards (about
250,000 items in total) were scanned using a desktop office scanner. In 2019 the
ARCHiVe research team, headed by Professor Giovanni Giuriati, started a project toconvert these older scans into machine-readable, transliterated text. However, the low
resolution of the 2001–04 images (150 dpi) as well as the diversity of data on thesecards posed a challenge for the creation of both a searchable and a semantic databaseusing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) processes.
This more recent project explored various
methods to find the optimal solution to automatically transcribe all the index cards (approximately 300,000 in total) from the Alain Daniélou
collection.
The first stage involved running Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) algorithms on aset of 30 scanned cards from the 2001–04 images
and analyzing the results; the same set of cards
was then redigitized using different instruments
and settings, and the OCR was run once again tocompare results. Both steps used the free, cloudbased Google Vision API for OCR. For the re-digitization, two scanning methods were adopted:
digital photography using CANON EOS 5D
209

Helen Hamlyn meeting the
ARCHiVe team in May 2019.
A generous donation from her
Foundation made the creation ofthis innovative centre possible.

(50mm lens, EOS Utility software); and FUJITSU Image Scanner fi-7160 (portable with80 sheets Automatic Document Feeder), iSOP (Intelligent Sonic Paper Protection) andPaperStream Capture 2.5. RawTherapee 5.5 was used for image processing.
The results from the three scanning methods – office desktop scanner (150dpi);
FUJITSU Image Scanner fi-7160 (600 dpi); and CANON EOS 5D (300 dpi) – were compared for error rates and estimated time for scanning and analysis.
The accuracy of the OCR algorithms increased by an average of 7% when usingpresent-day digitization techniques – probably due to the increased image resolution,from 150 dpi to 300dpi and 600 dpi.1 Despite the marginal increase in accuracy, it was
decided that the estimated time required for rescanning the entire collection could bebetter employed to manually create a set of transcriptions that could be used as a training
model for a Handwritten Text Definition (HTR) software.
For the Daniélou collection index cards, error rates were higher for theDevanagari script than the Roman alphabet, probably due to the large database of
Roman alphabet transcriptions available online for the Google Vision cloud-based software. By training the machine reading model with a manually transcribed sample,
the error rates could be reduced. The recommendation is to use an HTR software,such as Google Auto ML Vision or Transkribus, a READ project with funding from theEuropean Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program. Another suggestion is to create an online project to crowdsource corrections by uploading the Google
Vision API OCR results (even with high error rates). This would create a platform for
1 It must be noted that a larger sample size might offer more precise results, but these preliminary observations could
lead to time saving measures.

210

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

public participation, whilst fostering a sense of stewardship of heritage and creatingawareness about the collection.
While enhanced OCR techniques can make it far easier to read the textual information on these low-resolution scans, low-resolution image documents might present avery different set of challenges; it would probably make more sense to re-record thoseat a higher resolution.
Once Alain Daniélou’s index cards become machine-readable, the next step in the
project will be to do the same for the manuscripts and link them to the relevant index
cards. Where the present archive is hard to navigate even for those researchers working
within the Cini Foundation, the new digital archive will make this unique resource on
Indian music accessible to researchers across the world.

FOLLOWING PAGES

Recording the surface reliefof Goya’s The Drowning Dog(1820–23) using the Lucida 3D
Scanner, Factum’s main recording
technology for low-relief surfaces.
The Lucida was designed and madeby artist and engineer ManuelFranquelo with support from
Factum Foundation.
The Small Objects Scanner is an
automated photogrammetry rig
designed to 3D-scan objects up
to 30 cm tall. The object is placedon a mechanised rotary table andas the table rotates, the object
is photographed from different
angles with a camera that canmove towards and away from it
on two axes. The scanner is being
developed by Matt Marshall,Quinner Baird and Otto Lowe.

Abhijit Dhanda working on the
prototype of the Photometric
Scanner. The system uses
computational methods to extract
detailed information about thesurface of an object using 2D
images taken under differing
lighting angles, and will provide
a fast and lightweight way ofrecording low-relief surfaces.
It is being developed by Jorge
Cano and Enrique Esteban from
Factum Foundation’s engineering
department together with
Dhanda, who is based at theCarleton Immersive Media
Studio at Carleton University,
Canada. Adam Weigert from
CIMS has also made significant
contributions to the technology’s
development.

The portable manuscript scanner
was designed in order to quickly
record fragile manuscripts at
remote locations in Dagestan. It
was created at Factum Foundation
by a team led by Enrique Esteban.
The miniature book scanner
was designed specifically to scan
L’Offiziolo di CarloVIII, a late 15thcentury book of hours with pages
measuring 6 x 4 cm, which could
only be opened to a maximum of
50° and was impossible to record
using a conventional scanner.
This technology uses a mirrored
optical-glass prism/camera
system to overcome this problem.
It was designed by Dwight
Perry (scanner) and Ben Gaskell(mirrored glass prism).

EXPLORATIO N O F AU TO M AT IC T R A NS CR IP T IO N

211

212

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

EXPLORATIO N O F AU TO M AT IC T R A NS CR IP T IO N

213

214

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

EXPLORATIO N O F AU TO M AT IC T R A NS CR IP T IO N

215

216

NE W IN F ORM ATION G E N E RATIN G NEW KNOWLEDGE

EXPLORATIO N O F AU TO M AT IC T R A NS CR IP T IO N

217

CHAPTER 4CARTOGRAPHY:
RECORDING SHAPE,
MAPPING SURFACE

218

219

THE WORK OF MAPPINGIN AN AGE OF DIGITAL MEDIATION
Jerry Brotton

Jerry Brotton is Professor of
Renaissance Studies at Queen
Mary University of London.
He is the author of numerous
books on the history ofmapmaking, including A Historyof the World in Twelve Maps
(London: Penguin, 2012).

PREVIOUS PAGE

Recording the surface topologyof the Hereford Mappa Mundi(c. 1300) in Hereford Cathedral,
2013.
OPPOSITE

Factum Arte’s recreation of thelost silver world map made by the
12th-century cartographer al-Idrisi
for Roger II of Sicily.

220

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACET

he commonly accepted definition of a map comes from the multi-volume Historyof Cartography, first published in 1987 under the editorship of J. B. Harley andDavid Woodward, who claimed that ‘maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in thehuman world’.1 This definition, aimed primarily at historians of cartography, also drew
on a generation of critical thinking embracing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, geography, urban planning and architecture that represented a ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities,
in which thinkers began to understand that the analysis of space as much as time offeredan understanding of personal and social change.
The tradition can be traced back to the phenomenological analysis of Gaston
Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, first published in French in 1957. ‘Inhabited space’,argued Bachelard, ‘transcends geometrical space’.2 Subsequent writing on the poetics
and politics of space by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and many others culminatedin Fredric Jameson’s essay defining postmodernism, written in 1984. Jameson argued
that a form of ‘cognitive mapping’ was required to understand the complex social andspatial environments in which late modern individuals found themselves towards theend of the 20th century.3 This turn to space and mapping largely predated the rise of
the Internet and World Wide Web, a digital revolution that, as these names suggest, represented a vast and growing map (‘web’ and ‘network’ of graphic relations connectedin virtual space). It did however coincide broadly with the development of computerised Geographical Information Systems (GIS) capable of using computer hardware
and software to manage and analyse large amounts of geographical data. In the 1960s,
the English geographer Roger Tomlinson grasped that the introduction of transistors incomputers allowed for hitherto unknown speed and memory in data collection and reproduction. In 1962 Tomlinson established the Canada Geographic Information System(the first ever GIS) for the Canada Land Inventory, describing it as a system in which‘maps could be put into numerical form and linked together to form a complete pictureof the natural resources of a region, a nation or a continent. The computer could thenbe used to analyse the characteristics of those resources’.4 To paraphrase Harley and
1 The History of Cartography, Vol. I, Book 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean,
eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), xvi.
2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 47.
3 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, vol. 146 (1984): 53–92.
See also Michel Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, no. 16 (1986): 22–27 (based on a lecture given in 1967), andHenri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1991), first published in
French in 1974.
4 Roger Tomlinson,‘Geographic Information Systems: A New Frontier’, in Introductory Readings in Geographic Information
Systems, eds. Donna Peuquet and Duane Marble (London: Taylor & Francis, 1990), 15–27: 17.

221

Woodward, this was the first digital graphic representation facilitating a spatial understanding of the human world.
Just as GIS specialists like Tomlinson were developing the technical power of new
information systems, thinkers like Foucault, Lefebvre and Jameson were detecting – although perhaps understandably not fully grasping – a transformation in the mapping ofsocial space using computing technology. It is a development that is now ubiquitous. As
the paper map gradually disappears and gives way to online geospatial mapping applications, digital maps are at the forefront of our everyday lives, and these are doing far morethan just getting us from A to B. From cracking the human genome and visualising capital
flows, understanding the brain and an ever-expanding universe, to how we manage Big
Data or our online searches to find the nearest takeaway, maps are now central to how
we process and organise modern life. Geospatial applications like Google Maps and thesame company’s online search returns over 30 per cent of searches containing some formof geographical content. Such digital online applications have led to the emergence of‘neocartography’, defined as the creation of maps outside the professional cartographic
community. Today, in our globalised digital world, anyone can be a mapmaker, and thefuture looks less like a text to decode than a map that guides us through what appears to
be a simultaneously shrinking and infinitely expanding digital global world.
If mapping has become a default activity for so many spheres of life, what kind ofmaps should we use, and who will make them? Nearly all digital geospatial applications
and neocartography involve the reproduction of a graphic two-dimensional (2D) map,whether the medium be print on paper or pixels on a display screen. Yet many of these
online maps act as little more than directional tools or as adjuncts to online search and its
monetisation. Artists have responded by incorporating maps into their works but usually222

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACE

THIS PAGE

Render of the 3D relief of the
Hereford Mappa Mundi.
Render of the Hereford Mappa
Mundi with colour registered to
3D data.
OPPOSITE

Render of the backboard (c. 1300)of the Hereford Mappa Mundi.

on a purely iconographic basis. But the development ofdigital three-dimensional (3D) data capture and reproduction of the kind pioneered by companies like Factum
Arte offers more significant possibilities for mapping everything from extremely small objects – like the surface ofa painting – to the vastness of the globe on which we live.
The laser scanning of an object’s surface and its
reproduction can be achieved through various methods.
They can include Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF),
where printers fabricate 3D models in single or multiple
pieces; Stereolithography 3D printing (SLA or ‘resin
printing’), where the form is created in layers throughthe action of UV lasers converting resin into solid objects; and Elevated Printing Technology, which employs
flat-bed printers to layer ink onto a surface to produce ahigh-resolution 3D form. The method chosen varies depending on the object to be reproduced and the level ofdefinition required. The surface of the object is digitally‘mapped’ via scanning then uploaded to computer files
before being reproduced in three dimensions in an act of
topographical modelling that mimics the act of the mapmaker inscribing the surface of his or her medium.
Factum’s practice is therefore embedded withinmapping techniques, even though the outcomes are not necessarily cartographic.
However, their projects dealing directly with premodern map artefacts offer an insight
into their wider ethos of data capture and reproduction. In recent years Factum has
worked on the reproduction of various medieval maps from Christian and Islamic culture. In January 2013, Factum was commissioned by the Mappa Mundi Trust of Hereford
Cathedral to carry out the first high-resolution 3D scan of the so-called Hereford Mappa
Mundi, one of the greatest surviving world maps from the medieval period, datedc. 1300. Using a Lucida 3D Scanner, Factum’s team recorded the surface of the map andthen used the data to mill it on a panel of polyurethane resin. The subsequent mould wasthen used to create a plaster cast of the map. This cast shows the map as a white surface
in which the colour has been virtually removed, so the landscape of the medieval vellum
can be experienced as a 3D object, with every wrinkle, scratch, patch and pouncing marktouched and felt.
The resulting object both is and is not the Hereford Mappa Mundi. It is a faithfulrecording of the surface of the map, yet its three-dimensionality enables us to ‘see’ themap in new ways. It becomes clear that the map was always a three-dimensional object,rather than the two-dimensional image we usually see reproduced in books. We are also
reminded that the map was created out of a three-dimensional calfskin, with all its surface
variations. It is an undulating, rippling skin, across which the medieval mapmakers createdrivers and continents, working with and against the creases, scars and folds of the animal’s
flayed body. It is the world made (from) flesh. When the map was first unveiled at the Hay
Festival in June 2013, the audience response was remarkable. People rushed to touch
the surface of the Factum map in a strikingly secular version of its original usage within
Hereford Cathedral as an image of the world made by God.

THE WORK OF MAPPI NG IN A N AG E O F DIG ITA L M EDIAT IO N

223

There is another tantalising outcome to using suchmethods for digitally mapping the surface of a map. The
facsimile shows that a compass was used in outlining
Jerusalem and Crete. If digital investigation can matchthe holes made by the compass points on the map withthose made on the backboard, then it can be proven thatthe map was made in Hereford, challenging generationsof scholarly belief that it was first made in Lincoln before being transferred to Hereford Cathedral.
A modern map is usually regarded as a 2D abstractionof 3D topographical data. Factum’s digital mapping methods
effectively invert this process and recreate a 3D artefact
from the 2D map, yet in the process reveal the practice thatwent into the original transformation from 3D to 2D. Nor isthis transformative process confined to the Hereford Mappa
Mundi. In 2017 Factum was invited by the Bodleian Libraryin Oxford to scan one of their most precious cartographic objects: the Muslim mapmaker al-Sharif al-Idrisi’s geographicalcompilation with maps entitled the Kita-b nuzhat al-mushta-q f
ikhtira-q al-a-fa-q, which translates as the Entertainment for He
Who Longs to Travel theWorld.The text was completed in Sicily
in 1154 for its Norman ruler King Roger II. The original
no longer exists but there are several surviving manuscript
copies, including the one held in the Bodleian, which wascopied in Constantinople in 1553. Idrisi’s vast text also
contains 70 regional maps which, if amalgamated (something Idrisi never proposed), would create the mental geography of the world according
to this remarkable 12th-century mapmaker. In scanning all 70 maps, Factum were able todigitally stitch them together to create a composite world map of staggering beauty anddetail. The resulting map was displayed for the first time alongside the 1553 book at theBodleian Library’s exhibition Talking Maps (July 2019 – March 2020).5
Displaying such a map offered a new perspective on Idrisi’s world picture. Yet
Factum’s 3D replication methods were able to go even further. In his Entertainment Idrisi
describes a subsequent commission from King Roger:
A disk should be produced in pure silver of a large extent and of 400 Roman ratls
in weight, each ratl of 112 dirhams and when it was ready he had engraved on
it a map of the seven climates and their lands and regions, their shorelines andhinterlands, gulfs and seas, watercourses and places of rivers, their inhabited anduninhabited parts, what [distances] were between each locality there, either alongfrequented roads or in determined miles or authenticated measurements andknown harbours according to the version appearing on the drawing board. 6

5 Jerry Brotton and Nick Millea, curators, Talking Maps, Bodleian Library, Oxford (5 July 2019 – 8 March 2020).
6 Quoted in Maqbul Ahmed, ‘Cartography of Al-Sharif Al-Idrisi’, in The History of Cartography, eds. Harley andWoodward, vol. 2 bk 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1992), 156–73: 159.

224

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACE

THIS PAGE

Detail of the render of the backboard
showing the point made by thecompass when the city of Jerusalem
was marked onto the map above.
Detail of the exaggerated relief
surface of the re-created Mappa
Mundi without colour.
OPPOSITE

María Carmen Pascual working ona re-creation of the map with an
exaggerated surface relief, 2018.

Having captured the topographical data in Idrisi’s text that must have been used to create
the silver disc, Factum were able to reproduce it based on the original specification. The
map was never seen and was presumably melted down for its weight in silver at sometime after King Roger’s death in 1154. The result is a beautiful world map made in relief,
but what is its status? Is it a copy of a lost original that was never described? Or a cartographic reimagining of a mental geography that enables us to see the world as Idrisi andRoger did in 1154? Both the philosophical and geographical ramifications of this digitalact of remapping a lost map remain in the domain of subsequent research that will undoubtedly flow from this unique digital mediation between past and present.
The processes used by Factum can go even further. As well as bringing objects like
Idrisi’s silver disc back to life from the distant past, it is now possible to remap our globalised world with astonishing results. For several years Factum have been projecting a new
3D map of the world with the oceans’ water removed, using a rectangular projection andbathymetric data, challenging us to see the world around us in shocking new light. Using
the title and practice of ‘Terra-forming’, the resulting model suggests a profound reconsideration of how we imagine the globe as both a subject and an object.7 Whereas globalisation
as a critical and economic concept imagines a fantasy of the globe upon which we live as asmooth surface across which capital moves unimpeded by geography, the ‘Terra-forming’model presents us with a very different image of how we map our world.
‘Terra-forming’ also stretches the possibilities of a map to breaking point in making
its environmental point: by slowly flooding the map over many hours and days until
reaching current sea levels, the world can then be slowly ‘drowned’ as a statement of
the current fears surrounding climate change. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Harley andWoodward, Factum’s endeavour is to facilitate a spatial understanding of processes or
events in the human world. Their practice suggests that the future looks less like a text
and more like a map.
7 Jerry Brotton and Adam Lowe, ‘Re-visioning the World: Mapping the Lithosphere’, in Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge,
eds. Pasquale Gagliardi, Simon Schaffer and John Tresch (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 31–51.

THE WORK OF MAPPI NG IN A N AG E O F DIG ITA L M EDIAT IO N

225

THE WAY WE SEE THE WORLD
Adam Lowe

Adapted from a text publishedin Modelling Time. The Permanent
Collection 1925–2014, eds. Mari
Lending and Mari Hvattum(Oslo: Torpedo Press, 2014)
Adam Lowe is the Director of
Factum Arte and the founder ofFactum Foundation for Digital
Technology in Conservation.

OPPOSITE

The first map of the lithosphere.
Willem Goeree, Voor-Bereidselen Tot
de BybelscheWysheid en Gebruik derHeilige…, Amsterdam, 1690.

226

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACE

W

ilson’s Cloud Chamber, designed by Charles Wilson while working on thesummit of Ben Nevis in 1894, may have failed to predict the weather but
after he joined the team at the Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge thefollowing year, his model did provide Lord Rutherford with new insights into the complexity of nuclear physics. Physical models have often yielded surprising insights.
It is hoped that Factum Arte’s planned model of the surface of our globe withoutwater will find many applications and provoke a range of conversations. Mapping the surface of the lithosphere requires a combination of topographic and bathymetric data. It has
great importance not only for territorial disputes focused on the Arctic and Antarctic,
but also for understanding the dynamic nature of our relationship with water. As weenter the Anthropocene epoch (or era, depending on how long it is likely to last), thisrelationship and its constantly changing parameters should be a reason to pause before
we go down the route of geo-engineering. The relationships between the lithosphere,
biosphere, atmosphere and stratosphere are delicate, dynamic, inter-related and beyond
the understanding of the ethnosphere.
The model of the surface of the earth has been assembled from publicly available data.
It is intended to be made on a vast scale to be in dialogue with the model built in 1851 in
Leicester Square by James Wylde, which had a diameter of 18.9 m, and the proposal by
Élisée Reclus for the World Expo of 1900, which was intended to be 160 m in diameterand to contain a second revolving globe 127.5 m in diameter. Reclus’ project was neverrealised, but it continues to influence generations of imaginative thinkers.
The first three-dimensional physical tests were completed in Madrid in 2013. An
equi-rectangular projection was carved into a tonally layered block of plaster measuring
50 x 100 cm. The highest points are white. They are 8 cm above the darkest points that
represent depth. In this model, a terra-centric projection, north is no longer at the top.
The globe was rotated before being projected onto a rectangle so that areas of water– rather than the two polar icecaps – are stretched to infinity at top and bottom. The
relief of the surface has been exaggerated by a factor of 100 in order to draw attention to
the relief on the surface of the planet. When represented at this scale with no exaggeration, the surface would be as smooth as a billiard ball.
A 2 x 4 m version was shown in the exhibition Anthropocène Monument, curated
by Bruno Latour for Les Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2014. Since then, the data has been
updated as it becomes available and a large-scale version is now planned. It does notpropose simply to represent our environment: rather, it insists on the processes throughwhich dynamic environment is shaped and altered.
The historian of science Simon Schaffer has written that ‘the concept of the “sublime” was invented to make sense of things beyond our comprehension. Vast things and227

THIS PAGEThe 2 x 4 m 3D relief projectionof the world shown as part of theexhibition Anthropocène Monument
in Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2014.
OPPOSITE

The earth without water.
Partially submerged earth.
The earth submerged.

natural phenomena are favoured subjects; not only floods, storms, eruptions, chasms
and cities but also over-population, global warming and climate change. These things
can freeze with fear or be a prompt to action. The decision to take charge and act isconstantly frustrated because of a massive failure of vision, of aesthetics’. The aim ofa physical model of the earth’s surface cast into cement or carved into stone is to givethe aesthetic voice a role in the discussion about climate change. The equi-rectangularprojection will be slowly flooded with water. The process will be indiscriminate anduniform, with the water being pumped in until the top of Mount Everest has been covered. While this is a physical impossibility in the real world, on a scaled model it acts as
a poetic statement. The watery surface will act as a ‘screen’ onto which dynamic mapsof temperature, gulf streams, radioactivity, salinity, political boundaries, light pollution,and other phenomena can be projected. The physical relief map will become an animatedevent that can be updated, experienced, discussed and posted or shared on social media.
The model makes the data more coherent and vice versa.
Changing the projection used to represent the surface of the spherical planet onto
a flat plane changes the way we perceive the planet. It provides a new perspective, a new
point of view.
228

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACET H E WAY W E S EE T H E WO R L D

229

RE-CREATING THE LOST SILVER MAP
OF AL-IDRISIElizabeth Mitchell

Elizabeth Mitchell has adoctorate in Greco-Romanarchaeology from Harvard
University. She writes, edits, andworks on recording projects for
Factum Foundation.

OPPOSITE

Engraving the silver map ofal-Idrisi.

230

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACET

he map of the world completed by the Islamic cartographer al-Idrisi in 1153 wasa masterpiece of mapping which remained the most technically sophisticatedworld map for three centuries after its production. Drawing on several centuriesof Greco-Roman and Islamic cartographic research, al-Idrisi produced both a book of 70
maps covering the surface of the known world, and a single, round map engraved onto asilver disk and set into a wooden table, with Mecca at its centre.
It was a map made for a culturally hybrid – and highly volatile – Mediterranean.
Al-Idrisi’s patron was the Norman king Roger II, whose father and uncle had conquered
the Arab Emirate of Sicily in the 11th century and who ruled from Palermo over a culturally and linguistically diverse population: Roger commissioned Arab artisans to produce
art and architecture for the court at Palermo, and many Arab bureaucratic structures
remained in place. Perhaps because of its large Islamic population, Sicily held back whileother European powers were embarking on the failed Second Crusade in 1147–49 – but
Roger’s powerful navy was less forgiving of other Mediterranean competitors, engaging
in campaigns of conquest and ransack on the Tunisian and Greek coastlines as well as on
Malta and in southern Italy. While Mecca may have been at the centre of al-Idrisi’s map,the Mediterranean looms large, with Sicily an outsized triangle at its centre.
The silver disk is now lost, and the book, the Entertainment for He Who Longs toTravel the World (Nuzhat al-mushta-q fi’khtira-q al-a-fa-q; also known as the Book of Roger), survives only through later copies. But in a groundbreaking collaboration with the Bodleian
Library, Jerry Brotton, and Daniel Crouch Rare Books, Factum Foundation has undertaken to re-create al-Idrisi’s fabled silver map. Neither facsimile nor copy, this re-creation, which is 2 m in diameter, nonetheless combines painstaking historical research withadvanced digital techniques and the highest levels of craftsmanship, paying tribute to thelost original and offering yet another layer to add to the complexity of its transmission.
The process began with the high-resolution photographic recording of a 16th-century copy of the Entertainment held by Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The 70 maps from theEntertainment were stitched together digitally, and discrepancies where one page meets another were adjusted to create a continuous rectangular map of the world. This was thendistorted into circular shape, keeping Mecca at the centre, and converted to a vectorised
file – essentially a line drawing.While some of these processes could be automised, this wasan endeavour that relied heavily on time-consuming human skill – as for example with thehundreds of Arabic place names, which had to be extracted from the composite rectangle
and re-placed individually on the final circular image in order to avoid distortion.
Where al-Idrisi’s map would have been engraved by hand, the re-creation used
CNC milling machines to engrave the contours of cities and coastlines onto the silver
surface. Far from representing a de-skilling of the engraving process, however, Factum
231

THIS PAGE

The composite map wastransformed into a vectorised
image, allowing it to beengraved using CNC milling.
OPPOSITE

Casado vectorising the map in
preparation for engraving.
Ms. Pococke 375, a
representation of al-Idrisi’s
world map made in the 1550s,
now in the Bodleian Library,
Oxford.

Foundation’s use of these machines regularly pushes them to previously unimaginable
limits. In this instance, in order to replicate as closely as possible the hand-engraving process, the usual drill was replaced with a spring-loaded tool able to cut without rotating,which applies a similar pressure to that made in hand-engraving. This allows for the creation of remarkably precise details through the reworking of the same surface multiple
times in finer and finer definition. The finished plates, eight in total, were then joined
together by a silversmith and polished.
The re-created map of al-Idrisi allows the traveller of the 21st century to undertake
an unprecedented journey: both through the landscape of the 12th-century geographicalimagination, and across the shining surface of advanced mapping and making technologies. One map has already been given to the Bodleian Library, where it has been displayed
as part of the exhibition Talking Maps, and the intention is to donate a further copy to thecity of Palermo, ‘returning’ this unique artwork to the place where its ancestor was once
beaten and engraved from a disk of pure silver.

232

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACE

RE-C REATI N G T H E L O S T S ILV ER M A P O F A L - IDR IS I

233

RECORDING AN OTTOMAN-VENETIANWORLD MAP
Guendalina Damone

Guendalina Damone isconducting graduate work in
the Conservation of Historicaland Artistic Heritage at the
University of Udine. She has led
the Factum Foundation officein Milan since 2014, and theFoundation’s laboratory at the
ARCHiVe digitisation centre in
Venice since 2018.

OPPOSITE

The wooden matrices of the
Ottoman-Venetian map.

234

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACET

he Ottoman-Venetian heart-shaped map of the world now preserved in the
Biblioteca Marciana in Venice was found in 1795 in the Criminal Archive of theCouncil of Ten, in the Doges’ Palace in Venice. Dating to the second half of the
16th century, it has traditionally been attributed to the Tunisian Hajji Ahmed, although
recent studies have suggested that it was a multi-author project conceived in Venice in1559–69. The map carries text in Ottoman Turkish and must be understood within
the context of commercial relations between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman
Empire; in that period Constantinople was making frequent cartographic requests
of Venice, and this map was probably designed for the Ottoman market.
The object preserved by the Biblioteca Marciana is the map’s matrix, comprising
six engraved wooden blocks measuring 106 x 110 cm and two woodblock prints madefrom the matrix at the end of the 18th century measuring 111 x 113.5 cm. The matrix
shows a cordiform earth (a projection in the form of a heart, a configuration common
at the time), with place names written in Arabic letters and a 292-line text in Ottoman
Turkish to left and right. The text is divided into five sections: prologue, introduction,
description of the continents, descriptions of the twelve main provinces of the world
and of the seven great lords, and epilogue. In the lower part of the map are an armillarysphere and two celestial spheres – distinctively European subjects of representation, as
Abbot Assemani has remarked, which are found at the same time period in the work of
Albrecht Dürer among others. Map, text, and spheres are framed by a string of floral motifs, broken only at the top by the title, ‘Kemâlîyle naqš olunmıš jümle jihân nümûnesi’,
which translates as ‘Perfect and complete engraving and description of the whole world’.
In February 2019, the Factum Foundation team collaborated with two students
from IUAV University of Venice’s Digital Architecture masters programme, Mario Costa
and Fabio Martinello, to record the map. The recording was part of an initiative led by
ARCHiVe (Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice), and was framed as acomparative study designed to assess the merits of three recording techniques: photogrammetry, laser scanning, and the Lucida 3D Scanner.
The photogrammetric survey was conducted using a Nikon D800 reflex with a
50mm lens, with the data processing employing the Agisoft Metashape Pro Software. A
Range 7 triangulation laser scanner, employing both a telephoto lens and a wide angle
lens (precision ± 40 microns), was then used to re-record the map. Alignment for thelaser scanner was performed using Geomagic Studio software. Finally, the map was recorded with the Lucida 3D Scanner, which is designed for the acquisition of 3D information from objects with an almost flat surface, such as paintings or bas-reliefs. At the end of
the investigation, a section (10 x 10 cm) of the data collected from the different systems
was printed in 3D. The information acquired through the Lucida Scanner was the closest
235

THIS PAGE

The re-materialised matrices wereused to create a new print of themap.
OPPOSITE

Mike Ward printing from therouted facsimiles of the matrices.
Detail of a print from one of therematerialised matrices.

to the surface of the original matrix. The correspondence was so close that the data could
be CNC routed into panels and used to remake a printed image of the map.
Should the Biblioteca Marciana decide to, it will now be possible to use the scan data
as a base for digital restoration. Factum Foundation is a pioneer in this sector, working inclose contact with universities, technical experts and art historians to develop and implement strategies for restoring objects in virtual space. The blocks that make up the matrixof the Ottoman-Venetian map have deteriorated considerably since they were first made,and there are several gaps in the map; using the scan data and the existing maps, it would
be possible to propose restoration options for several of these gaps, leading to a more
complete 3D model that could then be rematerialised and used to print new, ‘restored’
maps, and allowing conservators to identify the most appropriate actions to take in order
to conserve the original object.

FOLLOWING PAGES

Render of the Gough Map withcolour and 3D registered together.
Colour data for the back of
the map.
Render of the 3D data for the frontof the map.
Render of the 3D data for the backof the map.

236

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACEREC ORDI N G AN OT TO M A N- V ENET IA N WO R L D M A P

237

238

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACEREC ORDI N G AN OT TO M A N- V ENET IA N WO R L D M A P

239

240

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACEREC ORDI N G AN OT TO M A N- V ENET IA N WO R L D M A P

241

242

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACEREC ORDI N G AN OT TO M A N- V ENET IA N WO R L D M A P

243

244

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACEREC ORDI N G AN OT TO M A N- V ENET IA N WO R L D M A P

245

THE GOUGH MAP. REVEALINGFUNCTION THROUGH CARTOGRAPHY
Catherine Delano-Smith and Damien Bove

Catherine Delano-Smith,formerly reader in Historical
Geography, University of
Nottingham, is senior research
fellow at the Institute ofHistorical Research, School of
Advanced Studies, Universityof London. She has written
extensively on early maps
and mapping and is theeditor of Imago Mundi. The
International Journal for theHistory of Cartography. She isalso currently the lead academic
for the three-year research
project ‘Understanding themedieval Gough Map throughphysics, chemistry and history’.
Damien Bove is the research
assistant for the project‘Understanding the medieval
Gough Map through physics,
chemistry and history’. He is
also a freelance researcher andthe picture editor for Imago
Mundi.

OPPOSITE

Recording the Gough Map in the
Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2014.

246

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACET

he Gough Map of Britain (c. 1400), bequeathed to the Bodleian Library byRichard Gough in 1809 (Gough Gen.Top. 16), was drawn on two pieces ofparchment stitched together to make one large sheet (115 × 56 cm).1 The complexity of the cartographical image, which is dominated by some 660 places portrayedpictorially, presents a challenge to historians seeking to discover the physical processes ofcompilation and the reasons for the map. In 2015, in the course of two related research
projects, the latter supported by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2019-070), Factum Arte
undertook 3D scans of the document, recto and verso.2 The objective was to record thetotal distribution of the pinholes scattered about the map (long known to be present
but never studied) and explain their origin and function, as well as to discover any othermarkings not discernible by the naked eye.3
The outcome exceeded expectations. The 3D scan not only allowed the plottingof a more or less complete distribution of the pricked holes, but also revealed a numberof unsuspected scored outlines, both features connected with the settlement signs andsome regional labels. The mismatch between the pricked outline of the sign, some rubrication and the final inked lines testify to an ad hoc sequence of alteration and amendment
and confirm the use of the map specifically for consultation. No less significant was thediscovery that the pinholes are absent from one part of the map (East Anglia and Kent).
Evidence from the 3D scan points to the use of a pin in copying features from an unknown exemplar onto the new, appropriately-sized, parchment; as far as can be seen fromthe verso, almost no hole has penetrated the sheepskin and only a tiny bump, revealed by
the 3D scan, betrays the pricking.4 This is a key discovery, explaining the pinholes, documenting a so-far unparalleled map-making process, directing attention to the origins of
the Gough Map, and highlighting to an extraordinary degree the way the map was used
and repeatedly amended.
On some occasions the mismatch of pinholes and inked lines can be ascribed to
the need to position the drawn sign more appropriately (not in the middle of a river, forinstance, or because of a blemish on the skin, revealed only by the 3D scan). Elsewhere it
hints at changed local circumstances (as when a towered sign is indicated by the pinholes,
but only the adjacent small cottage element was inked). The lack of any pricking at all in
1 Nick Millea, The Gough Map:The Earliest Road Map of Great Britain? (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007).
2 Catherine Delano-Smith et al., ‘New Light on the Medieval Gough Map of Britain’, Imago Mundi.The International
Journal for the History of Cartography, no. 69, 1 (2017): 1–36.
3 W. B. Sanders, ‘Map of England and Scotland (author unknown) preserved in the Bodleian Library, probable date,
about 1300’, in The Thirty-Second Report of the Deputy Keeper of Public Records, no. 1 (Southampton, Ordnance Survey;
London, HMSO, 1871).
4 The removal of the glued backing of the map, and extensive patching undertaken as part of conservation somewhat
confuses what can be seen.

247

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP LEFT

Detail from the Gough Map
showing the pictorial sign for Hull,
Yorkshire. Bodleian Library,
Oxford, MS Gough Gen. Top. 16.
Reproduced with the permissionof the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Details from the 3D scan of theGough Map showing (top) the
pinholes marking out the shape of
the pictorial sign for Hull,
Yorkshire, and (bottom) the bumps
on the verso made by the pins.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS
Gough Gen. Top. 16. Reproducedwith the permission of the
Bodleian Library, Oxford.

East Anglia and Kent, however, clearly anticipated the need to reconfigure the coastlineof southeast England according to new information.5 The hitherto unseen grooves scoredaround some of the regional labels are not always associated with pinholes and seem tohave been a different way of indicating the outline of the label that was later to be inked.
The clerks in the royal household conjectured to have been responsible for theGough Map, working on it intermittently, cannot be thought of as map-makers. They
appear to have been working for their own purposes, probably in connection with domestic administration, without established map-making techniques. Their prickingsand scorings, revealed so remarkably by the 3D image, reflect their struggles and theirexperiments.

General distribution of pinholeson the Gough Map. The lack ofany pricking in East Anglia and
Kent clearly anticipated the needto reconfigure the coastline ofsoutheast England according to new
information. Geographical featuresin this part of England had to be
drawn directly onto the parchment
instead of being pricked off from atemplate. The vertical line crossing
the map near its centre corresponds
to Hadrian’s Wall.
Standard groupings of pinholeson the Gough Map showing how
they fit the pictorial town signs.
D. Bove.

FOLLOWING PAGES

Render of the surface of the Illés
Map, a 1:500 scale model ofJerusalem made between 1864
and 1873 by Stephan Illés, now onpermanent loan from the Maisonde la Réformation SA in Geneva
to the Tower of David Museumin Jerusalem.
Panoramic photograph of Giovannida Modena’s Last Judgement in the
Basilica of San Petronio before
perspectival correction.
LiDAR scan of the interior of thePantheon in Rome, 2019.

248

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACE

5 By the early 14th century, Mediterranean traders and navigators were arriving in London from the Bay of Biscay andthe Channel with their charts; ‘New light’ (see note 2), p. 18 and Fig. 7.

THE GOUGH MAP. REVEALI N G F U NCT IO N T H RO U G H C A RTO G R A P H Y

249

250

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACETHE GOUGH MAP. REVEALI N G F U NCT IO N T H RO U G H C A RTO G R A P H Y

251

252

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACETHE GOUGH MAP. REVEALI N G F U NCT IO N T H RO U G H C A RTO G R A P H Y

253

254

C A RTOG RA P H Y : RE C ORD IN G S H AP E, MA P P ING SU R FACETHE GOUGH MAP. REVEALI N G F U NCT IO N T H RO U G H C A RTO G R A P H Y

255

CHAPTER 5

ACCESS AND DISPLAY

256

257

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS.
TRANSPORTIVE ARCHITECTURECharlotte Skene CatlingCharlotte Skene Catling is
an architect. With her practice,
Skene Catling de la Peña,
she designed the exhibitions
Madame de Pompadour in
the Frame at Waddesdon
Manor and Scanning Seti: The
Regeneration of a Pharaonic Tombat the Antikenmuseum, Basel,among other collaborations
with Adam Lowe.
The exhibition Madame dePompadour in the Frame opened
in May 2019. It was originallyscheduled to run for fourmonths but has now been
extended to May 2020.

It is strange to dream, and to have mirrors
Where the commonplace, worn-out repertory
Of every day may include the illusory
Profound globe that reflections scheme.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Mirrors’, in Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer andHarold Morland [1960] (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 60–61.

T

he biography of a painting can be almost as complex as that of its subject.
The exhibition Madame de Pompadour in the Frame was built around a facsimile byFactum Foundation of François Boucher’s famous 1756 portrait of the all-powerful,
Enlightenment maitresse-en-titre of Louis XV. The initial idea was to replicate Boucher’s portrait, reunite it with the frame it once occupied and to display them together. But the idea
grew… A smaller Boucher oil sketch of Madame de Pompadour in an elaborate 18th-century gilded frame remains at Waddesdon. By Factum also recording and replicating thissketch, there was the rare possibility to display an original and a facsimile next to one another, challenging visitors to determine which was which.Then it became important for theshow to explain what this means and why it matters. This is a description of the exhibition,of the intention behind the design, and some reflections that emerged during the process.

THE MIGRATION OF THE OBJECTPREVIOUS PAGE

A facsimile of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper displayed as part of an
installation by Peter Greenaway, Park
Avenue Armory, NewYork, 2010.
OPPOSITE

Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin,
La verité Surmonte L’Autorité(Truth Overcomes Authority), 1757.
Waddesdon (National Trust),
Bequest of James de Rothschild,1957. Photo Waddesdon Image
Library, Bodleian Imaging Services.

It remains a mystery how, or why, Boucher’s portrait was separated from its frame– no-one today knows. It was painted while Madame de Pompadour was living at
Versailles. After her death, the vast quantity of her possessions were split up and sold by
her brother and soon after, the royal collections were dispersed as the French Revolution
unfolded. By the late 19th century, the Pompadour portrait had travelled to London,
where it belonged to Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild as part of his large accumulation ofAncien Régime artworks. Around the time Ferdinand acquired the portrait, it was reframed. When he died in 1898, he left the portrait to his brother Nathaniel and although
the canvas eventually found its way to Germany, the elaborate 18th-century frame, withits 19th-century cartouche and decorations that mimic the flowers on Pompadour’s dress,
was kept. Today, the painting belongs to the HypoVereinsbank but is on permanent loan to
the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, where it is one of the most important in their collection.
The painting depicts Madame de Pompadour reclining on a striped chaise and embroidered satin cushions, framed by curtains and swags of gold silk damask. The vast
mirror behind her extends outside the frame of the painting. It reflects the back of her
259

head and the bow at the nape of her neck, bookcases, and the putto of an ornate clock,and it allows a view into a shadowy place beyond. Pompadour – a pale pink and whitebust, forearms and hands, and a pair of tiny, slippered feet – emerges like sculpted porcelain from a frothy sea of turquoise taffeta, white lace, pearls, pink roses and a corsetof pink silk ribbons and bows. Pompadour used portraits to communicate with the King
as well as to shape a public perception of herself: here the image is of beauty and purity,
framed in sensuality and balanced with intellect, kindness and devotion. Boucher was afavourite collaborator. She holds an open book in her lap. Surrounding her are symbolsof biographical detail: a writing desk with a quill resting in an inkstand, a half-written
letter, her seal and wax, a patient spaniel sitting loyally at her feet, a leather-bound bookfrom her own printing press with the stamp markings of her arms, loose manuscripts
and engravings, rolls of architectural drawings and a pair of roses crossed with engraving
tools. She gazes affectionately beyond the edge of the painting – one assumes towards theKing, or at least the thought of him.

The facsimile of Boucher’s Madamede Pompadour (1756) displayedat Waddesdon Manor. It wasscanned from an original in theAlte Pinakothek, Munich, where
it is on permanent loan from the
HypoVereinsbank, Memberof UniCredit.

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Madame de Pompadour’s Rococo portrait is part of the story of Versailles but also of theRothschild’s family past and the Alte Pinakothek’s present. In each of these contexts, it hasa very different meaning. Pompadour might be surprised to find a facsimile of herself at
Waddesdon Manor, a house commissioned by Ferdinand de Rothschild that looks like a
Loire Valley château conjured into the English countryside.When her portrait was painted,
France was at war with Britain. Facsimiles allow objects to be in more than one place atonce – to travel back to former contexts or forward to new ones. A facsimile has reunited
Boucher’s portrait with the 18th-century frame that ended up at Waddesdon in an act thatquestions the relationship between originals and facsimiles, technology and art, and the way
we value things and move them from one place to another. It demonstrates the role digitalrecording and facsimile-making can play in preserving and disseminating cultural heritage.
From this, questions proliferate and as they multiply, culture comes vibrantly to life as a primary form of communication. Madame de Pompadour was an Enlightenment inspiration.
Back in her frame at Waddesdon, she becomes part of the discourse of today.
In 2018, the Alte Pinakothek gave Factum Foundation permission to digitally record Boucher’s portrait in high resolution. An agreement was made according to the protocol Factum has developed around its recording and output technologies, whereby theAlte Pinakothek gains the data in colour and 3D and retains full control of the copyrightfor all current and future commercial applications. In return, they allow Waddesdon to
make one exact copy of the painting.
The Exhibition Room in the North Passage on the first floor of Waddesdon Manor
is a room of 5 x 6 m with high ceilings and walls dressed in a deep red damask, suggesting
the high fashion of Victorian mourning. The light that enters through two tall windows
is immediately swallowed into the burgundy gloam before it can reach the opposite wall.
A dark red carpet covers the floor. A narrow corridor off the end of this space – 8.5
m long by 1.5 m wide forms a tail that leads to a small, bright room with pale walls ofglass-fronted cabinets filled with Sèvres porcelain: figures of flirting shepherdesses andtable settings in brilliant blues, pinks and golds. ‘Rose Pompadour’ was the pink groundinvented by Sèvres in 1757.
260

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

PORTALS
A painting can be a portal that leads far beyond the visible contents of a picture. The
composition, the language, and the symbolic objects of Boucher’s portrait are all layers ofa complex narrative. Although the intention was not to focus on the character of Madamede Pompadour, the biography of the painting revealed aspects of her own extraordinary
life that have relevance today. The aim of the facsimile and the exhibition design wasto amplify the multiple narratives of the painting to produce a space that throws theportal further open and draws the viewer through. It was decided to block the two
windows directly opposite the entrance and effectively split the space into two: the longexit corridor was extended into an even longer strip using a theatrical gauze, and themain room was turned into a 5 x 5 m square. On entering the exhibition, the eye isimmediately drawn to Madame de Pompadour in her frame on the end wall, making
her the literal centrepiece of the show as well as its subject. The dividing frame of gauze
was digitally printed with elements of the damask cloth from her portrait and focuses
attention onto the facsimile of the painting and its frame. The walls of the long strip
were painted the same mole grey as in the portrait’s mirror reflection, with the effect ofextending the painting beyond its frame and into real space. The gauze conceals the door
to the exit corridor, so allowing an element of discovery and successive experiences.

FRAMES WITHIN FRAMES
The main room was painted the pale rose of Madame de Pompadour’s skin, anda carpet of the same fleshy colour replaced the deep red one. The walls were divided by strips of bevelled mirror framing the Rococo panels of Boucher’s Nouveauxmorceaux pour des paravents (New works for screens) designed between 1730 and 1740 and

T R A NS P O RT IV E A R CH IT ECT U R E

261

WORM-EATEN
To fit the proportions of the room, Boucher’s compositions have been extended at theirbase by the addition of five different framed panels of ‘digital vermiculated rustication’.
These panels were developed with Adam Lowe and were 3D-modelled by Irene Gaumé at
Factum, eventually to be CNC routed into stone. Boucher’s panels merge the mythologicalpast and pastoral idyll reclaimed by nature, only to be reborn again. Similarly, rustication is
the symbolic, sculpted transition from raw material to rarified architectural composition,
animated by shadow. The routed patterns are based on rock and crystal forms, petrified
underwater creatures or their fossilised remains. This vermiculated or ‘worm-eaten’ rustication is masonry as ‘Memento Mori’, a 21st-century architectural Vanitas, speaking oflife, death, dirt and time.

GALERIES DES GLACES

depicting the Triomphe de Pomone (1740), Triomphe de Priape (1737), Rocaille (1730s),
Hommage champètre (1740) and Léda (1740). Following the Siamese Ambassador’s visit
to Versailles in 1686, Chinese screens became very fashionable in France. Diderot andd’Alembert’s Encyclopédie includes examples, and Chinoiserie was absorbed into the
Rococo style.
In Boucher’s screens, architecture is overtaken by an aesthetic of constantly
shifting movement; materials become indistinguishable from one another as they dissolve from picture frame to plant tendril, spiky coral branch, waves, waterfalls, vinesand ribbons. The viewer is pulled through successive openings, impossible perspectives, abstractions and layers of illusory depth. The role played by frames within these
Rococo fantasies is at once paramount and elusive: they distract as much as they focus.
Erotic scenes of mythological and pastoral love undulate among broken statues andpediments; time is compressed into a single, restless moment that unites relic, reproduction, and the possibility of renewal. Responding to Factum’s interest in art andillusion, originality and authenticity, as well as the 18th-century approach to the roleof the copy, the screens also play with the way a subject can be expressed in different
materials. Boucher’s panels began as drawings that were turned into engravings, probably designed to be painted on paper mounted to canvas or woven as tapestries. Herethey have been digitally printed onto pale pink, padded silk, fixed to boards and wall
mounted. Similarly, Pompadour’s print engravings reproduce drawings by Boucher,themselves reworkings of carnelians carved by court gemstone engraver Jacques Guay.
In the 18th century, skilled translations between different media were highly regarded.
Boucher includes a putto engraved by Pompadour in his portrait, represented througha fourth medium – oil paint. Factum’s facsimile becomes a fifth, made by printing
pigment onto gesso.
262

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

THIS PAGE

View of the exhibition showing
the Lucida Scanner and Rococo
wall panels with mirrored
surrounds.

The mirrored frames create yet more layers of infinitely extended space and make theedges of the room dissolve. Through these mirrors, Madame de Pompadour is omnipresent – visible on every wall. As visitors move through the dimly lit space, Pompadour’s
opaline face flickers in and out of view and she can be caught gazing at multiples of her
own reflected image in a series of confrontations between original and facsimile. Bevellededges add further kaleidoscopic multiplications, extending and partly abstracting
Boucher’s palette of turquoise, fleshy rose, mole grey and muted gold. The mirrors are areference to the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at Versailles where, on the night of
24 February 1745, at the masked Bal des Ifs (Yew Tree Ball), King Louis XV first declaredhimself to Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson. She was disguised as Diana the Huntress. The Kingwas disguised as a tree, accompanied by a small forest of courtiers.

OPPOSITE

Cabinet containing production
artefacts from previous projects.

T R A NS P O RT IV E A R CH IT ECT U R E

263

LAITERIE D’AGRÉMENT
Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson was not born an aristocrat. She took the title of Marquise dePompadour after moving to Versailles. She exemplified the Age of Reason: a friend of
Voltaire and Montesquieu, she was initially a supporter of Diderot and his Encyclopédie
despite the disapproval of the Church and the King. She wielded enormous political influence and was involved in negotiations that led to the first Treaty of Versailles in 1756.
Pompadour was an opera singer as well as an accomplished artist, print and gem engraver, champion of the Rococo style and great patron of the arts. She would distractand entertain the King with architecture, his favourite pastime. From Crecy to Bellevue,
Fontainebleau and Elysée, together they bought, built and refurbished chateaux, theatres, hermitages and petits appartements, killing time and a large chunk of the Kingdom’staxes. The aristocratic mania for milk and rural life, or a rarefied simulacrum of it, led
to a whole genre of architectural contrivance: the laiterie d’agrément or pleasure dairy,
little temples to health and the ‘simple life’. The King’s favourite architect, Ange-JaquesGabriel, built the Nouvelle Ménagerie for Pompadour in the gardens at Trianon in
1749 with an elegant laiterie, ornamental cowsheds, aviaries and henhouses. Art and life
merged. Pompadour could commission and co-design the architectural set while playing
the role of decorative milkmaid.

LES TREMBLEUSES
Bone china is a soft-paste porcelain made with clay and the ash of cattle bones. In Limoges
producers found a large kaolin deposit and began making an imitation soft-paste,
mixing the white clay with powdered glass to dazzling effect and widespread yearning.
Pompadour is remembered for her role in creating the porcelain factory at Sèvres. It wassaid that to charm the King into supporting her enterprise, she commissioned Sèvres tomake her a garden. Louis’ delight became enchantment when he tried to pick a flower
only to discover it was made of brilliant porcelain. By 1753, Sèvres was a Royal factory.
Pompadour’s frequent illnesses, together with her desires for ‘health for within’
and to overcome her frigidity, led her to drink a lot of milk. In 18th-century medical
discourse, milk, a symbol of pastoral purity and feminine innocence, was put forward
as a wholesome health cure for the elite ailments of the urban upper class. Diderot’s
Encyclopédie included Gabriel François Venel’s essay ‘Lait’ as part of a new secular
Enlightenment morality. Delicate porcelain gobelets à lait (milk goblets) were developedby Sèvres to hold the milk-cure for the anxious, the depressed and eventually, the oversexed, and to prevent ‘insane love’. These vessels, some deeply recessed into the socketof their saucers to prevent the quivering hands of delicate owners spilling the contents,
became known as trembleuses: exquisite emblems of rarefied temperaments. Pompadourchose trembleuses in blue and white porcelain for her pleasure dairy at Compiègne and herapartments at Versailles and Paris.
Years later in 1787, four porcelain bol-seins or jatte-tetons (breast cups or nipple
bowls) were made by Sèvres for Marie Antoinette’s dairy at Rambouillet based on an
Etruscan design. Rumoured to have been cast from her royal breast, the thought of theprocess gave a voyeuristic frisson. Each was delicately painted to mimic flushed living
flesh, its erect nipple a deeper shade of pink. To drink, the milk-filled breast is lifted
264

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

Colour tests for the facsimileof the Munich portrait.

from its tripod base where it rests on the curved horns of three goats.With her bol-seins,
Marie Antoinette’s Hameau somehow failed to project innocence: as the Revolution
approached, her pleasure dairies became infamous as rendezvous for degenerate, incestuous sex. They were part of the end, both for her and the Ancien Régime.

TWIN SKETCHES
Mounted on two panels in the main room, the smaller, more spontaneous and intimate Boucher oil sketch of Madame de Pompadour hangs in its original 18th-century
frame alongside its twin – a perfect facsimile – challenging the visitor to tell one fromthe other. The challenge means that viewers spend much longer looking than theynormally would. They also tend to look in a different way, beyond the subject of thepicture and to the technique; they see the brushstrokes and gain an understanding of
how the painting was made as well as what is depicted, and they puzzle over the ornate,hand-gilded frames. They go deeper into the picture, almost as if seeing it ‘inside out’.
The way that recording and rematerialising gives access to a deeper understandingof an artwork as a process is one of the core tenets of Factum’s work. The labels arecovered, and visitors are invited to vote for which they believe is the original. Since
the opening of the exhibition, the results have been surprisingly equal, suggesting thevisual gap between original and facsimile has been closed.
Directly opposite the oil sketch and facsimile are two prints of the main painting.
One is divided by a net of scarlet lines into a matrix of puzzle-shaped pieces; it is an artefact of composite photography where multiple images taken methodically must thenT R A NS P O RT IV E A R CH IT ECT U R E

265

be reunited to recreate a three-dimensional object. The other, a more abstract black andwhite image where the composition of the painting can just be made out, is a ‘mask’,
used to ensure that the multiple photographs all have the same qualities. Both are compelling and look like 21st-century artworks reinterpreting Boucher’s portrait.

TECHNE CASES
Beneath the composite and mask, four perspex cases contain a collection of objects that
also relate to the facsimile-making process; these include greyscales, surface textures andimages at different resolutions. Beautiful in their own right, they demonstrate the physical materiality and craft involved in making a perfect recreation. The first case focuses
on tone, relief and the relationship between image and form through a Woodburytype
print. A CNC milled relief plate, when filled with pigmented gelatin, is able to turn
depth back into a continuous tone image. In the second case, to demonstrate elevatedprinting, a detail of the small Boucher oil sketch was made in increasingly exaggerated
surface relief, partly with colour and partly without. A third case is dedicated to digital‘noise’, demonstrating the critical balance between information and noise in the processof data gathering (recording an image) and output (making a facsimile). This is illustrated
through interference patterns that look like geometric notations of the music of thespheres. Finally, a collection of greyscales illustrates an essential part of Factum’s processthat underlies both 3D scanning and low-relief output.

FANS

Court in exquisite – and often obscene – watercoloured drawings.. The book is open toa page on which a diabolic satyr examines Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadourat the 1757 Salon, with the caption, ‘La verité Surmonte L’Autorité’.
To the left is the exit corridor with six full-height cases containing a collection of
objects from the Factum studio. They make up an extraordinary ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’
related to the process of recording and making, ‘input and output’. The first case contains
test and reject prints of the Boucher portrait, mounted with a raking light to reveal therelief surface of the canvas. Colour sticks show the method used to perfectly match thefacsimile to the original.
The ‘curiosities’ consist of: a demonstration of resolution in 3D scanning showing a
blurred vs. sharp form; an emerald-green depth map; a 3D-printed colour facsimile of theskull of an extinct bald ibis; a section of al-Idrisi’s world map engraved in silver; a detailof the surface of Seti I’s sarcophagus in alabaster; a cluster of printed stones and Meissen
porcelain panels from the facsimile of the Table of Teschen; the head of Ashurnasirpal
II from the throne room in Nimrud; geometric solids designed by Wenzel Jamnitzer;
reduced scale 3D prints from the façade of San Petronio; a facsimile of the helmet of
Jaime I; facsimiles of paintings from the Politico Griffoni; details from the Hereford Mappa
Mundi; colour notes produced in the Louvre while making Veronese’s Wedding at Cana;an assortment of tests both digital and physical; a fragment of a routed test for a tombstone from Kala Koreysh; a CNC milled panel of Vermiculated Rustication in Limestone.
Films on wall monitors show the making of objects designed by Piranesi, an animationof Piranesi’s Carceri and a Lidar-scanned film of Factum’s Madrid studios revealing theirproduction processes.

CYCLES OF REBIRTH

Text in exhibitions is generally dictated by size, legibility, the limits to what can be easily
absorbed and the speed at which people are encouraged to move through. Word counttends to be limited. But in this relatively tiny show, the text amounted to nearly 3,000
words. Hand-held information paddles followed an 18th-century Chinese fan design, theoriginal printed with a popular lyric and used for coquettishly hiding behind at Court.
Visitors lingered much longer than expected and guards noticed that they talked and interacted more than usual. Objects seem to come alive when they’re shared and discussed.
It was important to include places to sit; four emerald mohair velvet seats allowed visitors to stop, look, talk, read and rest.
A Lucida Scanner was set up near the entrance to the room to record various
paintings in the Waddesdon collection over the course of the exhibition. The paintings
are supported on an historic easel, emphasising the juxtaposition of past and present. The
person scanning sits at a small desk, processing images on a laptop in real time.

THE LONG CORRIDOR

From Waddesdon Manor – an escaped château – to the writhing Rococo fantasies of
Boucher’s parallel universe; from the reflected room in Pompadour’s portrait to the dissolved and multiplied space of the exhibition, these are all ‘transportive architectures’,
designed as portals into the imagination.
Facsimiles mean that exhibitions no longer need to depend on loans or the movement of valuable, fixed or fragile things from one place to another. Scanning Seti: The
Regeneration of a Pharaonic Tomb at the Antikenmuseum, Basel in 2017 was an earlier collaboration with Factum that also engaged with an historic character. Seti I is much further
away in time than Madame de Pompadour, but by using facsimiles and design, within alabyrinthine space, many complex stories were unfolded including the ultimate – thatwhich leads from life to death. At the core of the exhibition was the journey through theunderworld, the symbolic transformation over 12 hours from death to rebirth. Cycles ofrebirth are the tomb’s narrative and Factum’s virtuosity.
Through the looking glass or through the wormhole, these exhibitions aim tocreate a passage through space and time where art becomes alive again.

Behind the gauze that frames the portrait, visitors discover, to the right, a case that contains Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin’s Livre de Caricatures tant de bonnes que mauvaises(The Book of Caricatures – both good and bad), known in his family as the ‘Livre des culs’ or‘Book of Arses’. The King’s embroiderer, Saint-Aubin amused himself by ridiculing the266

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

T R A NS P O RT IV E A R CH IT ECT U R E

267

VERUM FACTUM ARTE:SCANNING SETI AND THE AFTERLIFE
OF A PHARAONIC TOMB
Bryan Markovitz
Bryan Markovitz is an artist,museum designer, and academic.
His research focuses on cultural
reproduction, the overlay of
performance and materiality,
and the experimental systems ofarchaeologists and conservation
scientists.

Even the most fecund of methods may eventually
become sterile without the fertilizing stimulusof new problems to solve.
Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 13.

T

he Scanning Seti exhibition at Basel’s Antikenmuseum begins like many other exhibitions of Egyptian antiquity – in an orientation room filled with expository
text.1 Here, the story of the 1817 European discovery of the New Kingdom
tomb of Pharaoh Seti I is told on graphic panels with supporting images from historicalvolumes. These are nested within wall murals made from 19th-century watercolors of
the Theban hills. Romantic palm trees arch over a famous portrait of Scanning Seti’s main
antagonist, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, sporting a turban. Belzoni was the Italian engineer and theatrical showman who found Seti I’s tomb during a stop-gap expedition for
Egyptian antiquities after his water-pump enterprise failed to impress Muhammad Ali,
the Ottoman governor who sought to modernize Egypt. To complete the Orientalist
tone of the room, a Turkish carpet on the parquet floor muffles the sound of visitor footsteps, giving one the feeling of being in the salon of some esoteric Egyptological society.
Many scholars have written about Egyptomania and its relationship to the formation of modern Western museums. The West’s longstanding fascination with Egyptian
antiquities is just one of a variety of elements that transformed Egypt into a colonial
territory, along with cotton exports, new trade routes, tourism, and the formation of academic disciplines like archaeology and Egyptology. The valuation of Egypt as a source ofboth natural resources and cultural heritage remains a fraught business in our postcolonial age. Knowledge about Ancient Egypt is driven by a passion for new evidence, thanks
to the CT scanning and genetic sequencing of mummies, as well as the digitization andscientific conservation of sites and artifacts. The Egyptian state itself plays dual positions,
simultaneously asserting its sovereign rights over the material culture of Ancient Egypt,while leveraging global resources to preserve and showcase that culture on the grounds
that it is a source of humanity’s shared heritage.2
In this age of global tourism, displays of Ancient Egyptian artifacts still evoke themystery and Gothic overtones that Europeans placed on early exhibitions, like the one

OPPOSITE

Holding a candle to the head ofHorus in the re-creation of theHall of Beauties as seen by Belzoni
in 1817.

268

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

1 Curatorial essays accompanied the narrative in the exhibition catalog, Scanning Sethos: Die Wiedergeburt Eines
Pharaonengrabes, Antikenmuseum Basel and Sammlung Ludwig, Basel, 29 October 2017 – 6 May 2018.
2 For more on this complicated relationship see Christina Riggs, ‘Ancient Egypt in the Museum: Concepts andConstructions’, in A Companion to Ancient Egypt, Volume 2, ed. Alan B. Lloyd (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

269

that Belzoni mounted in London’s Egyptian Hall in 1821.3 Unapologetically, Factum
Arte, the aesthetic curators of Scanning Seti, draw upon similar dramatic effects to set
the rest of the exhibition apart from its didactic opening scene. Past the carpeted salon,
visitors are lured into darkness by the foreboding presence of a stone-like block with amodel of Seti I’s tomb carved into its core. Split down the center, with one half of thetomb appearing on each side, the model is a perfect miniature of the burial complex’s
corridors and rooms.4 Centered on the wall between the model’s two sides is a monitor
showing a 3D fly-through of the tomb that Factum Arte created. As the sacred burial
space appears simultaneously from these dual perspectives – here as dollhouse, there as
bird’s-eye view – one begins to sense that Factum Arte is setting up a distinct mise-enscène of surrogates and doubles.
Far in the corner, a photograph of Seti I’s unwrapped mummified face hangs without
explanation. His closed eyes refuse our gaze. He is captive, yet inscrutable.This inclusion ofphotographic evidence is clearly a desecration of the deity-king’s formerly wrapped body.
However, the neutral purse of his desiccated lips suggests that the Pharaoh is indifferent,
having already left the chaos of the world for the orderly sky. One need only look to Ancient
Egypt’s Myth of the Heavenly Cow, which covers the walls of Seti I’s tomb, to understandthat the Pharaoh’s cosmos was organized by the sun god to contain human conflict on Earth,so that order could reign at other celestial registers. The myth establishes the origin ofkings as earthly mediators between layers of the visible and invisible, human and divine.5
Moreover, the myth’s presence within Seti I’s tomb instantiates the Pharaoh’s transformation into a god of the afterlife. The photographic evidence of his unwrapped corpse says
more about our world than his. It is an indication that we, the spectators, are the reflexive
focus of this show, not the Pharaoh. What we choose to see, or not see, is the issue at hand.
Adjacent to Seti I’s portrait is a discreet hole in the wall – a portal cut at a deep angle.
Looking through it, one sees an image of Seti I on a distant surface surrounded by the gods
that he joined in the afterlife. I watch other museum visitors to see who notices this view,
hidden in plain sight. Most pass by without notice, reminding me that some scholars believe
the Ancient Egyptians kept the presence of the dead in daily life through similarly subtle
acts of revealing and concealing.While one cannot say that it is in the power of Factum Arteto re-perform this magic, it is nevertheless a way of understanding Ancient Egypt throughits manner of operation. The divine is rendered present in surrogate form, and the moresurrogates there are, the stronger their presence.6 Indeed, no less than four versions of Seti
I and his tomb are registered by Factum Arte in this dark opening scene.7
Registration – certifying the transfer of one thing to another – is an essential idea
in Factum Arte’s work, where the facsimile must be precisely aligned with the contoursof its disfigured or absent referent. What is seen immediately registers what is unseen,
3 A detailed account of the exhibition and its archival remains is provided by Susan M. Pearce, ‘Giovanni Battista
Belzoni’s Exhibition of the Reconstructed Tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in 1821’, Journal of the History of Collections 12, no. 1(2000): 109–25.
4 Factum Arte’s model is a nod to the one made by Belzoni for his exhibition. See ibid., 114.
5 For a more complete account, see Nadine Guilhou, ‘Myth of the Heavenly Cow’, in UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology,
ed. Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: University of California Digital Library, 2010).
6 Alan B. Lloyd offers a distinctly performative understanding of Ancient Egyptian mimesis. His interpretation emphasizes the way that an act of reproduction instantiates the thing copied as a new entity in reality. See Ancient Egypt: State andSociety (London: Oxford University Press, 2014): 257–61.
7 Adam Lowe’s writing suggests that he is indeed making invocations at the borderline between our time and the timeof the pharaohs: ‘Walking the thin line between fact and fetish, image and idol’, Lowe writes, ‘Fact loses its objective
truth, things are never stable’. Adam Lowe, The Dark Hours of the Sun (Madrid: Factum Arte, 2006): 15.

270

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

3D model of the entire tomb ofSeti, with doorway (based on thedesign used in Belzoni’s original
exhibition) leading to the recreated Hall of Beauties.

evoking a kind of quantum entanglement, where objects separated in time and space
may be united as a whole. As in other experimental systems that mingle science and art,
Factum Arte’s technology of registration inevitably impresses itself on the people andcultures that it entangles. One might simply call this a play of copies and originals, butthere is deeper problem at stake than a simple question of authenticity. The problem is
how to change the very foundation of modern historical knowledge by acknowledging
more poetic and moral expressions of truth.
Factum Arte presents museum visitors with an opportunity to understand the poetic
powers that museum authorities use when they display historical accounts through theircuratorial decisions, while also inviting visitors to think about the epistemological obstacles that artisans must overcome (such as museology’s policing of fact and fiction) when
they set out to reproduce a historical object. By looking at Scanning Seti as an experimentin historical recomposition, we see that Factum Arte is embracing a philosophy of history
that replaces cause-and-effect narratives with arrangements of things that share intrinsic
relationships.The truth of the whole is to be found in the aesthetic reproduction of its parts.
Scanning Seti assumes this philosophy when it proposes that out of bad colonial actsof destruction, something good can emerge in the registration and reconstruction of its
remains.This is why Adam Lowe, Factum Arte’s founder, invites us to focus on the aesthetic
qualities of the reproduction to determine whether it succeeds or fails at invoking a deeper
moral truth.8 This is not the same as suggesting that the museum display can preserve apharaoh’s life after death, or that museum visitors will experience an Ancient Egyptian’s

8 A reclaiming of the metahistorical potential of technological reproduction after Walter Benjamin, which Bruno
Latour and Adam Lowe call ‘The Migration of the Aura, or How to Explore the Original Through Its Facsimiles’, in
Switching Codes, ed. Thomas Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

SC ANNING SET I AN D TH E A F T ER L IF E O F A P H A R AO NIC TO M B

271

THIS PAGE

The Hall of Beauties re-createdfollowing watercolours produced
by Alessandro Ricci for Belzoni.
OPPOSITE

Close-up of recreated Hall ofBeauties.

feeling of spiritual power.9 Factum Arte is not attempting to restore a lost religion.Yet, it istrying to breathe life into materiality in the same way that Seti I’s high priests and artisans
did – at the most detailed level of careful execution. Scanning Seti does not ask us to believein the Pharaoh’s divine power any more than it asks us to believe that the copy is the original. Rather, it asks us to see the Ancient Egyptians’ religious devotion through the aesthetic
and moral quandaries that a precision reproduction presents.
Consider the next act of appearing that occurs when the model room ends with acurtained archway of heavy fabric. The curtain is a facade of the architectural entrance
that Belzoni designed for his 1821 reconstruction of the tomb. The effect is well placed,
for some spectators appear giddy with pleasure when they pull the curtain back to reveal
a stunning replica of the space that Belzoni once called the ‘Hall of Beauties’.10 A walllabel indicates that this is not the ‘Hall of Beauties’ that one sees in the original tomb
today, but an idealized version that Factum Arte made to imagine what Belzoni might
have seen before he and others did so much to damage to the tomb. On all sides of thesmall room are richly painted images of Seti I as he is greeted by his family of gods. The
images multiply the king in a continuous repetition of encounters, each glowing warmly
with the color of life after death. Overhead, a deep blue ceiling painted with a grid ofrepeating five-point stars becomes the night sky – supplemented by modern LED track
lighting at the base of each long wall. A collection of flickering LED candles are scatteredindiscriminately on the floor. Like me, other visitors may not initially understand how
the ‘Hall of Beauties’ fits into the overall scheme of the tomb. Fewer visitors may know
9 This idea is suggested by Dietrich Wildung in ‘What Visitors Want to See’, Museum International 47, no. 2 (1995):
4–8. Christina Riggs critiques such claims, as well as the stereotypes found in the ‘museum-as-tomb’ trope in Unwrapping
Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014): 213–15.
10 The ‘Hall of Beauties’ is one of the two rooms that Belzoni produced as a full-scale replica in his London exhibition, which
was considered at the time an objective way of presenting real artifactual evidence (see Pearce, ‘Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s
Exhibition’: 117). Factum Arte mirrors Belzoni’s actions by reproducing the same two rooms for their Scanning Seti exhibition.

272

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

that this is a fantasy of a lost past reality. The layering of real and imagined surfaces forces
one to recognize that there is more than one version of the story on display, making
Scanning Seti feel at times like a game of hide-and-seek.
Beyond the reconstructed room, a dark gallery presents a series of framed drawings made by Belzoni and his team during the first months that Belzoni spent at the site.
They render the tomb’s walls in pencil, ink, and watercolor. Between 1817 and 1859,
the exhibition tells us that the tomb was visited and plundered by a whole host of expeditions. Accompanying the gallery of drawings is a room full of stone fragments extracted
from the tomb by Belzoni and others, now deposited in museums around the world.
The display supports Factum Arte’s advocacy of preservation through reproduction as an
ideal way to reassemble the scattered remains.
This drive to preserve history as a commercial salvage operation is not without precedent. Despite Factum Arte’s impassioned call to save Seti I’s tomb from past injustices ofcolonial plunder, the facsimile is nevertheless made over in Basel as cultural capital whose
caché is heightened by the level of social interaction it affords.You can step into the tomb,post a few images of it on Instagram, and feel good knowing that the original is protectedby the experts. It is a subtle reworking of the same narrative that drives many archaeologicalprojects today. Salvage and circulation also drove modern Egypt’s first president, Gamal
Abdel Nasser, to disassemble and ship a handful of Ancient Egyptian temples to international
cities like NewYork and Madrid. In exchange, Nasser’s modernizing Egyptian state received
the funding and expertise needed to save the great temple of Abu Simbel by moving it outof the Nubian flood plain caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.11 Whether
one approves or not of saving world heritage sites through the free flood of data is a pressing
issue, especially when many borders are closed for asylum-seeking refugees.
11 For more on the long shadow of international development and salvage archaeology see Lynn Meskell, A Future in
Ruins (London: Oxford University Press, 2018).

SC ANNING SET I AN D TH E A F T ER L IF E O F A P H A R AO NIC TO M B

273

The next gallery extends colonialism’s tragic plot by merging the story of thetomb’s destruction with actual reenactments of the crime. At first glance, visitors might
misinterpret this display as a demonstration of Factum Arte’s own artistic processes,
but closer scrutiny reveals that one is seeing an indictment of past abuses presented asdemonstrations in a forensic laboratory. A second facsimile of a wall from the ‘Hall ofBeauties’ is also present. This time, it is not shown as an ideal ancient past, but as a sceneof more recent crime. Blood-red wax is splattered down the side of Seti’s body fromthe neck, where a wax impression was taken of his face. Dripped plaster pools on thefloor in front of another version of the Pharaoh, his body covered with cracks and holes
from souvenir extraction. The wall functions as a demonstration for a casting techniqueknown as ‘squeezing’. Well before laser scanning and photogrammetry, squeeze casting
was a popular way to record the relief of a surface for reproduction. Most of the replicas
in Belzoni’s exhibition were produced this way, and the wall shows three examples ofsqueeze casting materials: wax and vegetable fiber, plaster, and wet paper. Each technique creates a different kind of impression, with a discernibly different damaging effect.
A screen next to the wall also displays a documentary video of the squeeze-making process as it was performed at the Factum Arte studio.
Turning away, I am faced with a reconstruction of the wall relief of the Myth of
the Heavenly Cow. Here, a facsimile of the relief is presented as it is today – coveredin wax from multiple squeezes, blackened from soot and impurities, and loaded withgraffiti from two centuries of tourist abuse. As I stand before the wall, scrutinizing its
marks, I notice that it starts to change. The surface brightens and my shadow appearson the surface. Very gradually, a projection from behind me grows brighter and whiter,
filling the faded and soiled relief with intense luminosity. After a brief pause, the imagetransforms again, as the figures of the cow and the hieroglyphs are restored with vibrant
274

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

Antiquarian study containing
artefacts from the facsimile-making
process, and facsimiles including
replicas of the lid fragments from
Seti I’s sarcophagus.

blacks, blues, red, ochre, and yellow sepia. I realize that Salt’s watercolor has been used
as a compensation image and mapped onto the facsimile’s surface.
Beyond the squeeze room, the exhibition grows more labyrinthine. There is a spacearranged like an antiquarian’s office, evoking the home of Sir John Soane, who purchased
Seti I’s alabaster sarcophagus from Belzoni’s agent in 1824. Soane designed a special sepulchral chamber for it, where the sarcophagus is now permanently displayed. The officecontains flashes of humor. A small memento mori cutout of Seti I’s mummy is propped upbehind a desk lamp. Tongue-in-cheek images evoking Britain’s golden age of collecting
hang on the walls.
The adjoining room contains the life-size facsimile that Factum Arte has painstakingly
produced of the sarcophagus itself. Here the facsimile reproduces in detail the sarcophagus’s
many inscriptions, figures, and historical scars. Texts along the sides of the room depict thecomplete Book of Gates. Occasionally, a visitor will lean over to scrutinize the wall andinadvertently find themselves bumping into the facsimile sarcophagus behind them. Someappear startled by the inadvertent taboo of touching the ‘artifact’, while others seem more
surprised by the sensation of bumping into something that has the appearance of heavy stone,
but sounds light and hollow. This happens to one man who gives the object a good knockwith his knuckles to demonstrate its hollow resonance to a friend. ‘See?’ he says, ‘Plastic!’
His friend then grasps the ridge of the sarcophagus where the lid once rested.Without concern, he holds and caresses its surface. It is a brazen defiance of museum decorum, ironicallysituated at the very spot on the sarcophagus where Belzoni carved his name.
Adjacent to the sarcophagus is a small gallery of artifacts presented in a more traditional exhibition format, clearly a zone managed by the Antikenmuseum’s curatorial staff.
These original objects are displayed in protective glass cases with an array of explanatory
wall labels. At the end of the gallery, one realizes that it also contains a surprise. A facsimilewall of a pillar in the tomb’s Hall E is placed at the threshold. It depicts Seti I with Horus,
standing before Osiris, and Hathor.12 Turning around, I recognize a hole in the adjacentwall. I lean over and look through. Peering back is a pair of eyes from someone back in themodel room, and I find myself caught up again in the exhibition’s play of appearances.
Around the corner, a much larger gallery is divided into two sections. To the left
is a large grid of framed black and white photographs that Harry Burton took of thetomb for the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1921 and 1928. The photographs
coincided with inspections of the tomb conducted by Howard Carter after large portionsof the ceiling, rear wall, and middle pillar of the burial chamber collapsed in 1901–02.
Carter embarked on a year-long restoration of the space by reinforcing walls and archways with brick, and installing electric lighting to prevent further smoke damage fromthe use of torches. The rubble from the collapsed sections of the tomb was collected andthrown into a spoil heap near the tomb of Ramesses X, which the University of Baselhas been excavating since 1999. In the center of the gallery are two distinctly different
kinds of reconstructions of destroyed pillars, which were produced by the University,
along with photographs and descriptions from other nearby excavations in the Valley ofthe Kings. While informative, and a welcome nod to interdisciplinary collaboration, theacademic contribution to the exhibition feels incomplete, if not marginalized, because of
the stark contrast with Factum Arte’s larger aesthetic project.
12 In the middle of this ‘family portrait’ is a small square section of enhanced coloration that was made on the original
relief as a restoration test by the American Research Center in Europe. The restoration has now been replicated as well.

SC ANNING SET I AN D TH E A F T ER L IF E O F A P H A R AO NIC TO M B

275

This is made most apparent by the other end of
the gallery – the largest area of the exhibition, which
immerses the visitor in Factum Arte’s studio practice.
Several objects and media here attest to the different technologies that have evolved over many years of the company’s experimental practice. One of the most importantof these is the Lucida Scanner, a dual cameral and laser
scanning system that Factum Arte custom built for the reproduction of large-scale art and artifacts. Scanning Seti’s
most bespoke tool appears as a black box of perfected
technology, but its real history is one of intense trial anderror to achieve maximum fidelity. Lucida now functions
in more of a supplementary role, buttressed by recent advances in photogrammetry and the need for speed when
scanning and rendering a file.
A two-channel video loop projected on the largest
wall of the gallery presents in wordless documentary
format the dual aspects of fabricating and printing thatmake up Factum Arte’s present-day process for replicating sections of the tomb. The video on the left shows
two different machine techniques used for producing thewall reliefs prior to their painting. The process for registering the surface images on the relief is documented
in the second video. Artisans are shown manufacturing
an ultra-thin, semi-elastic material, or ‘skin’, which isthen printed using a custom-made inkjet printer. After
printing, the ‘skins’ are applied to the surface of the relief in an elaborate and careful process. Together, bothvideos dramatically demonstrate the complex interplayof computerized machines and human artists. While one
screen displays a close-up of a very precise milling machine at work, the other screen presents two artists literally climbing onto a table tosmooth out the creases on a freshly applied ‘skin’ with the full weight of their bodies.
The room gives visitors a peek into Factum Arte’s process over the past two decades, which is in a constant state of evolution, pushing at the constraints of time, money,
and technology. Every moment of transformation produces new anomalies in their experimental effort to register a perfect double. Thus, every moment of imitation is also one ofradical novelty. As Scanning Seti reveals, the art and science of reproduction is always subject
to dramatic plays of difference. Materials present obstacles to the reproductive process, andtheir appearance creates subtle shifts in the subjective aim of an act of remaking. Original
and copy inevitably diverge along their own drifting historical trajectories.
A single doorway to a long and narrow hallway leads to the final gallery of theexhibition. Along the way, one encounters a small screening room where videos about
Factum Arte play on a continuous loop. Most of these contain Adam Lowe, speaking
in one way or another about his ideal museum visitor, who willingly adopts the ‘newcontract’ that Factum Arte proposes, in which the original artifact is hidden away andpreserved in exchange for a facsimile that takes over its public duties. As Lowe points
276

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

out, Seti I’s tomb was never meant to be seen, yet it is the digital copy that may makeit possible for countless generations of people to scrutinize it in ways that the Ancient
Egyptians never intended.
The possibility that an ever-more perfect copy could be made from the vast troveof data in the future becomes the key to the tomb’s transcendence. Like the king, thetomb must be made again and again, comprising a sequence of multiples made possibleby the power of ‘datareality’ that Factum Arte has stored.13 Expansion of the artifact asa class of repetitions that Factum Arte’s artisans and technologists have the skill to mediate is offered as another way for museology to make the past endure as a form of stableknowledge.This suggests that the historicizing work of curation – of investing things witha rarefied aura – is rapidly merging with the art and science of conservation-as-reproduction in Factum’s experimental atelier. Factum Arte dispenses with the need for originality at the same time that it doubles-down on the importance of technological fidelity
as a poetic expression of truth.
What seems like a contradiction is at the heart of Factum Arte’s challenge to established professions that make up the cultural hegemony of museums. Lowe’s rhetoric simultaneously draws on the romance of preserving priceless artifacts, while extolling thedestruction of museology’s sacred cow: originality. Factum Arte’s ambivalence towardauthority in the museum creates a new kind of artisanal epistemology.14 Knowledge isrepositioned to privilege the ones who have the skills to remake the thing itself.
13 George Kubler was prescient in his observation that the metaphors of modern technology, from transmissions tocircuits, seemed most suitable for characterizing the way that artifacts are made to endure across time as open-ended andexpanding classes. See The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962): 9, 34.
Compare this to Adam Lowe, ‘Datareality’, Future Anterior 12, no. 2 (2015): 72–81.
14 For a history of the role of artisans and similar liminal practitioners in the formation of scientific and historicalauthority, see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).

THIS PAGE

Display showing the effects ofsqueezing (casting) the painted
relief surfaces.
The facsimile of Seti I’s
sarcophagus made using elevatedprinting technology.
OPPOSITE

Close-up of a test for the digital
restoration of the sarcophagus of
Seti I, showing the goddess Nut,with the blue infill which is nolonger present on the original.

SC ANNING SET I AN D TH E A F T ER L IF E O F A P H A R AO NIC TO M B

277

The copy looks the same as the original, but does it act differently? Could Factum
Arte not only remake the tomb of Seti I, but also restore the power that is found in themagic of the Pharaoh’s high priests? Or is this simply confusing ancient divine secretswith modern technical skills? One thing seems clear. In both cases, what is displayed has
the power to conjure a certain kind of truth. Indeed, Scanning Seti heightens the power ofthe facsimile by using multiples to emphasize the contrast between different times in thelife of the object, including the trauma inflicted on the artifact, which serves to heighten
its aura.15 One version of the ‘Hall of Beauties’ highlights the destruction. Nearby, another version reimagines its original perfection. This is quite an omniscient position to
occupy over the leveling forces of time. Perhaps this is the ultimate pursuit of Lowe,whom a television reporter once called, ‘the man who leads Factum with evangelicalfervor’. Scanning Seti definitely plays to one of the West’s most powerful forms of historical, and religious, emplotment – resurrection.
That’s one view. However, I want to propose a more complicated understandingof Lowe’s aim. As I have stated, Factum Arte prefigures its mode of display in aesthetic
and moral terms. We are invited to decide for ourselves whether the copy is a good
surrogate, or whether it fails to register the truth of the artifact’s history. Thus, real andcopied fragments are reassembled without differentiation in the exhibition to conjure amythos that lures spectators with feeling rather than dispassionate objectivity. The actof making in Factum Arte’s studio shares similarities with Ancient Egyptian practices ofcleaning, perfuming, dressing, and feeding a cult statue. Scanning and routing, castingand sculpting, adding and subtracting, layering and passing, rendering and processing…
All of these steps are never-ending acts of problem solving, perfecting, and care. They fill
the material form with a certain kind of constructivist loving that brings life back to theartifact. Immanence and transcendence and combined.
More traditional forms of museum display might simply give visitors a general schemaof Ancient Egyptian cosmology in text beside a glass case. Immersive exhibits of infotainment might just embrace the clichés that dramatize Ancient Egypt as obsessed with death.
A more critical postcolonial form of display might focus so intently on the West’s problematic gaze that the tomb’s presence might seem incidental. Factum Arte uses a little of
all of these techniques, and none of them fully. Instead, its idiosyncratic obsession lies withreproducing fragments by the micron in pursuit of a more meaningful whole. Something
about Factum Arte’s approach is expressed in what Hayden White found so distinct about
Giambattista Vico’s claim that the most true expression of a thing’s history comes from dissecting and reassembling its discrete heterogeneous parts.16 Vico’s famous response to themodern Cartesian age was a constructivist mantra: verum esse ipsum factum. By reassembling
the tomb’s billions of small attributes, both physical and performative, Factum Arte lives up
to the assertion that what is true is precisely what is made.
I continue along the dim hallway, which opens onto a platform before the final gallery. Here I step into the exhibition’s final reproduction of the ‘Hall of Beauties’. Unlike
the wonder felt with the Belzoni version, or the gruesome horror of the room as a crime

Facsimile of pillared Hall J
as it is today.

scene, this space presents the hall in its current condition. The truth is sad. The residueof squeeze castings mingles with extracted stone and cracked surfaces. Part of the ceilinghas collapsed, which the facsimile mimics, complete with graffiti made by candle smoke.
The display is made all the more honest by the fact that it is a continuation of the same
history of desecration that it reproduces, just in a less materially invasive way. A sign on
the wall announces that visitors are free to use their cameras, and encourages them tohashtag their photos on social media. Following the crowd, I pull out my smartphone andtake a selfie with Seti’s half-erased image on the wall, before entering the column-filled
hall adjacent to the Pharaoh’s burial chamber.
This is where the unfinished replica ends. The floor is lined with raised wooden pathways that creak when you walk, and gaps between the walls and floor are filled with abrown styrofoam-like material that simulates gravel. Embedded in the gravel are a handfulof speakers that play a new-age ambient sound reminiscent of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.
The non-contextual cosmic atmosphere competes with a loud HVAC system that is required to heat the temporary space, protected beneath a tent in a service courtyard of themuseum. Around me, visitors pose for photos of themselves standing in front of the tomb’s
most captivating images. Belzoni would be impressed with the quality of the copy. I walk toward the exit and notice one last panel at the very end of the path. It fills in the final sectionof surface with one of Harry Burton’s black and white images – an unusual registration of
one era of documentation with another. I find out later that it is a placeholder for a sectionof the tomb that could not be scanned before Factum Arte’s permit to work in the tomb had
expired. The gap in data will remain unfilled until Factum Arte’s papers are renewed by the
Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and Scanning Seti begins again.

15 Drawing on the work of Michael Taussig and Walter Benjamin, Christina Riggs raises this question about the importance of the public secret in Ancient Egyptian society in Unwrapping Ancient Egypt: 190–95.
16 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973). For more on Vico’s views on the experimental construction of cultural models, see
Robert C. Miner, ‘Verum-Factum and Practical Wisdom in the Early Writings of Giambattista Vico’, Journal of the Historyof Ideas 59, no. 1 (1998): 53–73.

278

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

SC ANNING SET I AN D T H E A F T ER L IF E O F A P H A R AO NIC TO M B

279

RECORDING AND DISPLAYINGBERNARDINO LUINI
Guendalina Damone

Guendalina Damone isconducting graduate work in
the Conservation of Historicaland Artistic Heritage at the
University of Udine. She has led
the Factum Foundation officein Milan since 2014, and theFoundation’s laboratory at the
ARCHiVe digitisation centre in
Venice since 2018.

OPPOSITE

Colour data for The Holy Familywith St Anne and St John by
Bernardino Luini, c. 1520–30.

280

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

S

ince the donation of the private collection of its founder, Federico Borromeo,
in 1618, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana has held an impressive collectionof paintings and drawings, known throughout the world for their quality and forthe significance of the artists represented. Given the importance of these works to ourcommon cultural heritage, it has been essential to establish a system of studying andmonitoring that can underpin their safeguarding and display. Fundamental to this is the
documentation of how these works were made and their current conservation state,
which can inform their ongoing care as well as public appreciation and understanding.
Since 2016, Factum Foundation has collaborated on an academic initiative led by
the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana1 to define a new investigative methodology forworks of art. This aims to incorporate both art-historical studies and material data intoa single integrated analysis, and takes as its case study a collection of paintings and drawings attributed to Bernardino Luini, spanning different periods, techniques, and levelsof documentation, together with the relevant published academic studies.
The first phase of the project, which finished in 2017, selected from the collections of the Pinacoteca e Biblioteca Ambrosiana four paintings and a drawing by
Bernardino Luini and his workshop. Among these were The Holy Family with St Anne and
St John and The Infant Jesus with a Lamb.2 A multidisciplinary team, consisting of art historians, restorers, archivists and academics conducted a chemical-physical and historical-artistic investigation to clarify the most relevant issues regarding Luini’s work.3
As part of this investigation, the Factum Foundation team recorded the works
using the Lucida 3D Scanner,4 and at the end of a long campaign produced a high-resolution web browser for each work, allowing the different datasets – including VIS, UV,
IR, XRF, and micro-samples – to be viewed at 1:1 scale in perfect register. The browser
allows the display either of a single dataset or of two datasets in parallel. The resultoffers a unique ID of the artworks and has been provided to experts who will now beable to compare the datasets with unprecedented ease as they work on a comprehensive
1 The project has been financially supported by the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Fondazione Cariplo, Fondazione
Gianmaria Buccellati, Alvise di Canossa and Arterìa.
2 The works selected from the collection of the Pinacoteca e Biblioteca Ambrosiana are: Bernardino Luini, The Holy
Family with St Anne and St John, oil on board, 118 x 92 cm (inv. 92); Bernardino Luini, The Infant Jesus with a Lamb, tempera
and oil on board, 28 x 25 cm (inv. 82); Bernardino Luini, Tobias and the Angel, drawing on paper, 40.5 x 45.9 cm (ND
cat. no. 21); Bernardino Luini workshop, Nursing Madonna, tempera and oil on board, 51 x 41.4 cm (inv. 81); Bernardino
Luini workshop, Noli me tangere, oil on canvas, 95.5 x 91.5 cm (inv. 776).
3 Together with Factum Foundation, the following institutions participated in the project: Università degli Studi Milano
Bicocca, Politecnico di Milano, INO (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche CNR) in Florence. The team of art historians,
restorers and archivists included Valeria Villa, Giulio Bora, Edoardo Villata, Pietro Petraroia and Marino Viganò.
4 The Lucida 3D Scanner was designed by artist and engineer Manuel Franquelo with support from Factum Arte andFactum Foundation.

281

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP LEFT

Bernardino Luini, The Infant
Jesus with a Lamb, c. 1525, colour
photography (Cristana Achille andFrancesco Fassi, Politecnico di
Milano).
3D render using Lucida 3D
Scanner (Guendalina Damone andCarlos Bayod, Factum Foundation).
IR 1230 nm (Accesso Molab,
CNR-INO; Anna Galli, CNR-IFN;
Letizia Bonizzoni, Università degliStudi di Milano).
Measured points XRF + FORS
(white) + RAMAN (red) (Letizia
Bonizzoni, Università degli Studi
di Milano; Daniela Comelli,
Politecnico di Milano; Anna
Galli, CNR-IFN; Marco Gargano,
Università degli Studi di Milano;
Austin Nevin, CNR-IFN; Gianluca
Poldi, Università degli Studi di
Bergamo).

study of Luini’s work. The initiative has provided a new model for the combination ofhumanistic and scientific study, bringing together experts from many different fields.
Digital datasets supplement biographical studies, archival research, knowledge of artistic techniques, materials and tools, and, in the case of Luini, the body of research on
his complex vision of the world and the role of religion in his work. The next phase of
the project will be dedicated to the study of a selection of Luini’s works preserved ininternational collections.
The project has two interlinked aims. The first is to establish and test a methodology for research and documentation within the limited scope of the Ambrosiana’s
collections. This must be able to support judgements of authentication and art historical studies, record the state of conservation of a work, and at the same time increase
public appreciation and facilitate understanding in ways that do not compromise thework’s safety. The second aim is to expand this initiative to create a systematic conservation methodology which can be employed within museums and collecting institutions more broadly.

X-ray (Marco Gargano, Universitàdegli Studi di Milano).
IR 1705 nm (Accesso Molab,
CNR-INO; Anna Galli, CNR-IFN;
Letizia Bonizzoni, Università degliStudi di Milano).

282

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

REC ORDI N G A ND DIS P L AYING B ER NA R DINO L U INI

283

LA CASA NATAL DE VELÁZQUEZ:RE-PRESENTING THE SPANISHGOLDEN AGE
Elizabeth Mitchell
Elizabeth Mitchell has adoctorate in Greco-Romanarchaeology from Harvard
University. She writes, edits, andworks on recording projects for
Factum Foundation.

OPPOSITE

Old Woman Cooking Eggs wasrecorded in the National Galleriesof Scotland in Edinburgh.

284

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

O

ne of the great advantages of facsimiles is their ability to move – to travel‘back’ to an object’s original location or onward to new ones. Mobility also
creates the potential for new juxtapositions, and even new collections, of artworks, allowing them to be restaged outside traditional museum settings in creative new
configurations. One such project is the new initiative currently underway at the Casa
Natal de Velázquez, where facsimiles are being used to create an unprecedented permanent display of the early works of one of Spain’s most revered artists in the context of thecity and time at which they were made.
Diego Velázquez spent the first 23 years of his life in Seville, where he was born ina house on what is now Calle Padre Luis María Llop in 1599. Seville was where Velázquez
undertook his apprenticeship in painting with Francisco Pacheco, and it was here that hepainted his famous bodegones, scenes from daily life in which people and objects are often
accorded equal prominence.
Today, very few of Velázquez’ paintings remain in Seville. But a new initiative is
now set to revive the spirit of the city’s most famous artist, using facsimiles and displays
in multiple media to recreate not only Velázquez’ paintings but also the surroundings
in which they were produced, all within the 16th-century courtyard house in which he
was born. Bought in 2018 by a group led by author and journalist Enrique Bocanegra,
the Casa Natal de Velázquez will partially reopen in late 2020. Working together with
José Luis Colomer and the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, Factum Foundation
will contribute to the project by recording and creating facsimiles of around 10 paintings by Velázquez. The project is thus an innovative new collaboration between a privateinterpretation centre, two well-respected foundations, and the several public museums
that have generously permitted the reproduction of works in their collections; these museums will retain the rights to the recorded data for these works.
On arriving at the house, visitors will travel through a sequence of rooms exploring the domestic and urban backdrop against which Velázquez’ talent developed.
Each one will contain a facsimile or facsimiles of paintings from the artist’s Seville years(1618–22), and will be furnished in the style of the early 17th century, with displays
which incorporate objects found in the paintings themselves. Velázquez’ early life andeducation, his training with the artist Francesco Pacheco, and the vibrant character ofSeville in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the apex of Spanish expansion into theAmericas, will be among the lenses used to contextualise the artist’s early works.
By exhibiting the facsimiles of paintings within domestic environments, theCasa Natal de Velázquez will allow the closed plane of the painting to expand out into
the space of the viewer, facilitating a new intimacy with the material world of thepaintings’ subjects and maker. The facsimiles will include works such as the Old Woman
285

THIS PAGE

Deatils of Old Woman Cooking Eggs.
OPPOSITE

Proposed design for one of therooms in the Casa Natal de
Velázquez by Carlos Bayod,
including a facsimile of Old Woman
Cooking Eggs.

Cooking Eggs from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, painted when theartist was only 18 or 19 years old. The Foundation will also work with local craftsmen
and other specialists to recreate objects seen in the paintings, using traditional woodworking, forging, ceramic and decorative techniques alongside digital recording andrematerialisation technologies.
Paintings on canvas are eminently portable objects, often intended from the start
to be moved from one place to another. Later on in his career, for example, as official
artist to Philip IV in Madrid, Velázquez and his assistants would paint three separate portraits of the Infanta Maria Teresa to be sent out to potential husbands, all of them outsideof Spain. But while there may be no single ‘correct’ location for Velázquez’ early paintings, the creation of facsimiles that can be shown as a group in Seville restores importantlayers of local meaning to these works, as well as allowing Sevillians and visitors to thecity to re-ground its most famous offspring once more on the narrow, twisting street on
which he was born.

286

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

L A C A S A NATA L DE V EL Á Z QU EZ

287

PROLIFERATION OF OPERA HOUSES,CONCERT HALLS, MUSEUMS & ART GALLERIES:
ARE WE BUILDING SEPULCHRES AND
MAUSOLEUMS FOR THE FUTURE?
Jasper Parrott

Address given in Yekaterinburg
in December 2019 at a
symposium to discuss the new
opera house designed by Zaha
Hadid Architects.
Jasper Parrott is the cofounder of HarrisonParrottLtd., a creative managementcompany based in London,
Munich and Paris. He is
credited with pioneering
innovative methods ofhandling the careers of classicalmusicians. HarrisonParrott’s
approach (also embracing
orchestral and project
management) has been
influential in the managementof artists worldwide.

OPPOSITE

3D render of the Barberini Harp.

288

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

O

ver the last two days it has been very interesting to learn so much from highly
respected colleagues who are creators or managers of cultural buildings andwho have devoted so much of their lives to the enrichment of cultural life,
often in many different cities as their careers have evolved. Nonetheless, perhaps becauseof the very long perspective that my 55 years of work in music and the arts (as well as myby now ingrained habit of almost continuous travel around the globe over many decades)
have given me, I can perhaps make some observations about the challenges I believe weall face today in all of the different areas of our work.
I suppose one could say that the post-World War II system of values and beliefs asincorporated in our music and arts structures and institutions has endured rather well
until very recently. At least in the ‘high’-cultural circles of, for example, the major cities
of Western Europe and the USA, a shared belief in what many of us took to be establishedcertainties has not only shaped our habits and attitudes, but these have spilled over andbeen adopted in many other rapidly changing economies and societies – most notably in
China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
One of the hallmarks of the system has been the quite extraordinary proliferation of concert halls, opera houses, museums and performing spaces – I have heard
it said that more have been built in the last 20 years than in the whole of the last two
centuries worldwide. What strikes me about this remarkable development is that thevast majority of these new venues are essentially modernised versions of a 19th-century concept and are updated versions of temples of high art for the middle classes,
adapted predominantly for secular purposes and often incurring vast public expense
both to build and to run.
And whether we look at the many wonderful and, within our current frames ofreference, successful examples such as Elbphilharmonie, Philharmonie de Paris, KKL
Luzern, Zaryadye Moscow or the amazing new multi-hall centre in Kaohsiung, just to
mention a few – and there are many other examples I could point to around the world –the story is largely the same: these are halls built predominantly for mostly privileged sectors of society (and in Europe and in the US mostly for white and greying audiences),with more or less similar constructions whether shoebox or vineyard or horse-shoe opera
theatre, many served up in extravagant, sometimes beautiful, but always extremely expensive monuments by brilliant star architects working closely with city politicians andproperty developers more concerned with short-term glory than with any very coherent
social or focused agendas.
289

The primary users of these halls may be a well-established and well-supported
symphony orchestra or opera or theatre company; or they may seem to have been
built, as so often in China and in Japan, as a public utility, located often very far fromconvenient downtown locations, without any clearly defined purpose and with little
popular access in ways that would enrich the lives and aspirations of wider sectors of
the community.
As a result, the outcome is usually the same: no deeply thought-through vision of
how such buildings can meet at least some if not all of the following criteria:

OPPOSITE

Section of a facsimile of theBarberini Harp (1605–20), now
held at the Museo Nazionale degli
Strumenti Musicali, Rome.

• provision of optimal acoustical and performance qualities;• the best potential for participatory experience for as wide a cross-sectionof the community as possible;• flexible facilities and resources that can be shared with academies and teaching
institutions, encouraging collaborations among arts of different genres;• adaptability for new technology and modes of communication;• ability to contribute to the enrichment and social improvement of thelocal environment;• provision of access and participation as widely and conveniently as possible
to local communities;• the enhancement of green environments in urban spaces, general embellishmentof cityscapes, and the reduction of mass transportation across large urban spaces
caused by poorly distributed venues.
Two general comments about London: the appalling ugliness and total lack of socially inclusive and cohesive cultural facilities in the huge luxury apartment andoffice developments throughout vast segments of the city are truly shocking. On theother hand, whereas I am naturally very much a supporter of what Simon Rattle,
the LSO, and the Barbican are seeking to achieve in their efforts to build a new hallof a quality better fitting for a great city like London than what currently exists, I
am also a critic of its location in that a great opportunity has been lost to mitigate
the shocking situation whereby in about 85 per cent of London’s urban landscapeno important artistic institutions of the scale and quality of the Southbank and the
Barbican halls have been established, while these two are in reality close neighbours
serving similar communities.
Theoretically at least, this worldwide expansion of the stock of venues, costing inmany cases hundreds of millions of euros, should last for many decades if not centuries,and some may even aspire to be the Parthenons or great cathedrals and historic palacesof our day… Or will they end up instead as mausoleums or sepulchres of the future?
Surely all of us in this room know that we are on the cusp of changes more enormous than any that societies have experienced for hundreds of years, and certainly moreacute than anything since the end of World War II.
And these changes will affect not only those of us who believe in the values of art
and culture but also the lives of all of the billions who populate this planet and who willprobably never go even once to a concert hall or museum or gallery.
There is surely no doubt that we live in the most turbulent, disrupted and unpredictable set of circumstances since 1945, not only politically and societally but more generally
in our daily lives. I will list just the five most obvious engines of change we are all facing:
290

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

P RO L IF ER AT IO N O F O P ER A H O U S ES

291

• climate change;• political radicalisation and the growth of tribal nationalism;• the irresistible power of the cyber world and those who control or manipulate it;• the incalculable impact of AI;• the ever-accelerating and widening gap between the obscene levels of wealthof the few and the desperate conditions of poverty of the many, not only in termsof means adequate for a decent life but also of access to fundamental necessities
like clean water, safety, education, equality of opportunity and freedom of
expression.
Of these threats climate change must be the most important, not least because of the stupendous challenges all societies will face in the next 25 years, but also because any mitigations
that are still open to us are opposed by the most powerful vested interests around the world.
On the very simplest of levels, if halls are built for orchestras or opera or theatre
performances that require the regular presentation of top-level ensembles and performers
from around the world, how will these halls need to be adapted to meet the realities of aworld that will need to live with the exigencies, demands and disciplines determined byconservation and carbon reduction, not to mention mass migration? Why should we continue to invest so heavily in building halls and venues that may become redundant within thenext 25 or 50 years, if many of them are already no longer fit for purpose?
Surely we need to bring together our expertise, our experience and our understanding of the longer term common good to think through much more coherently
how to create spaces that will not only serve the best purposes of music and art and of
the performances to be created within them, but that will also act as agoras accessible
to and shared with individuals and organisations dedicated to aspirational learning andto participatory artistic and creative experiences, and that will enrich the lives of amuch wider section of society.
Very recently I had a fascinating dream: I was sitting in a brand-new hall made up ofmultiple interlocking spaces separated one from the other by acoustically impermeable
but totally flexible walls and dividers that, with the flick of a switch, could be flown up
almost magically into the ceiling spaces of the halls so that the same building could serve
not only the finest concerts of symphonic music or jazz but also a wide range of collaborations in every genre of music, dance, and theatre.
I am certainly no architect or engineer and this naive dream can probably belaughed off as the nocturnal ravings of someone who goes to too many performances.
Nonetheless it does suggest to me that with today’s extraordinary technology almost everything is possible provided that we begin to understand better some of theprocesses and opportunities we need to work on together if we are to keep faith with theidea that mankind’s individual and collective powers of imaginative and artistic creativity
are the greatest assets we have not only for the conservation of harmonious and peacefulcivil societies but also for saving the planet.
To end on a more pragmatic note, here is my short list of requirements for the future:

Detail of a render of the Barberini
Harp.

their Maag interim hall for the cultivation of newaudiences and for new work.
• Arts institutions should be cultural spaces open
all day and every day, welcoming citizens from all
backgrounds, ages, and walks of life, and as suchshould offer wide ranges of opportunities forlearning and participatory activities, especially forchildren, young people and also for seniors; theSouth Bank Center and Barbican score well withthese aspirations but most Asian halls very badly or
not at all.
• Different music and arts genres, ideally including
an academy conservatory, should share overlapping
spaces and facilities; Helsinki’s Musiktali is aninteresting example.
• Arts centres should have many different-sized
performing and rehearsal spaces to which an
extended network of partner organisations should also haveregular access.
• Centres should have secure and climate-controlled exhibition spaces,
regular lecture series, and literary and other debates with public participation:
the interface of different creative genres brings added value to everyone.
And lastly – but this must be a call to arms for another occasion – the music and arts
communities around the world should raise their voices and take public and if necessary disruptive actions – we should learn from Greta Thunberg and from Extinction
Revolution – to insist with our political classes that music and the creative arts are notelitist luxuries but essential and urgent priorities for all of our societies.

• Orchestras and all performing groups of ensembles should have at least two
regular venues – one for their legacy repertoire and the other for experimental
and innovatory work of all kinds. As a concrete example, when the Tonhalleorchestra moves back to their great historic hall in 2021 they hope to retain
292

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

P RO L IF ER AT IO N O F O P ER A H O U S ES

293

ART IN TIME
Alexander Nagel

The complete slideshow toaccompany this script canbe found at http://www.
factumfoundation.org/artintime/.
Alexander Nagel is an art
historian living in New York.

ACT ONE
SILENT SLIDE: ‘Catherina Bollenes, widow of the late Sr. Johan van Meer, appears before thenotary and declares that she has hereby ceded in full and free property to her mother Juffr. Maria
Thins a piece of painting, done by the aforementioned late husband, wherein is depicted The Art of
Painting. 22 February 1676.’
SLIDE: THE ART OF PAINTING (with a portion of the text)
H The figure mingles the attributes of History and Fame: the book to commemorate
great deeds, the trumpet to ensure that the deeds are heard of far and wide.
S She holds the trumpet upside down, suggesting she won’t be using it any time soon.
H The trumpet was slow to sound for Vermeer, who died in penury and became famous
only in the 19th century.
P The young woman’s head turns, her eyes swiveling with her head, as if to look backwards. History stands between a past that is unrecoverable and a future that remembers
it through stories and figures.
SLIDE: THE ART OF PAINTING (detail of model)
S But we don’t just see the figure of History or of Fame. We see how such a figure comes
into being through painting. A double of Vermeer sits in a room with a model, probably
his daughter, and he is in the midst of painting a personification of history and fame.
H The result is ‘a piece of painting in which is depicted The Art of Painting’.
P Out of this small space, out of these assembled props, a painting emerges that opens aworld and reaches a world.
S We witness the micro-processes by which meaning is assembled, manipulations andtransfers that prepare the larger process of fame and historical commemoration. The
painting is an orchestration of befores and afters. A living young woman is dressed up
and turned into a mock-up of a personage, a ‘figure’. And then painting begins its workof turning this performance into a picture (and then, in the picture before us, turning theprocess of making a picture into a picture).
P Branches broken from a living tree have been turned into an ornamental wreath andplaced on the head of a living person.

OPPOSITE‘… a piece of painting, done by
the aforementioned late husband,
wherein is depicted The Art of
Painting.’

294

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

SLIDE: THE ART OF PAINTING (detail of canvas)
P [continue:] The painter starts there, at the beginning, at the top, with the leaves. Right
now, his brush is making known that the leaves form a wreath, and eventually it will show295

it being worn on a head, and then it will describe a body wearing a robe and holding abook. Leaves formed into a crown, dyed cloth, and bound paper – these are advanced
transformations of natural matter into culture. Painting adds a layer to the artifice of theworld.
S The staggered relation of befores and afters is present at every moment in the paintingof a picture. The process of painting is a micro-alternation of looking at the figure, thenturning one’s eyes towards the canvas to apply the brush in a rendition of what one has
just seen. And then looking back again. Here, the painter is looking at his model withthe brush on the canvas or very close to it, which means we are precisely at the juncture
between the two moments, just at the moment of swiveling from model to canvas, or– more likely – just at the moment of swiveling from canvas to model.
SLIDE: THE ART OF PAINTING (detail of model)
H The model is draped with an ample robe that is meant to belong to no time in particular, putting her in a different realm from the painter, who wears a slashed doublet thatwas fashionable in the 1630s and then was newly fashionable in the 1660s.
S In the map on the wall, landmasses – geological realities undergoing very slow change –are coordinated with political developments that unfold month by month and year by year.
SAME SLIDE WITH ARROW POINTING OUT (signature)
P This is one of the ways that maps are like pictures. Pictures collect the world together
and introduce snags in time, allowing history and recollection to form.
SLIDE: MAP
H The map was decades old by the time this painting was made, showing all seventeen
provinces of a unified Holland, which by the time the painting was made had been broken
up into a Catholic south and a Protestant north.
S Once folded and now unfolded, the map is a contraction of space that allows a person
in a room to imagine a vast space. The map affords a vision of a whole domain that is now
a historical memory, and that piece of territory opens onto the whole world. The paintersits under the map, directly in line with the city of Delft, where this painting was made.
SLIDE: MAP DETAILP The map is worn; it has lived a life, it has been unfolded many times. These aren’t justfolds but cracks, lovingly described.
SLIDE: DETAIL OF MAP WITH SHIPS
H The map shows boats coming towards and leaving from a bustling maritime empire.
The blue pigment dotting the boats and the sea under the allegorical figures is ultramarine, which means ‘from beyond the waters’, because it is made up of ground lapis lazuli,
which was imported from Afghanistan, making its way to Delft on ships like these.
SLIDE: DETAIL OF CANVASS The painter in the picture works on an easel, on canvas, and the picture we are looking
at is also on canvas and is also easel-sized. It depicts a world that can be moved. It is aformat designed to be independent of a given context – moveable, sellable, collectible.
H Vermeer’s wife struggled to keep it from moving, passing it on to her mother in
296

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

1676 so that it wouldn’t be used to settle Vermeer’s debts. But the executor of theestate saw the trick and put it up for auction anyway. It disappeared from the record
for over a hundred years, until in 1813 it was acquired by one Count Czernin. By thatpoint it was no longer a Vermeer – it was attributed to the much better-known Pieter
de Hooch.
SLIDE: MONUMENT MEN IN 1945 CROUCHING NEXT TO THE PAINTING
P Nothing is more lovable than what is loved by my rival.
SLIDE: MAP SHOWING VARIOUS PLACES WHERE THE PAINTING HAS
BEEN EXHIBITED
H A trophy of the Nazis now reclaimed, Vermeer’s Art of Painting needed to go on a world
tour, a symbol of the triumph of European painting. For the decade after the war, it traveled every two or three months to a different location. More recently, in the 6 years
between 1999 and 2005, the painting traveled to no fewer than 8 venues, which is to say
it was on the road continuously. Precautions were taken, as always, to ensure that thepainting would not suffer damage during transport and under different climatic conditions
at each venue. But it DID suffer.
SLIDE: IMAGE OF PIGMENT
S The whitish tones in this work are, unusually, painted in more than one layer – abottom layer where the pigment is ground somewhat coarsely and an upper layer ofextremely finely ground pigment. The layering and the composition of the finely groundlayer produced an unstable surface.
SLIDE: BACK OF PAINTINGP Out of a room where a painting is being made a world will arise. The first impression
the picture makes is of a still scene. But in fact the painting is all about movement: we seea translation from life to art, from one time to another, from one scale to another. Whatabout the painting itself? It is an easel picture. Was it also designed to move? [Pause:]
Flakes of paint finer than snow fall from the painting every time it is moved.
H Particular damage occurred in 2004 in Kobe, Japan, where climatic conditions were
not well controlled. At that point, the painting’s home, the Kunsthistorisches Museum ofVienna, decided it would no longer allow the work to travel.
SLIDE: ART IN TRANSIT
H [continue:] Future historians will describe the decades we are living through as theera of the exhibition industry, when the migration of works of art to locations aroundthe world came to dominate all aspects of artistic life. But it wasn’t always like this. The
spread of biennials and art fairs is a recent development. Old master paintings are swept
up into these streams together with contemporary art.
S It is one system. The rules pertaining to contemporary art now apply to all art.
SILENT SLIDE
Nagel: I know that the 1970s saw the arrival of King Tut and a new era of blockbusters at the Met
and elsewhere. But I want to know how many exhibitions were done at the Museum during the
1960s, when you were curator there?

A RT IN T IM E

297

SILENT SLIDEDe Montebello: None.
SILENT SLIDE
Nagel: None?
SLIENT SLIDEDe Montebello: None.The curator’s job was to take care of the collection and make occasional acquisitions.
SLIENT SLIDE
Nagel: But what about The Great Age of Fresco of 1968, the show of detached frescoes and theirunderdrawings from Renaissance Florence?
SILENT SLIDEDe Montebello: Ah well, that was a highly unusual occasion.The frescoes were detached and restored
after being damaged, or at least threatened, during the disastrous 1966 flood in Florence. The
exhibition was really a diplomatic gesture of friendship to Italy. It was so unusual that we had a
Princeton Professor, Millard Meiss, organize it. The idea that a museum curator would organize an
exhibition was foreign at the time.
SLIDE: TORONTO ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM WITH NEW ADDITION
H In the era of the exhibition industry, museums have radically redefined themselves.
Striving to detach themselves from any association with the art vaults of old, they now
market themselves as sites of interest, programming centers, interactive spaces. Museums
are now venues where events take place; their mission statements consistently emphasize‘experiences’ over objects.
SLIDE: COLLAGE OF CARAVAGGIO EXHIBITIONSS And the primary event and experience offered by museums is the temporary exhibition, one after the other, more than one at any given time.
SILENT SLIDE WITH REAL TIME EFFECT OF TYPING
It is being said, and will be said again and again, that this is a unique exhibition, that nothing like itwill ever be seen again.That is not true: for better or for worse plenty of exhibitions like it will be organized for years to come, and the air routes of the world will soon be jammed once again by jets carrying
their cargoes of Rembrandts and Rubenses, Poussins and Goyas. Minor damage will be repaired without
publicity, and a failure to care for paintings that stay behind will not be connected with the pressure toattend to those that travel. But one day a major accident will occur and the current priorities of someof the world’s greatest museums will be exposed as grossly irresponsible.’ Francis Haskell,‘Titian and thePerils of International Exhibition’, New York Review of Books, August 16, 1990.

S [read screen slide silently, then start:] Here is one way to describe the situation inwhich we find ourselves. A new paradigm (the exhibition industry) has been introduced
while maintaining an old model of art (based in the idea that artworks are unique andirreplaceable). The works must be originals, and at the same time they need to be inswift circulation. The most treasured works of art are the ones under greatest pressure
to move. Exhibitions need originals, but moving them produces damage, requiring restoration work, which leaves less of the original.
P It is an accelerated half-life, or maybe it is a slow sacrifice.
SLIDE: VERMEER RESTORE DESTROY
P [continue:] Or it is a change of state. Logically speaking, with enough restoration thework slowly becomes a duplicate of itself. Maybe that is what works of art want to bewhen they move around – avatars of themselves.
SLIDE: SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO AT PALAZZO VENEZIA 2008
S The exhibition space is a space of fantasy.Works of art have been brought together as if bymagic from far-flung places, and now are being held in suspension for a limited period oftime. The works on display often have the quality of being images of themselves. Under theexhibition industry, works of art want to live a double life, irreducibly themselves and yet
able to lift off from themselves and to move at the speed of the surrounding image culture.
BLANK SLIDEACT TWOSLIDE: 26 GASOLINE STATIONSM In the 1960s Ed Ruscha produced a number of books celebrating the serial conditionsof modern life: 26 gasoline stations, 34 parking lots, some Los Angeles apartments.These
small books were inexpensive and not unique. They are multiples. One copy was as goodas another. The idea was that each book would be an open edition, with new printings
produced as needed to satisfy demand.
SLIDE: GAGOSIAN WEBSITE SHOWING ED RUSCHA BOOK FOR SALE
M [continue:] The logic of the art market, which deals in authenticated originals, found a
way to turn these works into expensive collectibles. The last printing of the gasoline stations book was issued in 1969, when it sold for $4. After that, they became famous, andthe artist became famous, and… the new printings stopped. The existing copies became
the only ones available, originals that now sell for four-digit sums.

SILENT SLIDE[News story about National Gallery Beccafumi having been broken during de-installation.]

SLIDE: ICONS IN SERIESR In the Middle Ages, the most revered images were the ones most actively copied. The
pressure to extend their reach had the effect of producing greater numbers of copies.

SILENT SLIDECurator who shall remain nameless: ‘Major damage almost never happens when things go out on
exhibition. However, they never come back in better condition’ .

SLIDE: MAN OF SORROWS ICON AND RELIC (with arrows showing relic,which was not reproducible, and image, which was reproducible)
R [continue:] Images were considered copy-able but relics were not. To substitute a pig’s

298

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

A RT IN T IM E

299

SILENT SLIDE: NEW YORK TIMES STORY. CANVAS TORN UNDERGOINGRESTORATION IN 1992!

bone for a saint’s bone was to commit fraud. What wehave therefore is a spectrum ranging from certain objects,
such as relics, that had to be originals, and a whole rangeof other objects, such as images, that could exist in legitimate copies. There was no actionable conception of art
forgery before about 1500.

SLIDE: VERONESE IN VENICE
M [continue:] The irony is that the towers that tore through the canvas were there to
newly position the canvas in the Louvre gallery at exactly the height at which it stood in
Venice, a touching effort to reclaim historical accuracy in the physical experience of thework.
R The work predicted its own reception, by extending the proliferation that is at theheart of the subject.

SILENT SLIDE: ISRAHEL VAN MECKENEM(with transcription of the text)
R [continue:] Then the categories shifted, so that works ofart, as they were now called, acquired the status of relics,
contact relics of the artist. Only the original would do.
The modern museum is founded on that notion.

SLIDE: DETAIL OF CENTER
R [continue:] Christ turns water into wine, allowing the party to continue and togrow more boisterous. From the iconic face of Christ the painting spreads out into
the world. Christ is surrounded by the Virgin and his Apostles and then by a wider
assembly of people. We see front and center a group of musicians, with none otherthan Veronese and Tintoretto on viole da gamba and Titian, the elder among them,providing the sustaining notes on his violone. Like the hourglass that stands between
the musicians and through which sand still runs, the music figures the dimension of
secular time.

SLIDE: OTSUKA MUSEUM IN JAPANM And yet the older idea has never died. The Otsuka
Museum in Japan offers replicas of over 1,000 masterpieces of Western art, including a full-scale three-dimensional replica of the Sistine Chapel, its wall decorations all
reproduced on ceramic board. Mr. Otsuka, an industrialist in ceramic manufacture, is imagining a future where
all the frescoes, panels, and canvases will have disintegrated and all that survives are these ceramic reproductions, proof of the quality of his company’s work.
SLIDE: VERONESE IN VENICE
M [continue:] Here is another kind of effort. The Madridbased firm Factum Arte, headed by the artist Adam Lowe,has produced startling conjunctions of contemporary methods and older art. In 2007,
using new, patented techniques, they produced an elaborately accurate three-dimensional facsimile of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana of 1563, the original of which is in
the Louvre, and put the copy in the painting’s original location in the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.

SLIDE: VERONESE IN THE LOUVRE
P Opening the painting’s subject to extend into the present as we look at the painting, ormaybe don’t look at it, distracted like so many figures in the painting itself.

This image was made after themodel and likeness of the wellknown first image of the Pietà,
which is preserved in the Churchof the Holy Cross in the city of
Rome.

SLIDE: VERONESE IN VENICE
M In 2007, Two-hundred-ten years after its removal by Napoleon, the facsimile wasinstalled in the painting’s original location, an event that was greeted as a kind of homecoming by the Venetian citizenry.

SLIDE: DETAIL SHOWING RELIEF
R They copied the actual relief of the canvas, the irregularities, the seams, the repairs.

SLIDE
ADAM LOWE [recording:] ‘Do I think the experience of the facsimile, a facsimile ofthis accuracy in Palladio’s refectory, hanging in the right place, with the right light, andwithout a frame, is more authentic than the experience of the painting in the Louvre?
Yes, I do think that.’

SLIDE: VERONESE IN THE LOUVRE
R [continue:] In 1797 Napoleon’s troops entered the monastery’s refectory and removed thevast canvas, cutting it in half in order to transport it to Paris, where it has been popular withvisitors ever since.Though not always safe. It spent months packed in a box in the port of Brestduring the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.The canvas was once more rolled up and hidden
in World War II, when it was hauled around France on a truck to keep it from the Germans.
M By 1990, a time of great optimism about an emergent new world order, curators felt
it was time for it to be restored. The damage of all this military conflict needed to bereversed, and the canvas needed to be brought back as much as possible to its pristinecondition. Unfortunately this caused the greatest damage of all.

SLIDE: VERONESE IN VENICE
M [continue:] The authenticity of the in-situ experience is complicated by the fact thatthe refectory itself has undergone changes since Veronese’s time. Also, the exact copy
necessarily registers the seams introduced into the work when the canvas was cut in
half and then resewn once it arrived in Paris under Napoleon, not to mention all theother work on it up until the major repairs required after the catastrophe of 1992.
O The facsimile doesn’t cancel the removal, but simply gives back to Venice an imprintof the canvas with its 210 years of war scars.
R History reaches into the present…
O … and the present reaches back into history

300

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

A RT IN T IM E

301

SLIDE: SMITHSON CORAL WITH MIRRORSM The installation of the copy in Venice produces a tension with the work in the Louvre.
Visitors who have seen the installation in Venice will look at Veronese’s painting with abetter-informed eye next time they visit Paris. Conversely, the existence of the facsimilemeans that visitors to the Louvre are now more strongly encouraged to go to Venice to
see what the painting looks like in its monastic setting. Copy and original now cannot
exist without each other.

happened that the scripture might be fulfilled that said, “Theydivided my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment”. So
this is what the soldiers did.’
John 19:23–24; quoting Psalm 21 (22): 18–19
SLIDE: DETAIL OF ROBEP The tunic is like a character in the story, empty and yet
buoyant, as if filled by an invisible presence.

BLANK SLIDESLIDE: MAMLUK TUNIC
H It is of one piece and very much like tunics produced in
the eastern Mediterranean at the time of Giotto.

ACT THREESLIDE: GIOTTO CRUCIFIXIONS The painting is divided left and right. To Christ’s right are the saintly companions ofChrist, and at his left his murderers, one of whom, Longinus, has just now been converted, and already he bears a halo. Above, angels collect the blood of Christ, grimace inpain and bare their breasts in agony. At the bottom right of the scene the Roman soldiersvie for Christ’s tunic, now empty of his body.

SLIDE: GIOTTO CRUCIFIXIONS The tunic is not a gift, since it was stolen from a murdered man’s back, nor is it a trade good, since it will be
won in a game of chance. It is a pure object of transfer.
SLIDE: DETAIL OF THE ROBE OF CHRISTP In their vying over the prize, the Roman soldiers unwittingly initiated the cult of Christ’s relics. It is held up by thesoldiers, as if under arrest, and slouches downward, as if
submitting to more abuse, except that here, their aim is not
to break it apart but to keep it whole. Misunderstanding thesignificance of the death they had just caused, the soldiers
nonetheless are compelled to preserve this second skin.
They knew not what they did in the crucifixion, and theyknow not why they preserve the relic.

SLIDE‘When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for eachof them, with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from
top to bottom. “Let’s not tear it”, they said to one another. “Let’s decide by lot who will get it”. This

Altichiero, Crucifixion (detail),
Basilica of Sant’Antonio, Padua,
1376–79.

Giotto, Crucifixion, Arena Chapel,
Padua, c. 1305.

302

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

SLIDE: ALTICHIERO CRUCIFIXION
H Giotto’s follower Altichiero offered a vaster and more populated rendition of the crucifixion scene several decades later and down the road from Giotto’s fresco. In the righthand panel of this fresco triptych once again we see soldiers competing for the robe.
SLIDE: ALTICHIERO DETAIL OF ROBEP The robe is shown again as a kind of skin, seamless and in the round as if it were a bodymade up of nothing but the skin tumbling head first toward the ground. Its arms reachdown to the level of the clearing where the soldiers throw dice to win the prize.
S Altichiero adds subsidiary incident. We see bystanders pointing to this game of chanceand commenting on it. We are far beyond what the Bible describes. It is impossible toknow whether they are commenting because they’re entertained or because they’remortified. And what of the figure who is offering the robe? He is not a soldier but instead
appears to be one of the Jews who had called for Christ’s crucifixion. And so there is arelay from the cross, into the hands of the unbelieving Jews, and eventually into the handsof one of the Roman soldiers who will come away with the prize.
P What will the winner do with his trophy? Will he wear it himself – literally clothe
himself in the garment of Christ? Or will he sell it off?

A RT IN T IM E

303

SLIDE: THE TUNIC IN TRIER
H Somehow the robe made it into the treasury of a Christian church, or so it was believed. The tunic in Trier Cathedral is no longer whole, however, or rather no longer
wholly original. Only a piece of it is the relic of Christ’s robe. At some later date someone
completed the original remaining fragment by weaving another garment resembling theoriginal tunic around it.
P It is as if the remaining piece had regenerated the missing parts of the tunic, restoring
the whole.
S The completed garment forms the reliquary for the piece of it that is authentic.
SLIDE: MANTEGNA CRUCIFIXION
H Andrea Mantegna spent his younger years in Padua learning from Giotto and Altichiero.
In his Crucifixion for the high altar of the Church of San Zeno in Verona, Christ’s bodyhovers above the horizon in the exact center of the picture.
SLIDE: DETAIL OF CHRIST’S FEETS The blood on the cross traces both punctual time and durational time. There is the
splatter caused by the initial blow of the nail into Christ’s feet, and the longer drip down
the cross, as if the blood’s path down to the skull at the bottom of the cross clocked thetime it took for the body to die.
SLIDE: MANTEGNA CRUCIFIXION
S [continue:] The stage is now emptying. Those who had come to see the crucifixion for an afternoon’s entertainment are wending their way back up the hill towards the city of Jerusalem.
Only the saintly companions remain, to Christ’s right, and to his left the soldiers throw lots.
SLIDE: DETAIL OF SOLDIERS
H These soldiers are in foreign territory, far from home and with insufficient provisions.
One sits with his legs outstretched, revealing holes in his footwear. A bald, bearded figure,swarthier than the others, suggests that recruits for the Roman army came from far flung
provinces, a sign of an overstretched Roman army. Again, the robe is in the process of being
handed over. A Roman soldier grabs it from the hands of a figure who seems to show regret
at giving it up. The artifact is passing from a proximate source to a recipient who knows
nothing of the meaning of its provenance but appreciates it for its intrinsic qualities. It is aseamless robe, a special item that cannot be simply divvied up like Christ’s other belongings.
P For the 14th-century theologian Johannes Tauler, the four-part division of Christ’s possessions represents the extension of the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice to the four quartersof the world. But of all his possessions the tunic could not be divided and so represents
the mysterious judgment of God, who decides who is to receive the Holy Spirit, who is
to be clothed in Christ and who not.
S Mantegna has the soldiers throwing lots on a circle segmented into alternating sectionsof red and yellow.
SLIDE: ROTA BOARD IN LIBYAH You can see this kind of game board on ancient Roman pavements. Here is one in
Libya. It’s meant for a sort of Roman tic-tac-toe game.You can look it up on the internet
where you can play against a computer. In any case, it was not intended for dice throwing.
304

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

Andrea Mantegna, Crucifixion,
from San Zeno, Verona, 1457–59.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.

SLIDE: DETAIL OF SOLDIERS
S Mantegna adapted the Roman board here for its pattern. To make this segmented
circle, you draw a cross and then inscribe an X through the cross. Add alternating colors
and you have a stark diagram of radial distribution. Here, the board suggests that oncethe dice is thrown, the robe could go in any direction. In fact, Mantegna neatly aligns theboard’s pattern with the cardinal directions: East, West, North and South. It is marked
like a compass.
SLIDE: MANTEGNA XION
H According to a non-biblical but long and pervasive tradition, Christ hung on the
cross facing to the West. The viewer looks from the West towards the East, towards
the hill of Golgotha, the place of the skull, outside the western walls of Jerusalem.
We see the hill rise and then slope away on the far, east side, towards Jerusalem in the
background. Those who know the city can recognize the tower of David, the highest
point in the city, rising on Mount Sion, and a little further down to the west a roundbuilding modeled on the Dome of the Rock, which in the Latin West was often taken
to represent the Jewish Temple.
S In the Crucifixion we are looking towards the East, towards the cross facing us in theWest. Even the lighting confirms the topographical siting. If you look at the shadows,

A RT IN T IM E

305

P He is coming down the steps, leaving the scene. Christ’s side is pierced and bloody.Yet
the lance tip is pristine, gleaming white. Right up against the picture plane, crossing over
into our space, the lance tip is a glinting wrinkle in time.

for example the one cast by the feet of John the Evangelist, or the ones thrown by thecrosses, or by the horse to the right, it is clear that we have a light source to the rightand a little bit forward of the painting, which is to say the sun is to the south and west,
as it would be in Palestine on an afternoon in Spring. The foreground is closest to us, on
the western side of the picture. In the foreground are two soldiers cut off by the frame.
They are shown at different heights, implying that they are walking down a flight of steps.
P They are leaving the space of the painting and entering our space and our time.

SLIDE: DETAIL WITHOUT WOODCUTS This bottom edge is where the picture meets the church altar – it’s not only a spatial
threshold but a temporal one. Every mass said on the altar folds time over onto itself,reiterating Christ’s sacrifice and directing its benefits into the present. In this zone, theseamless visual fabric of the picture starts to break down. The lance here is partly inside
the scene, but its bottom half disappears into the ritual space outside the picture. It is theweapon used during the event, but it is also the relic that has come down to Mantegna,
now presented again. The way it is set against the cross, emblematically, like a relic, suggests that it is not quite in the picture, but overlaid onto the picture from our space andour time. Images tell the story not just of the event but of the way that it peels off into
its future commemoration.

SLIDE: IMAGE OF CALVARY CHAPEL
H These steps are well known to any Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem. There are 18 ofthem leading up to the raised site of Calvary. For centuries, pilgrims have mounted thesesteps then took the sharp left behind the wall and mounted the rest, counting each of
the 18 steps as they climbed to the place of the crucifixion. Mantegna’s representation isrelying on some other source, a drawing of the site, for example.
SLIDE: WHOLE PAINTING
S Mantegna thinks away the chapel later built on this site and sets us before the foundational event that took place there, the reason a church was built, the reason any Christianchurch was ever built. You can see other holes in the rock where previous crosses had
been planted. You see the skulls and bones of previous victims amassed in the little caveto the left. This is still just the place outside the city where the crucifixions got done.
P And yet we feel the future presence of the chapel and the church even in this historicalscene. The stone summit of the hill looks something like a reticulated pavement. The
figures in the foreground descend pre-architectural steps, or rather proto-architectural
steps, precursors of the steps that are there now.

SLIDE: WHOLE PAINTINGP In the distance, we see the people returning eastward, towards Jerusalem, returning
to their ordinary lives. They turn their backs towards us and resume the routines of their
daily history, all those little acts that history will never remember. In the foreground,close to us, we have the other extreme, a liminal zone of temporal interference.
S And in between we have the main stage. From the top of the steps, the cracks in therock, marking out perspectival lines, accelerate into the picture’s depth and also into the
picture’s time.
SLIDE BLANKSLIDE: WHOLE ALTARPIECE IN SAN ZENO
H Mantegna’s Crucifixion was taken from the church of San Zeno in 1797.
S In its original location, Mantegna’s panel stood under an assembly of saints in heaven.
Standing in the church and looking towards the high altar, the congregation looks eastward, towards Jerusalem. In the Crucifixion, the central and most legible panel of thelower zone, Jerusalem is exactly where it should be: behind Christ, who faces west,
towards the viewers in Verona.
H Once it was removed to the Louvre by Napoleon’s monuments men, the panel’s function as a compass was lost.
P At the bottom of the altarpiece, the Crucifixion panel touches the altar and the church
space. It is a portal between spaces and times.
SLIDE: DETAIL OF BOTTOM PORTION
P [continue:] The soldiers climb down the steps, leaving the picture space and entering
our space.
S The white lance tip drives upwards, its white blade set off against the wood grain, andcuriously contained within the form of the cross beam.
SLIDE: WITH WOODCUTH This must be the lance that was used to pierce Christ’s side. It had entered the imperial
collection in Nuremberg by this time.
306

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

FOLLOWING PAGES

Giovanni da Modena, Croce vivente(Croce brachiale), c. 1420, Cappella
Bolognini, San Petronio, Bologna.
Giovanni da Modena, Croce
verdeggiante, c. 1420, Cappella
Bolognini, San Petronio, Bologna.
Renders of two ushabtis fromthe tomb of Seti I.
1:1 scale 3D print of Amico
Aspertini’s Deposition of Christ(1526–30), from the right-hand
portico of San Petronio in
Bologna, 2020.

A RT IN T IM E

307

308

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

A RT IN T IM E

309

310

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

A RT IN T IM E

311

312

ACCE S S AN D D IS P L AY

A RT IN T IM E

313

CASE STUDY 1

RESURRECTING
THE BOLOGNESE
RENAISSANCE

314

315

RECORDING AND RE-UNITING
THE POLITTICO GRIFFONI
Adam Lowe

Adam Lowe is the Director of
Factum Arte and the founder ofFactum Foundation for Digital
Technology in Conservation.

PREVIOUS PAGE

Partially restored detail of the mapof Bologna from the Sala Bologna,
Vatican Palace, 1575. Recorded andrestored in 2011.
OPPOSITE

Proposed configuration (by Cecilia
Cavalca) of the panels of the
Polittico Griffoni.

316

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

T

he work to record and replicate all 16 panels of the great Bolognese altarpiece,
the Polittico Griffoni, painted in 1471–72 by Francesco del Cossa and Ercole
de’ Roberti, lasted for several years between 2012 and 2018. It was not commissioned by any organisation – it simply started and gained momentum. It is a demonstration of how digital technology can create new ways of studying, displaying, sharing
and experiencing a work of art. In the Polittico Griffoni’s fragmentary form, the panels
can be seen as independent works of art of aesthetic and historic importance. But thecomplete polyptych in its ornate gilded frame would have had a totally different impact
and visual coherence. Marco Zoppo’s Polittico di San Clemente in the Collegio di Spagnain Bologna is in a similar frame to the one drawn by Stefano Orlandi in 1725 (Archivodi Stato, Bologna). This is the only existing reference to the appearance of the Polittico
Griffoni. It rises from the dynamic, temporal and perspectival world of miracles andsocial structures depicted in the predella to the gilded other-worldliness of the upper
panels. Only together do they articulate their message. When looking at the facsimile of
the Polittico Griffoni, we can grasp the physical and emotional impact in ways that cannot
be achieved in a normal ‘reproduction’. The panels are indistinguishable from the originals in scale, colour and surface to the naked eye under museum conditions. It is anobjective replication generating forensic evidence that encourages a profound reflection
on the dynamic process of originality.
The Polittico Griffoni was painted for the Griffoni Chapel in the Basilica of San
Petronio, where it was installed between 1473 and 1475. It was displayed in an ornate gilded frame made by Agostino de’ Marchi of Crema. The polyptych was removed
in 1725 when the chapel was re-dedicated to the Aldrovandi family. The panels weretaken out of their gold surround, separated and after a period of time decorating the
Aldovrandi family house at Mirabello, near Ferrara, they were sold. Today, 16 parts of thealtarpiece are scattered between the National Gallery in London, the National Galleryof Art in Washington, the Musei Vaticani, the Brera in Milan, Museo di Villa Cagnola in
Gazzada, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Musée du Louvre in Paris,
Collezione Vittorio Cini in Venice and the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Ferrara. The frame wasdestroyed and some panels are missing.
The museum protocols that governed the loans and specify the conditions ofdisplay in Bologna keep the original panels apart and discrete, displayed as separate
entities. In the years since 1725 each panel has acquired its own character that reflects where it has been, how it has been valued and the ways it has been cared for.
The National Gallery painting has been flattened and backed with balsa wood while
the predella in the Vatican reveals the impact of the cradle fitted to the back of thepanel, visible through the painted surface in the 3D recording. Once noticed, the317

position of the wooden reinforcements and the dynamic forces they have created in
the wooden boards are obvious. The recent restoration at the Pinacoteca di Brera resulted in the opportunity to scan the panels before and after treatment and compare
the difference. Wherever possible, the front and back of each panel was recorded. The
backs often reveal a great deal – the caution of restorers and archivists can be morerelaxed when dealing with concealed parts of the object. The back of St George has
been branded with the letters CGBC (Conte Giovanni Battista Costabili). Two small
but unrelated panels by Ercole de’ Roberti in the National Gallery in London containthe same stamp.
It is not known how many paintings have been lost but the drawing by Stefano
Orlandi, made prior to the destruction of the altarpiece, shows six small paintings ofsaints on each side. The drawing is rough and the size of the upper and lower central
panels has led Cecilia Cavalca to suggest there were actually seven saints on each side.
This means that there are potentially either five or seven paintings of saints by Ercole
de’ Roberti still waiting to be found. Giuseppe Baraldi, the man in charge of the dismemberment of the Polittico, wrote to Aldrovandi on 21 November 1725, stating that thepolyptych could be split up into 13 decorative paintings. This seems strange as there are
16 in existence. Perhaps he meant 23, lending credibility to Cavalca’s intuition.
The high-resolution recording of the panels began in June 2012 following a conversation between Roberta Terra, Francesco Ceccarelli, Nadja Aksamija and myself while
Factum was recording the main doors on the unfinished façade of San Petronio. All paintings were recorded using the Lucida Scanner designed by Manuel Franquelo and developed by Factum Arte to record the surface of paintings. They were also recorded using
composite photography to ensure high-resolution accurate colour data.
The first three panels to be digitised were the small paintings by Ercole de’
Roberti of St George, St Catherine and St Jerome in the collection of Vittorio Ciniin Palazzo Cini at San Vio, Venice. This was part of the ongoing collaboration between
Factum and the Cini Foundation that started in 2006 with the recording of Veronese’svast painting The Wedding at Cana in the Louvre. This was followed by the recording of
the two roundels in the Cagnola Collection in Gazzada depicting the Annunciation.
The recording at Villa Cagnola established the viability of the idea and led Nicholas
Penny at the National Gallery to grant permission to record the main panel of the318

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

Ercole de’ Roberti, predella,
1472–73.

altarpiece. The figure of St Vincent Ferrer painted by Francesco del Cossa was recorded in the National Gallery in London in August 2013 as part of a demonstrationof the importance of 3D-scanning the surface of paintings. The National Gallery now
has a Lucida Scanner and carries out detailed documentation of their paintings before
and after restoration.
The predella by Ercole de’ Roberti, which depicts the miracles of St Vincent
Ferrer, was recorded in the Vatican Museums in October 2013. The predella is ademonstration of the way perspective was changing representation. It contains one
figure wearing a mazzocchio turban walking out of the picture plane and another figure
riding into it. The perspectival games played with the architectural details frame thefilm-like narrative that runs from left to right along the long thin strip that would havebeen at about eye level on the framed altarpiece. The small panel depicting St Petronius
was then recorded at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara. This is of interest as thepanel is set within a wooden surround that seems original, implying that the paintings were slightly recessed into the gilt frame. The two panels of St Peter and St John
the Baptist, which complete the central section of the Polittico, were recorded in the
Pinacoteca di Brera. They were recorded before a scheduled restoration and rescanned
after the completion of the treatment.
In every case the recording was carried out on the understanding that each museum
or collection would receive the files for the complete altarpiece while the copyright foreach painting belonged for all current and future applications to the owner.
St Anthony Abbott was scanned and photographed in the Boijmans Museum inRotterdam. The recording of the three paintings by Francesco del Cossa of St Florian,
St Lucy and the Crucifixion was carried out at the National Gallery in Washington. The
recording of Ercole de’ Roberti’s St Apollonia and St Michael Archangel in the Louvre
completed the documentation of the altarpiece in October 2015, over three years after
the first painting was recorded. A high-resolution viewer of each painting was preparedwhich will be supplied to all the owners, allowing each museum to place its own panel
or panels into the larger context of the complete polyptych. The viewer, in Factum’s
standard format, includes colour and 3D information and a layer containing transparent
colour superimposed over the 3D scan. The data can be viewed in layers or in a side byside synchronized format.

REC ORDI N G AN D R E- U NIT ING T H E P O L I TTI CO GRI F F O N I

319

The first facsimiles were produced while the recording was still underway. Initially these were CNC
milled into polyurethane but as the technology developed
we moved to a mix of elevated printing and CNC milling.
Océ - A Canon Company perfected the elevated printing
technology resulting in an accuracy that exceeded the resolution of the data that was recorded. New developments
led the production process. The separation of the general form (using Global Mapper and other cartographic
software) from the surface that could be printed in 5-micron-thick layers has forced the team to work in new ways
and rethink the relationship between shape and surface.
Interesting parallel work is going on in the developmentof photo-realistic rendering of 3D models for film and architecture. Emerging software, like Substance Designer,is dramatically changing the relationship between virtual
realities and the physical world.
While most digital data is viewed through thescreen of increasingly sophisticated headsets, Factum’s
speciality is in physical facsimiles. The sixteen tempera
panel paintings were realised as exact copies by moulding
the relief prints and casting the surface in traditional animal-glue gesso. The colour is added by printing in multiple layers on a purpose-built flatbed printer. Varnishes
and waxes are used to produce a character similar toeach original panel. The gilding presents specific challenges and was done by hand with painstaking attention
to surface detail.
In October 2017 facsimiles of the 16 panels were
given to the Basilica of San Petronio by Factum Foundation.
This triggered the idea of an exhibition at Palazzo Fava.
A collaboration between Genus Bononiae (Fabio Roversi
Monaco) and Factum Foundation resulted in loan agreements with all the museums and collections involved. The
exhibition La Riscoperta di un Caporolavoro at Palazzo Fava
will be the first time that all existing panels have beenbrought back together and can be seen in the same spacesince their sale in 1725. The facsimile will be displayed
without the gold frame but in the spatial relationship proposed by Cecilia Cavalca in 2013.
After the exhibition in Bologna it is hoped that the facsimile, in physical or digitalform, can help each of the collections holding parts of the Polittico Griffoni to explain theimportance of their fragment when seen as part of a whole. It is also hoped that this focus
could result in the discovery of some of the missing parts.
Many questions have been raised by the work carried out to record and replicate
each of the paintings that form the Polittico Griffoni. Many more will emerge as skills andtechnologies develop. Reuniting paintings, objects, sculptural elements and architectural320

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

THIS PAGE

Gilding the printed facsimile ofFrancesco del Cossa’s St Lucy,
1472–73.
Detail of the facsimile of St Lucy.
OPPOSITE

Recording the two panels by
Francesco del Cossa depicting theAnnunciation, 1472–73, at theMuseo di Villa Cagnola, Gazzada.
Adam Lowe and Rafa Rachewsky
working on the facsimile panelof Francesco del Cossa’s St Peter,1472–73.
Surface of the facsimile of thepredella.

details that have been separated for one reason or another is at the heart of Factum’s
work. Questions about the careers of objects, the way they are valued, how they are displayed, how they are preserved and conserved, their meaning and ultimately about theirsocial and aesthetic significance are emerging.

REC ORDI N G AN D R E- U NIT ING T H E P O L I TTI CO GRI F F O N I321

BEAUTY IN RELIEF
Carlos Bayod Lucini

Carlos Bayod Lucini is
an architect and Project
Director at Factum Foundation,
where he is responsible forthe digitisation of paintingsand oversaw the recording of
the Polittico Griffoni (2012–15).
He is Adjunct Professor ofHistoric Preservation at
Columbia University and isa PhD candidate at Madrid’s
Universidad Autónoma, where
he is writing a thesis on therelief of paintings.
Lucida 3D Scanner: ManuelFranquelo conceptualised
and designed the electronics,
mechanics, optics and software.
The scanner was fabricatedand tested in Factum Arte by
Carlos Bayod, Dwight Perry,
Jorge Cano, Nicolás Díez,
Manuel Franquelo Jr, Guendalina
Damone, Enrique Esteban,
Marta Herranz and Aliaa Ismail
under the supervision of ManuelFranquelo.

OPPOSITE

Scanning the Crucifixion in
the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., 2015.

322

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

A

15-inch laptop screen may not seem like an ideal window into a painting. The
digital image depicts an abstracted version of reality that only bears comparison
to the original work of art in some ways. Nevertheless, all eyes were on thescreen during the recording of St Lucy (Francesco del Cossa, c. 1473) at the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in October 2015. The object of rapt attention was animage simulating the painting’s relief that was appearing on the screen in real-time.
As the Lucida 3D Scanner moved over the surface of the painting, the data materialising on-screen revealed an image that felt strangely familiar: one could quickly
discern the punch marks delineating St Lucy’s golden halo and the radial furrows on
the golden background. It was also possible to distinguish the figure of the saint andher habit from the surrounding areas, as well as the painting’s uneven surface, its subtle
craquelure, the slight curvature of the panel, or even areas of paint loss around theedges. The digital image reconstructed the painting’s texture by means of light andshadow, with clarity and precision, as though it were an aerial photograph exposing therelief of the Earth’s surface.
If one examines a painting carefully, similar three-dimensional elements are usuallyvisible to the naked eye. In a conservation workshop, raking light or a magnifying glasscan also help the researcher to better understand surface texture. In a museum gallery,
however, relief often goes unnoticed. This may be because paintings are uniformly lit,
helping the visitor to see ‘properly’ from any position in the room. The ideal lighting creates a well-defined image with no shadows, but at the same time the painting is entirely
flattened, to the point where it looks like a reproduction of itself. The work of art is thus
standardized and packaged for consumption, easily recognizable as its catalogue image orin its multiple other photographic incarnations. Uniform lighting reduces the complexities inherent in the work of art.We may ask, though, whether the artist was in fact relying
on textural nuances to produce a variety of aesthetic effects.
In a 15th-century work in tempera on board like del Cossa’s St Lucy, textural details beyond the colour are crucial. The artist had recourse to a whole host of techniquesthat were used to modulate light and create a sense of movement, vibration and space.
Punch marks and incisions, the slight differences in depth between the figures and thebackground… these were the special effects that made it possible to express an aesthetic
herefore, the significance of relief in the percepidea on the pictorial surface. To ignore, therefore,tion of the work can negate a critical element of the viewing experience. To see the digital 3D image of St Lucy or of St Florian or the Crucifixion (also in Washington) was toappreciate the richness of their relief as if ffor the first time. The Lucida 3D Scanner, used
to digitise all sixteen surviving panels of the Polittico Griffoni between 2012 and 2015,
was designed specifically to record and reveal the textural qualities of the painted surface.
323

THIS PAGE

Colour data of the eyes of St Lucy.
OPPOSITE

3D render of the eyes of St Lucy.

The fruit of an exceptional collaboration between the artist Manuel Franquelo,
Factum Arte and Factum Foundation, the Lucida is the result of nearly twenty years of
research in the field of surface recording. The scanner works by capturing monochrome
video of a moving line of light projected onto a surface. The light is emitted by a laser
diode and passes through two different lenses (aspherical and cylindrical) to define on
the surface a thin vertical line approximately 5 cm long. As the scanner moves parallel
to a plane, at a constant distance of 10 cm, the cameras – positioned at 45° to thesurface – record the distortions in the laser line produced by the relief. The movementof the linear guides is controlled by an Arduino board and the system is operated using
custom software on a laptop. Lucida’s structure is modular and easily adaptable to therequirements of each project.
The Lucida has condensed the joint visions of Manuel Franquelo and Adam Loweabout what it is that defines the dynamic nature of a work of art. The complex andconstantly evolving surface of a painting speaks to us about its historical trajectory.
Painters understand this physicality, as do those who are responsible for safeguarding
and conserving works of art. However, the tools to document it accurately have notexisted until now. Therefore, a scanner developed by artists to record works by otherartists was inevitably going to be based on the following fundamental principle: apainting is recognised as much by its material qualities (its relief) as by the image it represents (its colour). Lucida allows us to effectively separate the two aspects, as if wewere virtually removing the colour layer in order to look more directly at the object’s
material qualities. Without the distraction of colour, it is easier to see detail in the texture: the marks that denote the passage of time and the indicators of successive repairs
and modifications are all revealed in a Lucida scan.
Since a first prototype was released in 2010, Lucida has been used to digitise almost
200 works of art, including paintings, altarpieces, drawings, maps, books, tapestries,
324

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

decorative objects, tiles, murals, bas-reliefs, sculptures and architectural elements.
Objects of various sizes, with diverse origins and from different eras, belonging to bothprivate and public collections around the world, have all been recorded with the aim ofcontributing towards their conservation, study, or dissemination.
In Summer 2012, three diminutive panels – St George, St Jerome, and St Catherineof Alexandria (Ercole de’ Roberti, c. 1473) – belonging to the collection of Vittorio Cini
(1885–1977) were among the first paintings to be scanned with Factum Foundation’s
innovative system. In the Palazzo Cini’s art gallery on the Campo San Vio near the Grand
Canal in Venice, an early Lucida prototype was used to digitise the almost flat surfaceof the tiny panels. The 3D scans marked the starting point of the Polittico Griffoni digital conservation project; the recording of two round panels depicting the Annunciation(Francesco del Cossa, c. 1473) soon followed at the Museo di Villa Cagnola in Gazzada.
Seven years and several dozen projects later, in August 2019, the latest version of
the Lucida Scanner was used to document the seven Raphael Cartoons at the Victoria andAlbert Museum in London. With a total scan area of more than 120 sqm, this constitutes
perhaps the most important 3D recording of pictorial works realised to date. The data
resolution is constant at 10,000 points/cm2, as is the capture speed at approximately
4 hours/m2. These numbers are irrespective of the area recorded: monumental works
like the Raphael Cartoons are approached in the same way as the small Venetian panels.
There are no shortcuts with the Lucida.
During a Lucida scan, there is plenty of time to contemplate the surface of thepainting in question. One can also entertain oneself by watching an undulating line of lightglowing white on the black background of the scanning application. With each new photogram, Lucida’s cameras record the change in shape and position of the light projected
onto the painting – a translation of physical relief into abstract language. Nevertheless,
Franquelo, the artist responsible for Lucida’s design and software, tends to describe thisB EAU T Y IN R EL IEF

325

THIS PAGE

Colour data of the halo of St Lucy.
OPPOSITE

3D render of the halo of St Lucy.

process as the condensation of the surface. The term abstraction implies simplification, that
information is somehow lost. Condensation, on the other hand, is suggestive of information that is being preserved in its most complete, elemental form. In this manner, any
relief surface can be documented and stored as a series of ordered profiles.
It is precisely this mode of approaching relief digitisation that makes the Lucida
Scanner so relevant within the field of heritage conservation. Whereas most 3D scanningsystems automatically perform a transformation on the data during capture, usually tomake data processing more user friendly, the Lucida stores raw files. This means that in
the future it will be possible to access this essential repository of information and re-process the video files with more powerful algorithms than are available today. Implicit inthis working method is the current generation’s responsibility to ensure that data remains
useful even after newer technologies have been developed.
As well as storing the raw video files, the Lucida converts relief into a depth-map– a digital image in which each pixel is assigned a grey tone corresponding to a specificheight. Greyscale accurately represents the three-dimensional nature of a scanned surface while allowing a user to work with high-resolution data in a manageable format.
Representing three-dimensional information in image form is analogous to seeing in apainting’s relief the wrinkled orography of a terrain at reduced scale.
The system was, in fact, designed to digitise flat objects with low relief (maximum
depth 25 mm) or what is known as 2.5D – where the X-Y axes that define planar surfaces are fundamentally greater than the Z-axis that establishes depth. Halfway between
2D and 3D, the data captured by the Lucida accurately characterises the original object
when the image representing the object reproduces its aesthetic qualities.This is achieved
with a different type of digital file, the shaded render, which is used to visualise the relief
data obtained in the digitisation. The two file types – greyscale depth-map and shaded
render – are complementary and serve different purposes. The depth-map enables the326

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

physical reproduction of the surface using digital fabrication means, while the shaded
render makes the 3D data visible.
A shaded render can visually reconstruct a scanned surface using the effects of lightand shadow. It is generated from the original raw video and based on the simulation of relief using an artificial light source. The light illuminates the scanned ‘landscape’, creating
shadows where it hits the virtual model. The result is an accurate representation of surface texture, very similar to the information obtained when raking light is projected onto
a painting. The visualisation imitates reality and the resulting representation of the relief
is therefore intuitive, readable and inherently beautiful: a monochrome image composedof light and shadow that establishes a direct correspondence with the visual appearanceof the original object. It is subjective in the sense that it is created artificially and digitally
mediated, but it is also an essentially objective, quantifiable reconstruction of reality. As
such, a Lucida shaded render is also a snapshot of an artwork’s state of conservation ata concrete moment in its historical trajectory. This constitutes the primary function of
the Lucida: it is most useful as a system for documenting objects of cultural and artistic
heritage, especially during conservation processes.
The central panel of the Polittico Griffoni, St Vincent Ferrer (Francesco del Cossa,c. 1473), was recorded at the National Gallery in London in 2013. The painting had
been conserved in the 1980s, when its support was changed to balsawood, the curvature
flattened, and the surface cleaned in a process that returned intensity to the colour. The
National Gallery Technical Bulletin describes, for example, how following treatment the formof the saint’s black habit became more distinct and the colour of the sky more vivid.1 The
3D scan of the painting revealed a surface in a good state of conservation, with few areas
1 Alistair Smith, Anthony Reeve and Ashok Roy, ‘Francesco del Cossa’s S. Vincent Ferrer’, National Gallery Technical
Bulletin, vol. 5 (1981), 44–57, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/technical-bulletin/smith_reeve_roy1981.

B EAU T Y IN R EL IEF

327

of damage or paint loss beyond the borders (except for an area on the face that required
significant remedial work). The figures’ contours are clearly distinguished by the subtle
height difference in relation to their surroundings. This variation is particularly evident in
the uppermost area of the panel, in which the figures emerge from a golden background.
The characteristic punches surrounding Christ and the angels’ halos were used by the artist
to generate the effect of light bouncing off the surface of the gold, part of the delicate playof depth and texture that completes the viewer’s perception of the work.
The predella, The Miracles of StVincent Ferrer (Ercole de’ Roberti, c. 1473), was alsoscanned in 2013 in the Pinacoteca Vaticana; it presented an entirely different state of conservation to the National Gallery panel. The data exposed a succession of linear cracks
along the central axis, corresponding to the wooden frame that was fitted to the back.
The 3D scans created a precise and detailed record of the state of the surface of the panels
revealing the need for the attention of the restoration team. The dynamic character of the
support was causing the brittle paint layer to crack and lift. The ability to inspect the surface with and without colour adds another layer of complexity to the photographic documentation.The benefits of using the Lucida to monitor change in a work of art before andafter conservation treatment became evident in the case of the St Peter and St John the
Baptist panels (Francesco del Cossa, c. 1473), which belong to the Pinacoteca di Brera in
Milan. The first scan was carried out in 2014 and later used as a base for the facsimiles.
Two years later, following restoration and surface cleaning at the Barbara Ferriani studioin Milan, the panels were scanned a second time; the repairs and superficial stabilisation
were clearly visible when comparing the scans from before and after the restoration.
High-resolution 3D recording allows one to look at a work of art without being
distracted by its colour. As in a bird’s-eye view of a landscape, the geographic accidents of328

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

THIS PAGE

Recording the predella at the
Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.
OPPOSITE

Carlos Bayod Lucini recording
Francesco del Cossa’s Crucifixion,
1472–73, at the National Galleryof Art in Washington, D.C.

a painting are revealed in the greyscale image and its visualinterpretation using light and shadow. One can only begin
to intuit the complexity of the pictorial surface when one
understands that a painting is more than a flat image – itis in all respects a three-dimensional object where eachgroove corresponds to the physical imprint of the events
that have shaped its appearance.When these three-dimensional traces are made apparent in the scan data, they cangenerate new questions about the work of art. The 3D
recording of paintings and other low-relief objects is a relatively recent and quickly evolving method of documentation and analysis. The Lucida system is a reference pointin the field of 3D scanning whose development has paralleled the digital reconstruction of the Polittico Griffoni.
Since the digitisation of the panels began in 2012, interestin the technology from conservators and heritage practitioners has grown exponentiallybecause, beyond the capability to physically reproduce a work of art, Lucida data makes
it possible to study the detail of a painted surface on a computer screen – a unique andnovel experience in the world of art.
The surface of a painting reveals much about the artist’s intention and aesthetic
conception of the work. Texture can produce exquisite effects of light and shadow thatcomplement colour as a vehicle for the transmission of the artist’s ideal of beauty. A
method of digital mediation that translates surface into an image created from light andshade results from the determination to faithfully convey the unique character of a painting’s relief. A system like Lucida, created by artists to record and reveal the beauty of thepainted surface, necessarily creates aesthetically appealing images. Beyond its usefulness
for forensically accurate documentation, there is a seductive aesthetic in the renders
themselves that invites an intimacy with the object. The Lucida’s success is based upon its
capacity to reveal the aura’s physicality.

B EAU T Y IN R EL IEF

329

HISTORIC CARTOGRAPHY AND DIGITALTECHNOLOGIES: FACTUM FOUNDATION
AND THE VIRTUAL RESTORATION OF
THE COUNTRYSIDE MAP FROM THE SALABOLOGNA AT THE VATICAN
Nadja Aksamija and Francesco Ceccarelli
Nadja Aksamija is Associate
Professor of Art History at
Wesleyan University. Her
primary research interests
revolve around villa architecture,
literature, and ideology during
the Counter-Reformation.
She has also published on lateCinquecento emblem books,
painted sacred landscapes,
gardens, landscapes of the ‘sacri
monti’, and cartography(including on the Sala Bologna
at the Vatican), as well as
on modern restorations ofRenaissance buildings in Venice
and Bologna and on the conceptof the architectural palimpsest.
Francesco Ceccarelli teaches
architectural history at the
University of Bologna. The focusof his research is the earlymodern and modern Italian city,from the Renaissance throughNeoclassicism. He has curated
international exhibitions inarchitectural history and has
authored numerous monographs
and edited volumes and scholarly
articles. With Nadja Aksamija,
he has co-edited the volume on
the Sala Bologna at the Vaticanand co-directed the research/
exhibition project on thiscartographic masterpiece, which
resulted in the production of
Factum’s facsimile of the city mapof Bologna for the Museo della
Storia di Bologna.
OPPOSITE

Recording the Sala Bologna,
Vatican City, 2011.

330

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

I

n 2011, under the auspices of the Museo della Storia di Bologna and the Musei
Vaticani, Factum Foundation conducted high-resolution digital recording of the entire painted cycle at the Vatican’s Sala Bologna. This important state room, locatedwithin the Terza Loggia of the Apostolic Palace, was created for the Jubilee of 1575
and adorned with frescoes celebrating the native city of the reigning pope, Gregory
XIII, the Bolognese Ugo Boncompagni. Almost five centuries later, this monumental
space – originally an open loggia overlooking the city of Rome – has changed functions
multiple times inside an architectural context that has also been profoundly transformed following the construction of the Palace of Sixtus V (1589–1605). Today, theSala Bologna sits between the private apartments of the pontiff and the Secretariat of
the Vatican State; it is inaccessible to visitors due to its location at the center of a network of routes used exclusively by the Roman Curia.
Famous for its monumental fresco of the city of Bologna, the biggest city portrait
painted during the Renaissance (456 x 607 cm), as well as the enormous chorographyof the Bolognese territory, the largest representation of an Italian region ever made(466 x 850 cm), the Sala Bologna contains an extremely significant cycle of frescoes
featuring geo-iconographical and astronomical content. It is a direct precursor to theGallery of Maps, realized five years later for the same pope, Gregory XIII, in theBelvedere Palace, and as such should be recognized as an extraordinary experimentallaboratory where various ways of representing a city and its surrounding territory
were first tested out.
Thanks to the initiative of an international group of scholars focusing on the
study, publication, and digital transposition of the Sala Bologna’s geo-iconographicalprogram, Factum Foundation was able to produce a facsimile of the entire south wallof the Sala Bologna (which is now on permanent display at the Museo della Storia di
Bologna) and a non-contact digital restoration of the chorography of the Bolognese
territory from its west wall. On this occasion, we would like to address the latterproject, which provides an exciting glimpse into the many unexpected and fascinating
possibilities of digital archaeology and virtual restoration when dealing with monuments of similar complexity. In fact, it was only thanks to the high-resolution recording data that it was possible to read and interpret this map for the first time. Given
its extreme size and compromised state of conservation, this would not have beenpossible with traditional photography. Digital recording has allowed us to examine the331THIS PAGE

Detail of the map showing thecastle of San Martino in Soverzano
before restoration.
OPPOSITE

Detail of the map showing thecastle of San Martino in Soverzano
after partial restoration.

map centimeter by centimeter, analyzing over 650 toponyms and investigating the various depictions of architecture, which could then be studied in a variety of new ways.
At first glance, the monumental chorography of the Bolognese territory gives animpression of being an objective and balanced rendering of the countryside in 1575,
the Jubilee year in which Lorenzo Sabatini and his team painted it on the basis ofdrawings provided by Domenico Tibaldi and Scipione Dattari. Its enormous size andextensive topographical and architectural details seem to imply scientific accuracy andcomprehensiveness, leaving the modern viewer with the misguided notion that this isan exhaustive and truthful document regarding the Bolognese contado at the outset of
the Boncompagni pontificate (1572–85). However, like all other cartographic products of the period, the chorography of the Bolognese territory should, in fact, be
understood as a highly selective, manipulated, and idealized territorial portrait. Whenexamined against the historical picture painted by various documentary sources, its
inclusions and exclusions, its orientation, size, and representational techniques all reveal the pressing ideological and practical needs and ambitions of Gregory XIII’s court
from which this fresco emerged as one of its most historiographically underappreciated, yet most remarkable products.
332

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

Unlike the much smaller depiction of the region on the 1580 map of the Bononiensis
Ditio at the center of the celebrated Gallery of Maps at the Vatican Belvedere, theSala Bologna fresco is a ‘pure’ contemporary chorography, free of symbolic allusions
and narrative markers of historical events that make the later map a cartographic intersection of history and geography. Moreover, territorial links to sacred history –which at the Gallery of Maps unfold in the vault above the mapped regions to which
they correspond – are also absent. In fact, the Sala Bologna as a whole lacks traditional Christian iconography, leaving the program’s chorographic, cartographic, andallegorical apparatus to carry a religious message that is not exactly devotional, butrather ‘infrastructural’ in its representation of papal hegemony over the entire region.
Together with its urban counterpart on the south wall, this great chorography demonstrates, among other things, a vision of good ecclesiastical government in Gregory
XIII’s homeland, presented here as an exemplum of structural and spiritual reforms
in the city and the countryside. In addition to accentuating certain strategically significant topographical features of the province, such as its rich hydrographic system(which was of direct relevance for the pressing question of borders between the Papal
State and the Duchy of Ferrara), the map also highlights the contado’s devotional and

HI STORI C C ARTOG R A P H Y A ND DIG ITA L T ECH NO L O G IES

333

agricultural aspects above all others, instrumental as they were for the implementationof Gregory XIII’s and Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s reformist policies.
Despite a complex and discontinuous territorial reality at the time, the countryside map at the Sala Bologna presents a neatly regimented agricultural landscape with
Bologna at its center, appearing regulated and ‘civilized’ thanks to an ubiquitous networkof civic and religious institutions in its midst. Marked by disproportionately large toponymic labels and architectural symbols – most of them generic and not indicative of
the size of the communities or monuments they represented – over 350 of these were
small settlements and various types of non-devotional structures (including a few villas
and fortified castles), while some 300 were religious establishments such as churches,monasteries, ospedali, and oratories. The 250 agio-toponyms simultaneously identified
the rural communities and their corresponding system of rural parishes, thus serving
as a synoptic visualization of Bologna’s rural population, whose exact number was notknown until 1587, when the census conducted under Sixtus V finally determined it to
be at around 150,000 people. The exaggerated graphic emphasis on the religious infrastructure sought to highlight the Church’s omnipresence in the contado; focused on the
diocesan organization of the Bolognese territory, this chorography portrayed the naturallandscape as coated with a political layer of ecclesiastical authority.
Aside from the religious institutions, another potent instrument of urban hegemony in the countryside were the numerous villas of the local patriciate, located mainlyin the fertile plain. Of all the sites and structures depicted on the chorography of the
Bolognese territory, the small castle of San Martino in Soverzano (‘sopra Zena’) – a
fortified villa of the Manzuoli family located between the Fiumicello and the Zena in thetownship of Minerbio some 20 km north of the city – was depicted with the greatest
architectural and topographical accuracy and a level of detail unmatched anywhere elseon the map. Its exploded size relative to the representation of the city has made the castle
appear as large as the radius of the city walls. Such an extreme close-up has revealed somepreviously unknown aspects of the site, such as a large formal garden present there in
the 1570s. It has also confirmed that the castle’s signature architectural features visible
today, including the internal courtyard, the defensive moat, the tall central tower, andthe crenelated profile are all original elements, rather than fanciful results of AlfonsoRubbiani’s ‘medievalizing’ interventions in the early 1880s. The remarkably detailed
portrayal of San Martino in Soverzano at the Sala Bologna suggests that it had a particular significance for Gregory XIII. In fact, in 1570, while still Cardinal of San Sisto,
Ugo Boncompagni managed to get this castle returned to the three Manzuoli brothers(Melchiorre, Alessandro, and Giorgio), who had lost it to the Bentivoglio for a number ofyears due to inheritance issues. As several inscriptions throughout the castle attest, thesethree nephews of Cardinal Paleotti proudly restored the late medieval structure in 1571,
transforming it, according to contemporary chronicles, into the most important fortified
villa in the Bolognese countryside.
Unfortunately, unlike the perspectival map of the city painted on the south wallof the Sala Bologna, the adjoining territorial map is in critical state of conservation.
Over the course of the 19th century, when the Sala Bologna was still part of the museum tour through the Pinacoteca Vaticana, its entire west wall was completely covered with tapestries which hid it from view until 1884, when it briefly reappeared
during the restoration of the city map; considered ‘unworthy of being shown’, it was
immediately covered up again. It was only in 1934, this time during the restoration
334

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCEof the celestial map on the vault, that the countryside map was finally revealed in allof its ‘not negligible geo-historical importance’, though its state of conservation was
immediately recognized as ‘desperate’. A restoration project initiated on 13 May 1943
under the guidance of Giovanni Micozzi was interrupted by the war soon thereafter,
and it was consequently never completed.
More than 70 years since that time, there have been no other documented conservation interventions on this map, which currently requires urgent – and no longer
postponable – physical care. Though still riddled with holes for tapestries (hung there
two centuries ago by the Floreria Apostolica) and worn down in several sections, the map
is still legible enough to allow us to gauge its notable technical quality and understand its
exceptional historical significance.
Thanks to the rich documentation gathered through Factum’s digital recording of
the countryside map in 2011, it is now possible to entertain innovative practical solutions regarding its physical restoration in the future. The study of the original cartographic and pictorial techniques, together with historical research on the place names,
the chorographic and architectural representation of various sites, the hydrography, andthe historic roads, have created both theoretical and practical foundations for a virtual
restoration, aided by custom-made software. The Factum team has successfully filled in
the lacunae in some sections of the painting, proposing an extraordinary chorographic
recreation of the whole that now allows for full legibility and comprehension of thework, which has once again become intelligible as a geo-historical document. This virtual
restoration can now be seen and appreciated in a video and in section facsimiles produced
at different scales, which can further the study of this map as well as help guide the handof future restorers intervening concretely on the actual wall.
Digital technology is now at a point where it can provide extremely compelling
alternatives to the traditional (and sometimes irreversible) interventions on the objects
themselves. A range of new recording techniques, including three-dimensional scanningand multispectral photography, as well as complex archiving systems for the storage andexploration of the acquired data, have been developed and mined by Factum Foundation
and Factum Arte over the past several years for purposes of non-invasive conservation of
the world’s cultural heritage. Factum’s multi-layered digital archives – at times translated
into extraordinary conservation facsimiles – facilitate the examination and use of therecorded data in a variety of previously unimaginable ways. The virtually restored map of
the Bolognese territory provides us with an exciting window into what is already possible
to do with these new and constantly improving digital tools.

FOLLOWING PAGES

The partially-restored map.

HI STORI C C ARTOG R A P H Y A ND DIG ITA L T ECH NO L O G IES

335

336

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

HI STORI C C ARTOG R A P H Y A ND DIG ITA L T ECH NO L O G IES

337

PUBLICA MAGNIFICENTIA
AND ARCHITECTURAL PALIMPSEST:
THE RESTORATION OF THE FAÇADE
OF SAN PETRONIO
Roberto Terra

Roberto Terra is a founding
partner of the Cavina Terra
Architetti studio in Bologna.
He has designed and directed
restoration interventions formonuments, historic buildings,
cultural heritage and liturgicalart, and has worked on the
exhibition design of museums
and temporary exhibitions. He
has also carried out research,edited volumes and publishedarticles and essays on thepractice of restoration and thehistory of architecture.

OPPOSITE

The façade of San Petronio, withzones that were scanned at highresolution marked in red.

The only people who have no architecture
are those who have no history.
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

In 1390, the free municipality of Bologna decided to erect a grand new church in the centreof the city – not a cathedral, but a civic temple dedicated to the cult of San Petronio, patron saint of the city. The municipality entrusted the construction to the Fabbriceria, theinstitution that has taken care of its conservation and maintenance up until today.1
Contrary to the practice of that time, the construction began with the façade.
Facing north towards the main public space of the city, it became the foundational element, gauge and generator of the new architectural organism, the vastest ever imaginedin Bologna up to that point. From the beginning, the façade represented the symbolic
fulcrum of the venture, reflecting the historical everyday life of the city, to the pointthat it gained the stature of a monument in its own right, to some extent independentof its building context.
After a quick start, the construction lasted many decades, during which time
Antonio di Vincenzo’s original project was transformed according to contemporary
tastes and contractors’ wishes. Ambitions for expansion of the ground-plan, however,
eventually came up against the limits of town planning – they were incompatible with
the new organization of the central urban spaces of the city. When the advancing works
reached the point where a great cupola was intended to be built – at the planned intersection between the aisles, the transept and the apse – they were interrupted. It washere in 1663 that the building was terminated, not as specified in the by-now ancientdesign, but in the form that we know today. The façade itself was completed as far as
the mural structure was concerned, but nevertheless remained bare on the upper part,without the marble cladding which had already been finished for the lower part.
The entire construction process, with its progressive adaptations and innovations,
was never disconnected from the role of the temple within the historical life of the city.
In 1530, the coronation of Charles V as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, conductedin San Petronio by Clement VII, was preceded by the construction of the minor portals that, next to the Porta Magna by Jacopo della Quercia (1426–38), completed what
1 For the history of the church, see La Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna (Bologna: Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna andCinisello Balsamo: Arti Grafiche Amilcare Pizzi, 1983–84), 2 vols.

339

would become one of the most celebrated sculpture cycles, not only decorative but also narrative, of the Italian
Renaissance.
The projects for completion of the façade2 shiftedfrom age to age, corresponding to ever-changing stylistic
conventions, and finally ran aground in the failure of thecompetition notices, first in 1887 and finally in 1933–35.
At this time, the ‘unfinished’ parts, with their vivid contrast of refined marble and bare bricks, which up untilthat moment had provoked opposing feelings and reactions, gained acceptance as a civic icon by at least a partof the community. This was an upending of values which
made made this extraordinary architectural palimpsest
the most modern demonstration of the publica magnificentia sought by the builders of this civic temple. It was
based on the ideas of Giosuè Carducci, who had stated in1881 that it was ‘appropriate and permissible to leave theillustrious monument in its present state, which is the result of the events of Italian art,
mindset and history’.3
In this process, the material history of the façade cannot be considered as limited
solely to the chronological scope of its construction. It must include every event, plannedor accidental, natural or artificial, which has determined its transformation and conservation up until today. San Petronio represents an architectural unicum that integrates
every structural, decorative and iconographic element, along with natural decay due touse, the stratification of various interventions, and previous restorations.4
In 2009, as continuation and completion of the interventions conducted since the1970s, the Fabbriceria of San Petronio set out to plan the necessary maintenance for theconservation of the monument, this time integrating operative, technical and scientificneeds with functional, economic and financial ones within a single programme.
Entrusted with this task, an interdisciplinary team coordinated by Cavina Terra
Architetti drafted a project that started out with an analysis of the basilica’s state of conservation. Preventive actions and restorative interventions to be carried out immediately werealso outlined, alongside a longer-term plan for periodic maintenance. In this regard, theobservation and understanding of the constituent elements in their complex material stateserved as primary guidelines for every phase of the project, from fact-finding to execution.
The methodological procedures of the building site have also been characterisedby patient and constant verification of the ways in which specific solutions work in practice, together with an awareness that every intervention is in itself superimposed on topof previous strata, sometimes irreversible and therefore requiring maximum attention.
The solutions chosen, therefore, sought to minimise alterations, favouring permanence
where possible. Efforts were also made, at the express request of the Fabbriceria andalso according to our own strong convictions, to not overlook ‘either … the practical

2 La Basilica incompiuta. Progetti antichi per la facciata di San Petronio (Ferrara: Edisai, 2001).
3 Anna Maria Matteucci, ‘La facciata: dal Seicento al Novecento’, in La Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna, II, 34.
4 Andrea Emiliani, Jacopo della Quercia e la facciata di San Petronio a Bologna. Contributo allo studio della decorazione e notizie
sul restauro (Bologna: Edizioni Alfa, 1981).

340

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

THIS PAGE

Scanning the façade of the Basilica
of San Petronio.
OPPOSITE

A LiDAR recording of the façadeof San Petronio and the Piazza
Maggiore.

and financial means, nor the administrative procedures, nor the management criteria ofa building site’ which, as stated by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, ‘the architects entrusted withsuch restorations, often very difficult, should know inside out’.5
Methods and aims have been shared with the parties involved, primarily the Basilica
of San Petronio, the supplier of the financial resources (mainly collected through fundraising); the Archdiocese of Bologna, the proprietor of the building; the peripheral offices of the Cultural Heritage Department responsible for conservation; and finally thecity and its institutions – a plurality of voices united in the Honour Committee making
up the cultural matrix of this civic monument.
The project began in 2010 with a preliminary analysis of the state of conservationof the building. From this significant points emerged regarding the priorities of intervention for the cladding materials, the external parameters and the internal chapels – all ofthem complex parts of the vast building, whose characteristics were sometimes typicaland recurring, but more often specific and differentiated.6
The first phase was dedicated to the façade, considered for the first time both asa single entity and also as a composition made up of three main parts: the rough brickstructure, the marble cladding, and the sculpted portals.
The extent and complexity of the façade and the scale of the intervention gave
rise to particular problems. First of these was the operational challenge of extending
scaffolding over its entire surface (to a height of 58 m). To this were added difficulties regarding the heterogeneity of the materials (brick, marble, stone, mural paintings, plaster,wood, metals), the finishes of these materials (paint, protections, patinas), the state ofconservation and finally, particularly with regard to the marble cladding and the portals,
the results inherited from previous restoration interventions.
5 Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, ‘Les monuments historiques, «Gazette des architectes et du bâtiment»’, in Eugène
Viollet-le-Duc. Gli architetti e la storia. Scritti sull’architettura, ed. R. Tamborrino (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996), 178.
6 Roberto Terra, Rossana Gabrielli and Michela Boni, ‘Restoration of San Petronio: four-year project between innovation and eco-sustainability’, in Built Heritage 2013 Monitoring Conservation Management, Online Proceedings of Conference,
Milan, 18–20 November 2013, editor in chief M. Boriani, eds. R. Gabaglio and D. Gulotta (Milan: Politecnico di Milano,Centro per la Conservazione e Valorizzazione dei Beni Culturali, 2013), 1461–71.

THE RESTORATI ON O F T H E FA ÇA DE O F S A N P ET RO NIO

341

In response to these problems, a diagnostic plan was put forward. This comprised asequence of investigations, non-invasive and non-destructive, which involved a contextualconsideration of historical, metrical and instrumental features, as well as the establishment of a corpus of information allowing the identification of morphological, material andstructural characteristics of the façade, and the classification of their state of conservation.
With specific regard to the portals, in 2010 the Basilica of San Petronio commissioned the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, as one of the Central Institutes of the
Cultural Heritage Department, to collaborate on the development of the diagnostic plan.
This was regulated by a first agreement in 2010, which in 2011 evolved into a second
agreement for the operative intervention handled by the Stone Materials Restoration
Sector of the same Institute.7
The façade intervention, finished in 2014, combined actions of prevention andinclusive restoration. As Amedeo Bellini stated, it encompassed ‘all the appropriate technical operations to preserve its material consistency, to reduce intrinsic and extrinsic
decay factors, and to satisfy all requirements of the building’s use while making only themost necessary alterations’.8
The legacy of the project will need to be assessed; it cannot be regarded as resolving once and for all the conservation issues associated with the building’s future.
One important question relates to the conservation of the outdoor sculptures which,as Marco Ciatti observed, ‘is one of the most difficult and represents a still unresolved
challenge for the science of conservation’.9 A debate that emerged in the project’s earlystages, and continued throughout the duration of the works, concerned the possibilityof removing those façade sculptures (such as Amico Aspertini’s Dead Christ) which aremost exposed to degradation, to ‘a more protected environment, substituting them withcopies, today more easily obtainable thanks to non-invasive 3D recording systems’.10 At
the end of four years of activity on the project, the Regional Management for Culturaland Landscape Heritage of Emilia Romagna, together with the civic authorities and the
proprietor entity, decided that more time for reflection was needed. It was determinedthat not all the necessary conditions had been reached, i.e. technical, cultural, economic
and functional, given the fact, moreover, that this kind of decision ‘is not only on a technical level, but also regards the foundation of modern restoration theory, as it concerns
the dramatic dilemma that arises every time between two equally important factors: theconnection of the work of art with its historical location on the one hand, and, on theother, the maintenance of its physical integrity, which is more clearly obtainable withthe substitution of a copy and an inside location’.11 Although the initial intervention has
ended, the conservation of the façade continues in the form of maintenance and periodical supervisions which are performed ‘using preventive analysis and plans, as instruments for increasing knowledge’.12
The documentation collected in the preliminary phase and during the works has
contributed to the creation of a scientific report on the intervention. This data is a prerequisite for future site maintenance as well as an indispensable element in the ordinary
practice of the site’s safeguarding and financial management; it constitutes an indispensable aid to scientific study and to the wider project of making the monument and its
values accessible to the public.
In this context, the widest range of potential techniques have been explored and analysed, including the creation of a digital three-dimensional representation of the façade,made possible thanks to the scaffolding. The sculptural and decorative scheme was recorded in detail with high precision using photographic and laser scanning; there was nodirect contact with the work of art. The recording, carried out between 2012 and 2013
by Factum Arte, involved constant work during the periods and the hours when restoration was suspended, mainly during the night. The data gathered in this endeavour madeit possible to update, and in some ways to revive, the chalcographic records common in
the 19th century in Bologna, which include many valuable testimonies of San Petronio’s
Porta Magna. Made since 1822, these models are now conserved in the Art Academy of
Bologna. The cast of the whole portal, taken in 1886 by Oronzo Lelli, was bought in two
copies by the South Kensington Museum in London, and is now at the Victoria and AlbertMuseum, where it is still exhibited as part of the Cast Collection.
The virtual model created by Factum Arte, which also integrated the historical,
diagnostic and conservation data, has significantly expanded our frame of knowledgeof the work and its state of conservation. It is in line with the best current technicalstandards, but still leaves space for the expansion of documentation following future
developments in recording technology.
In addition to increasing our understanding of the structure, the project to restore
the façade of San Petronio has achieved its main goal – that of preserving the non-material values of the monument through the conservation of the material data – and has
thus itself become an instrument and component part of the basilica’s cultural heritage.

78
9

10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Amedeo Bellini in Che cos’è il restauro?, 24.

Scanning one of the sculptureson the left-hand doorway.

Il restauro dei portali di San Petronio a Bologna, ed. M. C. Improta (Florence: Edifir Edizioni, 2016).
Che cos’è il restauro? Nove studiosi a confronto (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2005), 24.
Mario Ciatti, ‘Presentazione’, in Il restauro dei portali di San Petronio a Bologna, 25–26.

342

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

THE RESTORATI ON O F T H E FA ÇA DE O F S A N P ET RO NIO

343

RESTORATION, REPLICATION,
RESURRECTION: CHOOSINGA FUTURE FOR AMICO ASPERTINI’SDEPOSITION OF CHRIST
Elizabeth Mitchell
Elizabeth Mitchell has adoctorate in Greco-Romanarchaeology from Harvard
University. She writes, edits, andworks on recording projects for
Factum Foundation.

OPPOSITE

The ‘prosthetic’ 3D-printed arm
made to investigate restoration
options for the figure of Christ.

344

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

S

culpted by Amico Aspertini and his workshop between 1526 and 1530, the lunette
tableau above the right-hand portico as you look at the façade of San Petronio shows
either Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus lowering Christ into the tomb while thetwo Marys lament to either side. Famously described by Vasari as ‘an eccentric man of
extravagant brain, whose figures … are equally eccentric and even mad’, Aspertini (1474–1552) was a skilled and prolific painter and sculptor; Vasari writes that ‘there is no churchor street in Bologna which has not some daub by the hand of this master’.1
The tableau from San Petronio brings out both the agony and the compassion of
the Deposition: while Joseph tenderly supports the slumped corpse, his expression is oneof deep distress, and even the expression of the dead Christ retains something of thepain of crucifixion. The two Marys offer a further division of response: Mary Magdalen ishunched over in grief, her eyes turned away from the sight of the entombment, but Mary
the mother of Christ stands straight, looking directly and serenely at the figure of her son.
Where Niccolò dell’Arca in around 1463 had presented female members of a pietà scene
as the agonised descendants of classical Furies or Niobids, here it is the male figures who
are most demonstrative in their anguish, with the female mourners subdued by contrast.
By 2010, when the team from Factum Foundation undertook to scan the three doors on
the unfinished façade as part of a larger restoration scheme directed by Cavina Terra Architetti(and carried out by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and the restoration firm Leonardo), thecentral group of Joseph and Jesus was in a state of extreme fragility. Sections of the marble
had denatured and dissolved as a result of time and exposure, a process probably accelerated
by modern airborne pollutants and acid rain, and the arms of Jesus in particular, projectingfrom the main bulk of the statue, were in need of significant consolidation work. Given thesecircumstances, there was extensive discussion at this time as to whether the most deteriorated
statues of the façade should be left in situ or whether they should be brought down from the
façade and exhibited in a museum setting within the church complex. This latter solution
would have allowed the sculptures to be seen up close and at eye-level in a far more controlled
setting, with facsimiles or copies replacing the originals on the front of the Basilica.
The Opificio delle Pietre Dure ultimately decided to preserve Aspertini’s original
sculptures in situ. But the use of copies, far from being radical, is one which has long beenused in church restoration schemes and is deeply embedded in historical practice – one
thinks, for example, of the replicas of the horses from Constantinople that now occupy
1 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors, and architects [1568], eds. Kenneth Clark, Gaston du C. De
Vere and Michael Sonino (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979).

345

THIS PAGE

Amico Aspertini, Deposition of
Christ, lunette above the right-handportal of San Petronio, Bologna,
1526–30.
Detail showing the fractured
left arm.
3D print of Nicodemus/Joseph,with the turban and its locating peg
clearly shown as a separate unit.
OPPOSITE

The Deposition of Christ within the
façade.

the place of the fragile originals on the loggia of San Marco in Venice, or of Viollet-le-Duc
replacing the damaged 13th-century sculptures of the kings of Judah in Notre Dame,decapitated during the French Revolution.
During cleaning it was decided to remove previous restorations from the left armof Jesus in order to safeguard the group, leading to a further difficult decision: whether toreplace the deteriorating stone with a lightweight facsimile, which would place less stresson the fragile upper arm, or whether to reattach the original using a metal pin which
would add to the stress on the marble. Scans made by Factum (using a NUB3D Sidio Pro
3D Scanner, with additional data provided by a Breuckmann Smartscan 3D) provided
the restorers with detailed information to aid them in making this decision. The originalarm was carefully removed and a ‘prosthetic’ acrylic resin arm was made and tested, but
a collective decision was ultimately made by the restoration teams to keep the original

346

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

sculpture on display.This involved reattaching the arm with a visible metal support structure – a solution that, although it avoids the stress which would have been caused by asingle pin, remains aesthetically awkward.
The scan data turned out to be important for condition monitoring sooner than
expected. During the restoration process the right arm of Christ also broke as a resultof the weakness of the stone, resulting in damage to the hand and fingers. Fortunately,as scanning had been carried out before the breakage, the data could be used to informthe reconstruction, and the restored arm was also replaced using a metal exoskeleton.
Although the main aim of the recording was to create an accurate report for monitoring
the condition of the sculptures, the scan data will also provide future restorers with afirm basis from which to replace the damaged original arms with digitally restored facsimiles should they ever wish to do so.
Another place in which scan data has resulted in substantive changes to our knowledge of the sculpture is the turban of Joseph of Arimathea. This is carved as a separate
unit from the head of Joseph and is held in place by a square locating extrusion. The
turban was removed during cleaning and was scanned independently of the sculpture,
allowing both the visible surface and the connecting join to be recorded. Once removed,
it became evident that there were two feasible positions for the headpiece, one with theknot at the front and one with the knot at the back. Following the 1972–79 restoration
campaign the turban was placed with the knot at the front, although the scan data suggests it fits the sculpture better with the knot at the back.
As Amico Aspertini’s Deposition clearly illustrates, the state of an original artworkchanges significantly over time. The choice faced by the restoration team is one faced by all
guardians of buildings and works of art: whether to leave external sculptures in their original location to slowly deteriorate, treating them as objects with a quantifiable life-span, or
whether to preserve the originals and to replace them with replicas (to borrow the opposition presented by Jean Clair in L’hiver de la culture, Paris: Flammarion, 2011).
While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, the fact that objectively accurate facsimiles
are now a possibility makes this choice a more real and immediate one than ever before.

C HOOSI N G A FUTURE FOR AMI CO A S P ERT INI’S D E P O S I TI O N O F CH RI S T

347

RECORDING EMOTION:
NICCOLÒ DELL’ARCA’S LAMENTATIONOVER THE DEAD CHRIST
Tess Tomassini and Guendalina DamoneIn 1260, Raniero Barcobini Fasani, a hermit turned member of the Order of Friars
Minor who was eventually beatified, moved from Perugia to Bologna following theadvice of a chief magistrate (podestà) from the illustrious Bolognese family Orlandini
Marescotti. He arrived with nearly 20,000 followers, established the brotherhood of
the Battuti Bianchi (flagellant monks) and founded a hospital in the city centre to tend
to invalids and pilgrims. The hospital and the brotherhood began operations around
1275 and the small church next to the hospital, previously dedicated to San Vito, soon
became its official chapel and took the name of ‘Church of Life’ thanks to the good
reputation of its doctors. In this way, the hospital, church and oratory of Santa Mariadella Vita were established.
The sculptural group of the Compianto sul Cristo morto (Lamentation over the Dead
Christ) by Niccolò dell’Arca is situated to the right of the sanctuary’s main chapel. This
dramatic depiction of sorrow and death was commissioned by the Battuti Bianchi inaround 1463 and consists of a group of life-sized terracotta figures – the Madonna andthe Three Marys, St John the Apostle and Joseph of Arimathea – weeping over the deadbody of Christ, which is laid out between them ready for deposition in the tomb.
The spectator is instantly struck by the tortured look of the mother of Christ andthe painful scream of Mary Magdalen, who runs into the scene with her clothes flyingout behind her. The extreme realism of the terracotta figures and the ‘petrified scream’
described by Gabriele d’Annunzio1 must have had a deep impact on the users of thehospital, many experiencing their own private grief and loss, and it is even possible thatthe anguish of patients and their relatives influenced Niccolò dell’Arca during the production of the work. But while they may be partly inspired by life, the figures are also
embedded within the visual discourse of contemporary image-making: there is a striking
resemblance between Niccolò dell’Arca’s Mary Magdalen and the two symmetricallydisposed women who animate the central section of the predella in Ercole de’ Roberti’s
Polittico Griffoni, and also between between Niccolò dell’Arca’s Mary of Cleophas and de’
Roberti’s Weeping Mary from the Garganelli Chapel of Saint Peter, now in the Pinacoteca
in Bologna. While most of the statues that make up the Compianto are thought to havebeen made around 1463, it is possible that these two were added later, after the paintingof the Polittico Griffoni predella in 1474.
The fragility of the seven statues led Factum Foundation to record the group in
December 2019. Working at night over the course of a week within the Sanctuary of

OPPOSITE

Mary of Cleophas from Niccolò
dell’Arca’s Lamentation over the Dead
Christ, c. 1463. Church of Santa
Maria della Vita, Bologna.

348

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

1 ‘This Christ will never be forgotten. Was it made from earth? Was it rotting flesh? I didn’t know what the medium
was … The three Marys enraged by suffering, demented by the suffering … Listen to me. Can you imagine the petrified
scream?’ [translated by the authors]. See Gabriele d’Annunzio, Il secondo amante di Lucrezia Buti (1924).

349

THIS PAGE

Otto Lowe recording the
sculptures using photogrammetry.
Pedro Miró using a structured lightscanner to record the statues.
OPPOSITE

Niccolò dell’ Arca, Lamentation overthe Dead Christ, c. 1463.
Pedro Miró recording the
sculptures.

FOLLOWING PAGES

Render of Mary mother of Christ,
produced from photogrammetry
data.
Render of Christ laid out forburial.

Santa Maria della Vita, Factum’s team used an Artec Spyder, a hand-held structured lightscanner, and photogrammetry to record each of the statues. As the figures are fixed to theground and had to be recorded in situ, this two-pronged approach was necessary to minimise the equipment required and reduce the risks associated with working in restricted
spaces. Reality Capture and other specialized software were then used to process thisdata into digital models, and ZBrush was used for organic modelling in places where data
was missing due to the impossibility of accessing the sculptures safely.
While the primary aim of the recording is to provide accurate data for condition
monitoring, it will also facilitate new research into the figures, particularly with regard
350

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

Render of Mary Salome.
Render of St John.
Render of Joseph of Arimathea.
Render of Mary of Cleophas.
Render of Mary Magdalene.

to their original positioning. In the current display the terracotta figures are fixed to theground, with visitors and scholars kept at a safe distance from the group. But now they
have been reproduced in digital form, it is possible for researchers to reposition thegroup of mourners around Christ, moving them both in subtle and in more dramaticways to explore the possibilities of Niccolò dell’ Arca’s work. Digital recording will thus
open up new possibilities for the display of the sculptures – certainly within the virtual
sphere, but perhaps even in the physical space of the sanctuary.

Detail of the predella of
the Polittico Griffoni.

N I C C OLÒ DELL’ ARC A’S L A ME N TATI O N OV E R TH E D E A D CH RI S T

351

352

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

REC ORDI N G EMOTI ON : N I C C OLÒ DELL’ ARC A’ S LAM ENTAT IO N OV ER T H E DEA D CH R IS T

353

354

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

REC ORDI N G EMOTI ON : N I C C OLÒ DELL’ ARC A’ S LAM ENTAT IO N OV ER T H E DEA D CH R IS T

355

356

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

REC ORDI N G EMOTI ON : N I C C OLÒ DELL’ ARC A’ S LAM ENTAT IO N OV ER T H E DEA D CH R IS T

357

358

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

REC ORDI N G EMOTI ON : N I C C OLÒ DELL’ ARC A’ S LAM ENTAT IO N OV ER T H E DEA D CH R IS T

359

St Petronius, the patron saint of Bologna, is easily recognisable in artworks from the model of the cityof Bologna that he holds, complete with the striking silhouette of the due torri. This image presents him
as the guardian of the city, which lies safely nestled in his protecting hand. It is as if the artists in Bologna
were pre-figuring the moment at which the world was removed from the shoulders of Atlas and re-presented
as a hand-held collection of maps.
Petronius was a protector both symbolically and practically. When he arrived in Bologna as bishop in 431,
the city had just been sacked by the Visigoths; he was a notable restorer of buildings, as well as the builderof the Monastery of Santo Stefano. Over a millennium later the saint offered protection to Bologna’s artworks
in a different way: when Napoleon’s forces entered the city in 1796, the inscription above the statue of Gregorio
XIII in Palazzo del Comune was changed to suggest that this was a statue of St Petronius, deterring the invadingarmy from removing the iconic work. Even today, the inscription still mislabels the 16th-century pope as
DIVUS PETRONIUS – PROTECTOR ET PATER.
Perhaps Bologna still has a need for St Petronius in his role as protector, generator and educator. While
the Visigothic threat is long gone, exposure to weather and pollution continues to pose a threat to Bologna’s
fragile cultural heritage, and the twin towers seem more vulnerable than ever in a region with regularseismic activity. Maybe the role of the patron saint is now a socially shared responsibility: a collective duty
to preserve, protect, educate and disseminate the information of our shared cultural heritage in orderto protect the past for future generations.

Tess Tomassini

OPPOSITE

Jacopo della Quercia, statueof St Petronius holding the cityof Bologna, from the lunette above
the central doorway of the Basilica
of San Petronio,1425–38.

360

R E SU RRE C TIN G TH E B OL OG N E S E R ENA ISSA NCE

361

CASE STUDY 2

THE THEBAN NECROPOLISPRESERVATION INITIATIVEWORK IN THE VALLEY
OF THE KINGS, EGYPT

362

363

IMMORTALITY AND BEYOND
Nicholas Reeves

Nicholas Reeves FSA is anarchaeologist and specialist on
the Valley of the Kings and thetomb of Tutankhamun. He has
held curatorial positions at the
British Museum, Eton College
and the Metropolitan Museumof Art, New York.

PREVIOUS PAGE

Colour registered with relief datafrom the Hall of Beauties in the tombof Seti I.
OPPOSITE

Scanning the surface relief ofTutankhamun’s sarcophagus witha NUB3D Studio Scanner, 2009.

364

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

F

actum Arte’s decision to record the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV 62) as a follow-on
from their earlier work of documentation in the tombs of Seti I and Thutmose
III was to prove an archaeological game-changer. The commission came from theEgyptian Government, and would be an ambitious one: to prepare a full-sized replica of
Tutankhamun’s famous monument which might be employed to alleviate tourist pressure
on the fragile original. For most Egyptologists, little interested in copies, the project
scarcely registered.
Factum set to work in 2009, employing a powerful combination of high-definition digital photography and surface scanning: in a bid for greater authenticity, the team
aimed to generate a record not merely of the tomb’s decoration but crucially, as we shallsee, of the walls’ materiality also – the ground on which these paintings sat.
A first glimpse of Factum’s results would be offered by Adam Lowe at a presentationin Luxor that same year. They proved a revelation: his team had achieved a visual recordof Tutankhamun’s burial chamber which was close to perfect – complete, and able toboast consistently well-lit imagery at a level of magnification many times higher than theoriginal. As enlarged, every stroke of the artist’s brush could now clearly be traced; every
correction and emendation seen; every subtle change in the painterly palette noted; and,of course, for the conservator, each and every defect and repair detected. The work set
a completely new and exceptionally high standard in archaeological recording, emphasizing the inadequacy of everything which had gone before.
Five years on from Lowe’s presentation, and with the Tutankhamun replica successfully installed on Luxor’s west bank, adjacent to Howard Carter’s house, Factum’s digitalrecord was made available online. Logging on to their website from my office in New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was not to be disappointed by this extraordinary
new resource. Although located some 10,000 km distant from the Valley of the Kings, I
was able to study the tomb in greater detail than if I were standing in front of the walls
themselves. The online imagery was crystal-clear, and could be manipulated at will, ruminated on at leisure, and returned to again and again for checking as required. What
Factum had produced was a researcher’s dream.
And there was more. Thanks to the scanning component of their survey, Factum’s
online coverage offered a wholly unexpected bonus: at the simple click of a mouse it waspossible to digitally strip away the tomb’s painted scenes in their entirety, to reveal the undecorated physicality of the burial chamber walls beneath – plastered surfaces as they hadlast been seen more than three and a half thousand years before. Here was the tomb as
metaphorical blank canvas – a canvas which, to my astonishment, displayed a network of
undulations and differences in texture clearly referencing the room’s structural history.
This was not better data than Egyptologists had had before; it was completely new data,365

hitherto unnoticed by us all, including the Getty who had spent months and years noseto-wall engaged in cleaning and conservation – unnoticed for the simple reason that
surfacial examination is insufficient to separate ground from colour.
With the benefit of the new Factum scans, these underlying details were now as
visible as archaeological features on a good aerial photograph, and they could be analysedin much the same way. Striking was the presence of lines so precisely vertical that they
could not possibly represent natural faults; nor were they digital artefacts, since theircontours can actually be felt on Factum’s physical recreation of KV 62. The manner inwhich these verticals came together, in fact, seemed to suggest the framing of longblocked doorways; doorways which, by virtue of their size, form and particularly theiralignment to other features within the tomb, gave every indication of being real.
Astonishingly, we seemed to be in the presence of additional chambers: to the west,
what may turn out to be a further, Tutankhamun-era storeroom; to the north, an apparent
continuation of the antechamber ground-plan, which would serve in turn to identify KV 62
as a significantly larger, right-turning corridor tomb – the tomb of a queen. A queen who can

366

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

THIS PAGE

Installing the facsimile in the Valleyof the Kings, 2014.
Javier Barreno putting finishing
touches to the facsimile.
Colour data for the north wallof Tutankhamun’s tomb.
OPPOSITE

Relief data for the north wall of
Tutankhamun’s tomb.
The entrance to the facsimile.

now be identified as Nefertiti, both from the implications of an overwritten cartouche and by the lady’s
facial features in the decoration applied to close off
and camouflage this putative corridor extension; thewall behind which Nefertiti’s burial ought, theoretically, still to lie. Investigations were set in train…
The media response to these proposals
would be immediate and loud – so loud, in fact,that the larger story would be quite drowned out:
the demonstration that Factum’s method of capture and combination of imagery and materiality– the data on which my conclusions were based –represents a fundamental advance in archaeological science. What the Tutankhamun revelations demonstrated was that the potential of
Factum Arte’s recording technique extends far beyond the tourist arena: it is preservation in its purest form. For, come vandalism, theft, terrorism, wars or natural disaster– the fact is that any monument recorded in the manner of Tutankhamun will have theability to rise physically from the ashes; to re-materialize completely whole – and, as experience now shows, with its forensic potential effectively intact.What Factum Arte havedeveloped is nothing less than the technology required to save the archaeological world.
End note. It is to their credit that Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities has acknowledged the importance of this work by facilitating the launch of the Theban Necropolis
Preservation Initiative in collaboration with Factum Foundation and the University ofBasel. This initiative has now equipped and trained seven local people to become scanning experts, and this team is currently engaged in recording the tomb of Seti I in its
entirety. It is exciting to speculate on what might result from this work too – and comforting to know that Seti’s tomb will be joining that (so far select) list of monuments now
destined, in the ancient expression, to ‘live forever’.

IM M O RTA L IT Y A ND B EYO ND

367

THE THEBAN NECROPOLISPRESERVATION INITIATIVE
A collective text by the team from the TNPI and the University of Basel, including: Aliaa Ismail, Adam
Lowe, Susanne Bickel, Carlos Bayod, Elizabeth Mitchell, Silvia Álvarez and Charlotte Skene CatlingF
THIS PAGE

The Egyptian team in the tombof Seti I. Left to right: Inspector
Ashraf Gaber, Mahmoud Abdellah,
Abdo Ghaba, Mahmoud Salem,
Mina Fahim, Amany Hassan, Aliaa
Ismail and Hagar Ahmed.
OPPOSITE

Facsimile of the tomb ofThutmose III, National Museumof Art, Washington, D.C., 2002.

368

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

actum Arte and Factum Foundation have been working in the Valley of the Kings
since 2001, as part of a long-term collaboration with the University of Baselunder the aegis of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. Since 2009, this work
has primarily been carried out through the Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative(TNPI). The TNPI works on conserving and sustaining Egyptian cultural heritage using
non-contact digital technology, with Egyptian staff in charge of all operations on the
ground and external involvement focused on capacity development, training, support
and technology transfer. The aim is to develop a sustainable structure that will help the
Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities to preserve the Valley of the Kings for future generations while encouraging tourism to Luxor and the West Bank. In 2019, the Initiative
received the official patronage of the Egyptian National Commission for UNESCO.
Following Factum Arte’s initial survey of the tomb of Seti I in 2001 and a projectin 2002 to build a replica of the tomb of Thutmose III (for a touring exhibition startingat the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), Factum Foundation was formed in2009 to record the tomb of Tutankhamun. At that time, about 1,000 visitors entered
this 3000-year-old tomb chamber each day, bringing with them humidity, heat anddust which posed (and still pose) a major threat to the integrity of the painted walls.
The Foundation’s team used a custom-built scanner to record the walls and the red
granite sarcophagus with its broken lid,
subsequently making this data public
so that conservators would be able tomonitor the condition of the tomb andscholars study its surfaces in detail. The
Foundation also made a facsimile – asuggestion first made in 1988 by Erik
Hornung and Theodor Abt from theSociety of Friends of the Royal Tombs
in Egypt – which was installed in 2014next to Carter’s House at the entrance
to the Valley of the Kings. The facsimile
and associated exhibition have been
open to the public since 2014, allowing
visitors to experience both original andfacsimile in one location, and to reflect
on the problems of preserving sites
whose original builders never intended
them to be visited.
369

STOPPELAËRE HOUSE: THE RESTORATION
OF THE BUILDING AND THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE 3D SCANNING,
ARCHIVING AND TRAINING CENTRE

T

THIS PAGE

Detail of Hassan Fathy’sarchitecture.
OPPOSITE

Restoring the roof and domes.
The restored building, with renderof a projected sign for the Centre.

370

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

his prominent mudbrick building at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings was
designed by architect Hassan Fathy in the 1950s and was restored in 2017 by
Tarek Waly using traditional methods; in exchange for funding the restoration,
Factum Foundation was granted free use of the building for 10 years as the home of the
3D Scanning, Archiving and Training Centre. This centre was opened by Irene Bokova,
the former Director General of UNESCO, in February 2017. At time of going to press,
Stoppelaëre House had just been shortlisted for the ICCROM-Sharjah 2019 ‘Award forgood practices in cultural heritage conservation and management in the Arab Region’.
The sharing of skills is a core element of the TNPI’s work. The model has alreadyled to the training of a team of specially selected local residents, the majority of whomare employees of the Ministry of Antiquities. The training is led by Aliaa Ismail, who
has developed an initial three-month training module, based in Stoppelaëre House andfocused on the skills needed to work on fragile heritage sites. At the end of this intensecourse, trainees are capable of operating, assembling and maintaining the scanners, planning the scanning work in the tomb, processing and archiving the data and ensuring that
it is delivered to the Documentation Centre in the Ministry of Antiquities. The team in
Luxor are supported by remote access from Madrid and assisted by visiting specialists
from Factum Foundation and Factum Arte.
The preservation of cultural heritage
will always be largely dependent on the interest and sense of ownership of local communities, and recording ventures like thishave the potential to contribute substantiallyto the local economy. Members of the local
community who are working with Factum in
Luxor are extremely capable and know how
to work with technology with limited accessto resources and infrastructure. The TNPI ismaking available the technologies and skills
which will allow them to preserve and makedecisions as effectively as possible. This recording project is resulting in a significant
archive of high-resolution data that is stored
locally, owned by the Ministry of Antiquities
and made accessible globally to further preservation, knowledge and research.
371

THE RECORDING
OF THE TOMB OF SETI I

I

n 2016, the TNPI and Factum Foundation embarked on the complete recording of
the tomb of Seti I, including all fragments and other objects that were still part of thetomb at the time of its initial excavation by Giovanni Battista Belzoni in 1817. In 2016,
work began to record the internal space of the tomb as it is today, using a LiDAR scanner,the Lucida 3D Scanner, photogrammetry and panoramic photography. This work is ongoing with an entirely Egyptian team, almost all from the West Bank in Luxor. Once therecording of Seti’s tomb and all of its fragments is complete, the local team will be able
to transfer the skills they have learnt to other projects within the Valley of the Kings andelsewhere in Egypt.
In October 2017, on the bicentenary of Belzoni’s initial excavations, the first facsimiles of the tomb were shown at the Antikenmuseum in Basel within the exhibition
Scanning Seti: The Regeneration of a Pharaonic Tomb. The exhibition included facsimiles ofthe Hall of Beauties and Pillared Hall J as well as a further, interpretative recreationof the Hall of Beauties as it might have looked in 1817, based on the watercolours
made for Belzoni by Alessandro Ricci. Scanning Seti demonstrated that objects and

THIS PAGE

Panoramic photography in the
Sarcophagus Room.
OPPOSITE

Carlos Bayod and Aliaa Ismail
recording in the tomb with Lucida
3D Scanners, 2016.

372

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

373

Hundreds of overlapping highresolution photographs of theceiling of the Sarcophagus Roomare automatically stitched together
using PTGui software. This is
the first stage of a process which
combines software and humanskill to create high-resolution
panoramas.
Recording in the tomb.

cultural sites are dynamic and not static things, which can change from one century
to the next in both material composition and geographical location. For the first timein 200 years, the exhibition made it possible for Seti’s sarcophagus and many of thetomb’s fragments to be seen (as originals and in facsimile form) alongside chambers
from the tomb from which they were removed. Visitors could inspect the details of thesarcophagus’ fine carvings and gain new understanding of the profound ways in whichconservation can affect the appearance of an artefact by comparing the different appearances of fragments that have been conserved in different places at different times.
It is arguable that by some measures at least, the facsimiles of Scanning Seti offeredviewers a more complete understanding of the tomb as it is today than they would haveacquired from a visit to the tomb itself.
374

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

The TNPI’s ongoing work will result in a facsimile of the tomb of Seti that will beeven more complete than that shown in Basel, incorporating many more of the fragmentsfrom the tomb; the eventual full facsimile will be the largest and most elaborate evermade. It is a sad irony that the love for cultural heritage is contributing to the destructionof the very things it fetishises, but facsimiles like this one offer visitors an alternative
option, allowing them to engage with the present materiality of a pharaonic tomb, to understand its complex history, and to invest in its uncertain future, all with no detrimental
effects to the tomb itself.

Recording progress: panoramiccolour photography.
Recording progress: Lucida
3D scanning.
Recording progress:
photogrammetry.
Relief data for the same sectionof the Hall of Beauties asshown on p. 362.
Colour data from the Hallof Beauties.

TH E R ECO R DING O F T H E TO M B O F S ET I I

375

THE SARCOPHAGUS OF SETI I:
RECORDING AND RE-MATERIALISATIONThe Sarcophagus of oriental alabaster, was found in the centre of the hall, withouta cover, which had been removed and broken, and the body that had once occupied
this superb coffin, had been carried away. We were not, therefore, the first who
had profanely entered this mysterious mansion of the dead.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni in The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808–26,
vol. 14 (1821), chap. 4, ‘Geography’, 358.

On 16 October 1817, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a 6’7” engineer and former
strongman, discovered the rock-cut tomb of Seti I, the most magnificent andcomplete in the Valley of the Kings. For 3,100 years this tomb had remainedin almost the same condition as on the day it was sealed. As few contemporaries could
travel to Egypt, Belzoni made a facsimile of his spectacular find and brought it toLondon. The relief surface was cast from moulds made on site, removing much of theoriginal colour and fabric in the process.The casts were then painted by hand, following
the meticulous watercolour records made on site by Belzoni and Alessandro Ricci. The
facsimile caused a sensation when it opened at the Egyptian Halls on Piccadilly in1821, and the following year was described in detail in Alfred Thornton’s Don Juan in
London, accompanied by a colour engraving of the gas-lit interior which had fascinatedfashionable Londoners.
Belzoni acquired Seti’s sarcophagus and transported it to London, where John
Soane eventually bought it in 1824 after the British Museum had declined the chance topurchase it. It is still displayed in the crypt of Sir John Soane’s Museum, under glass, whichmakes it difficult to examine the delicate carvings (or Belzoni’s name graffitied into thefoot of the sarcophagus, a very visible ‘scar’). The stone was white when it arrived andis now honey-coloured, stained by the 19th- and early 20th-century London smog. The
blue infill that originally delineated the carving fell out or was scrubbed away by over-enthusiastic cleaning. Now only traces of the blue remain, and most are 19th-century.

FLESH-EATING STONEOPPOSITE

Finishing the facsimile.

376

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

Decay and change are inherent in the idea of a ‘sarcophagus’: literally a ‘flesh eater’, it
protects the body and the soul during their most vulnerable transformation. The sarcophagus of Seti I contains the protective figure of the goddess Nut on the base and thehieroglyphic text of The Book of Gates on both its inside and outside surfaces; this describes the Sun God’s complex journey after death, through the ‘dark hours of the sun’to his rejuvenation each morning.
377

RECORDING AND RE-MATERIALISING THE SARCOPHAGUS
Archaeologists and geologists use the term alabaster differently. ‘Oriental alabaster’ is afine-grained, banded calcite (rather than the geologists’ gypsum), with a low index of refraction, allowing light to penetrate several millimeters into the stone before it is scattered
back out. This causes the ethereal translucency that makes it so desirable – but also makes
it almost impossible to scan with a laser. Factum tried and failed to scan the shape, colour
and surface of the sarcophagus in 2001. The scanning was part of a conference basedaround Factum’s work in the tomb of Seti I that took place in Sir John Soane’s Museum,organised by Michael Mallinson from the University of Cambridge and Dr Gaballah Ali
Gaballah, the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities at the time. Using a Modelmaker scanner(made by 3D Scanners UK) the recording was a failure as the translucent alabaster resulted in a high level of noise in the data. In 3D scanning, the relationship between noise
and information is critical. In this case the artefacts in the data exceeded the accurate
information, making the data meaningless. It took 14 years and a different approach torecord this enigmatic but fundamentally important object.
In 2016, a second attempt was made, funded by Jeffrey and Veronica Berman. A
multi-disciplinary team made up of engineers, photographers, cartographers, sculptors,
specialist printers and restorers took part in the challenge of recording the sarcophagus
and then fabricating a facsimile. This time the recording was done using photogrammetry
and a specially designed camera rig with integrated lighting. Over 5,000 photographs
were taken and processed with RealityCapture software (the only photogrammetry software available at that time capable of processing this number of high-resolution images).
The outcome was a 3D file of over 12 billion polygons: vast, unwieldy, and impossible tohandle in one piece. Factum’s 3D studio ingeniously transformed the data and, using bothphotogrammetry and topographic mapping software, separated the sarcophagus surface

378

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

THIS PAGE

Recording Seti’s sarcophagus in
Sir John Soane’s Museum using
photogrammetry, 2016.
OPPOSITE

Silvia Álvarez working on thefacsimile of Seti’s sarcophagus.
3D render of the sarcophagus.

from its undulating form. The form was milled into a polyurethane block while the surface was distorted into a flat
plane for elevated printing.
The printed surface of the sarcophagus was built
up in 5-micron color layers of UV cured resin by Océ - A
Canon Company. Once printed in relief and colour, thesurface was mapped back onto the curvilinear structureand glued into its final position.
This process of re-materialisation was experimental
from the outset and modifications were improvised as
new difficulties were discovered. The facsimile of the sarcophagus of Seti I is an object with its own visual qualities,
and in the same way that plaster casts were valued as objects with unique qualities and scientific value, so the sarcophagus has become more thanan imitation. It is an object of wonder and excitement that reveals the evidence of thepast through the technologies of the present.
A monograph entitled Sir John Soane’s Greatest Treasure: The Sarcophagus of Seti I by
John Taylor and Helen Dorey was published to accompany the exhibition Egypt Uncovered:
Belzoni and the Tomb of Pharaoh Seti I (October 2017 – April 2018). The virtual 3D modelof the sarcophagus was displayed alongside the fragments of the lid in their 19th-century mounts made by Joseph Bonomi. All the fragments of the lid were also recorded byFactum’s team.
Using the knowledge that has been developed, it is now possible to carry out a digital
restoration, based on Joseph Gandy’s watercolours, to show how the sarcophagus looked
when it first arrived in England. Hopefully this innovative approach to the study of the past
will reveal why the object looks as it does now, and possibly why it aged as it did.

T H E S A R CO P H AG U S O F S ET I I

379

RECORDING FRAGMENTS IN EGYPT AND
IN COLLECTIONS AROUND THE WORLDIOPPOSITE

Two panels removed from thesame doorway within the tomb,
now in the Museo Archeologico
Nazionale, Florence (left) andthe Musée du Louvre (right). The
panels have been subject to very
different conservation choices.

n the years following the discovery of the tomb of Seti I, large sections of the decorations were removed from the walls. Hundreds of fragments are now in the collections of museums across the world. Others were left in and around the tomb, someremoved by the ‘excavators’ and others from general damage; there are indications thatthe first ceiling in the sarcophagus room had collapsed. In recent years, over 8,000
fragments have been found inside the tomb itself or in the rubble deposited outside it.
The work has been done by a team from the University of Basel under the direction of
Susanne Bickel and Florence Mauric-Baberio. The recording of all of these fragments
is a fundamental part of the collaborative effort by the Theban Necropolis Preservation
Initiative to document the complete tomb in its current condition, including all thefragments in museum collections and all those that are currently stored in the nearby
tomb of Ramesses X. This will result in a complete digital restoration and hopefullya facsimile that will communicate the importance and spectacular nature of the tomband its painted relief carving.
Since 2016, Factum Foundation has recorded fragments in the Boston Museum ofFine Arts, the Louvre in Paris, the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin,
the British Museum and Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Griffith Institute in
Oxford, the Archaeological Museums in Bologna and Florence and in a private collection. Most of these fragments were removed from the tomb soon after its excavation anddocumentation by Belzoni, Champollion, Rosellini and other well-known figures fromthe early history of Egyptology. Over the intervening 200 years they have undergonevery different treatment at the hands of their new custodians. Two large relief-carved
door frames that were situated in corridor G, at the exit from the room containing
the Book of Gates, show this clearly. The first, now in the collection of the Florence
Archaeological Museum, has a profoundly different colour palette and surface characterfrom its matching pair in the Louvre, the result of different choices made by conservators at the two institutions during restorations that took place in the 1930s and 1990s
respectively.
In the Valley of the Kings the excavations carried out at the entrance to the adjacent tomb of Ramesses X (KV 18) between 1998 and 2005 have brought to lightthousands of fragments of different sizes that can all be traced to the tomb of Seti.
Many other fragments, often large and with colour, were found in the tomb itself whenrubble was cleared from some of the rooms. The fragments are currently in storage
awaiting recording in colour and 3D. In 2015 the Supreme Council of Antiquities authorised analysis of this material, and the high-resolution 3D and colour recording ofthese fragments is scheduled to start in early 2020. This is one of the main goals of the381

Recording a fragment at theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Currently, fragments have tobe pieced together manuallyin order to determine their
original configuration. The digitalrecordings of the fragments will
make it possible to undertake thispuzzling process without risk to
the originals.

Tarek Waly. It is now proposed that this will be accompanied by the complete facsimileof Seti I’s tomb, along with workshops where further facsimiles can be produced. This
will become a new visitor attraction and it will generate a self-sustaining economy forthe local community.

LIST OF FRAGMENTS RECORDED OUTSIDE OF EGYPT
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Inv. no. 72.645ab; 300 x 200 mm
Inv. no. 72.646; 70 x 80 mm
Inv. no. 72.647; 160 x 140 mm
Inv. no. 72.649; 220 x 150 mm
Inv. no. 72.650; 100 x 40 mm
Inv. no. 72.651; 130 x 100 mm
Inv. no. 72.653; 180 x 180 mm
Inv. no. 72.661; 90 x 120 mm

Inv. no. EA884 (Side B); 490 x 210 mm
Inv. no. EA5602; 240 x 180 mm
Inv. no. EA5603; 250 x 240 mm
Inv. no. EA5604; 110 x 70 mm
Inv. no. EA5605; 130 x 100 mm
Inv. no. EA5606; 100 x 180 mm
Inv. no. EA5608; 280 x 200 mm
Inv. no. EA5610; 250 x 380 mm
Inv. no. EA35499; 80 x 110 mm
Inv. no. EA35500; 50 x 80 mm
Sarcophagus lid fragments:
Inv. no. EA37928; 100x 160 mm
Inv. no. EA29948; 350 x 240 mm
Inv. no. EA37927; 120 x 140 mm

Musée du Louvre, Paris
Inv. no. B7; 2260 x1050 mm

TNPI and the 3D Scanning, Training and Archiving Centre at Stoppelaëre House forthe coming months. The aim is to build a complete record of these pieces that can beused in a digital restoration.
The recordings will allow the Basel team to piece together the fragments, reconstructing damaged sections of the walls and making it possible to visualise elements ofthe tomb which have suffered from the effects of time, archaeology, and tourism. Overthe past few years the team has been analysing and re-assembling some of the fragments
found inside the tomb. The fragments themselves will be safely stored but in facsimile
form they can assist in the study and understanding of the tomb. Several of the pillar faces
in the upper part of the sarcophagus room have already been reassembled to a considerable extent. It is hoped that as more fragments are recorded, they will provide insights
into the ceiling of the sarcophagus room and lead to a better understanding of the complex history of this vast chamber. Factum Foundation, through ARCHiVe (the centre for
the Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice) is committed to assisting withthe computer visualisations that will help with the study and re-integration of these fragments, facilitating a better understanding of the tomb for both scholars and the generalpublic. The re-integration of the fragments into the facsimile will result in an exact copythat is more complete than the original, incorporating all the elements. Such a facsimile
will lead to a deeper understanding of the tomb, the texts it contains and the prospects
for their long-term preservation.
The long-term goal of the Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative was always to establish a visitor centre on the Ministry-owned land between Carter’s Houseand Stoppelaëre House. The first stages of this ambitious project have already beenachieved; the facsimile of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber was installed in May 2014
and the full restoration of Stoppelaëre House was completed under the direction of382

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

Ägyptisches Museum undPapyrussammlung, Berlin
Inv. no. ÄM 2058; 2610 x 880 mm
Inv. no. ÄM 2079; 1050 x 530 mm
Inv. no. ÄM 2079; 1060 x 540 mm

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
In addition to the main sarcophagus, 18
fragments of the sarcophagus lid havebeen recorded. Two are presented in a
glass case while the others are set into
plaster and housed in four wooden caseswith glass protection designed by Joseph
Bonomi the Younger.

Museo Archeologico Nazionale,
Florence
Seti and Hathor; 2350 x 1030 mm
Maat; 740 x 470 mm
British Museum, London
Inv. no. EA855 (Side A); 1660 x 630 mm
Inv. no. EA855 (Side B); 1660 x 200 mm
Inv. no. EA884 (Side A); 490 x 400 mm

Museum of Archaeology, Bologna
8 Shabtis from Seti’s tomb have beenrecorded.

Ongoing research is bringing new fragments to light – one was recently recorded atGallery Eberstein in Paris and another has been located through a dealer in London. The
aim is to create a database of all existing fragments and to keep updating it as new pieces
emerge.

R ECO R DING F R AG M ENT S IN EG YP T

383

THIS PAGE

Facsimile of an early Twelfth
Dynasty funerary garden recently
excavated at Dra Abu el-Naga inLuxor. The facsimile can be seenin place of the original garden,
which has been reburied in orderto preserve it – it is only thesecond Egyptian funerary garden
to be excavated, and the first toreceive proper archaeologicaldocumentation. Installed 2020.
OPPOSITE

Facsimile of a funerary stele
from the entrance to the tombof Djehuty in Luxor, madefor the Consejo Superior deInvestigaciones Científicas anddisplayed outside the Templode Debod, Madrid.

384

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

385

CONCLUSION
Adam Lowe

Adam Lowe is the Director of
Factum Arte and the founder ofFactum Foundation for Digital
Technology in Conservation.

PREVIOUS PAGE

Facsimiles of two paintingsby Bartolomé Esteban Murillo,
The Miracle of the Fish and Bread(1669–70) and Moses Drawing
Water from the Rock (1669–70),
each measuring 236 x 575 cm.
Recorded in the Instituto Andaluz dePatrimonio Histórico, Seville, 2018.
OPPOSITE

Rafa Rachewsky working on thefacsimile of The Sacrifice at Lystra,
one of the Cartoons by Raphaelrecorded by Factum at the Victoria
and Albert Museum, London, 2020.
The Cartoons have been loaned
from the Royal Collection by Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

388

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVEAlva Noë writes about ek-stase – the breaking of stasis. As ideas find a way to move
there is a real sense of excitement and potential. Paul Valéry wrote about thisand is quoted by Walter Benjamin predicting a real change in what we consider
and how we value art. But in the 85 years since Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the aura has become like a new iconostasis – afixed barrier of images that separates the sacred domain from the public space. Techne(the practical act of making or doing rather than an understanding based on theoreticalabstractions) once again replaces a notion of art for art’s sake, emphasising the work thatis needed to give the work of art meaning.
The essays and reflections in this book aim to chart a new space for debate anddiscussion. They span a decade, from Richard Powers’ writing about the facsimile of
Veronese’s Wedding at Cana written in 2009 to Mari Lending, writing at the very endof 2019, renegotiating the relationship between the original and the copy, or Hartwig
Fischer addressing the issues of the responsibilities that museums face. Over this time,
the team from Factum Arte and Factum Foundation has been working collectively andin a way that dissolves professional compartmentalisation, re-evaluates value and sets ananachronic agenda for the things that are important in human communication – understanding, empathy and sharing are among the most important. Celebrity, fixed notions oforiginality and the art market need to move aside.
High-resolution recording of the surface, colour and structure of things is leading
to a new digital connoisseurship, just as medical imaging is reshaping our understandingof health and its treatment. It is providing access to the thought processes and decisions
made by people who have lived at different times, with different social structures, different gods, different philosophical frameworks, different value systems and different
ideas about the way materials combine and become articulate objects. When concepts
are divorced from physical evidence they tend to disperse. Thoughts and ideas need tofind their form. They are always rooted in their time but accessible to those who take thetime to look, listen and question.
When our own prejudices prevent us from looking and when we fail to embrace
the technologies at hand that allow us an intimacy and time to reflect, objects remainmute. Sharing is critical and issues of data ownership, access and long-term archiving
all need addressing. While there is a growing interest in applying digital technologies tothe preservation of cultural heritage, this is often dismissed as an expensive luxury. Six
billion euros were spent on the construction of the MO.S.E. (MOdulo Sperimentale
Elettromeccanico) to protect Venice, even though its eventual impact on the preservation of the lagoon is less than clear. The MO.S.E. should have been completed in
2011. It is still unfinished and has never been used. Compared to this level of expense,
389

OPPOSITE

3D and colour +3D data for tiled
surfaces from the Casa de Pilatos,
Seville, recorded 2018.

the application of recording and analytic technology for preservation is a drop in theocean. If a fraction of this money had been spent on infrastructure, equipment, skilled
operators, archiving the data, and understanding how to disseminate it, Venice’s futurewould still be fragile, but we would understand it and the perils it faces a lot better.
Hopefully in the future we will be able to make informed and often difficult decisions
with a collective understanding.
The return of the 16 physical panels from the Polittico Griffoni to Bologna, where
they will be seen together for the first time since 1725, is a reason to celebrate. Seeing
them as both original tempera paintings and as physical facsimiles, alongside an exhibition about the impact of digital technology on preservation, is also something tocelebrate. This publication is not intended as a definitive or coherent thesis. It is a positional document based around the thoughts of many people, as well as Factum’s work
to map out some of the changes required to reframe our thoughts on the importanceand purpose of recording and reproduction. The digital revolution is ushering in analternative way of thinking that is accumulative rather than sequential – it builds up
like a 3D print rather than flashing before our eyes like a film. Perhaps the old dualities– analogue/digital, authentic/fake, virtual/physical, original/copy, Art/Science – arenot really so useful in this context.
Digital natives need to seize the opportunity and think as imaginatively as Paul
Valéry about what happens next. In a world without electricity there would be no accessto digital data. It’s not impossible to imagine. As all the data being generated and stored
dissipates, what form will our memory take? In a Jurassic Park scenario we can extract
the DNA of a dinosaur from a mosquito, but will today’s digital depositories survive thetest of time? Digital microfilm and data stored as laser-etched glass can survive without
electricity, but it will take political will to ensure secure archives with a significant life
expectancy, just as it will take dramatic social change to address the issues of climatechange. Preservation of our environment and our culture is possible if it is prioritised
and if there is a will to preserve.

FOLLOWING PAGES

Render of the Sepulchre of
Cardinal Tavera by Alonso
Berruguete, 1552, Hospital
Tavera, Toledo, Spain. The
Sepulchre is currently undergoingrematerialisation as a facsimile
for the Auckland Project, Bishop
Auckland, UK.
Renders of a 3D sculpture after
Giulio Romano’s Disegno per una
brocca a forma di delfino (Design
for a ewer in the form of a dolphin),part of an ongoing project tocreate 3D sculptures in silver
based on designs by artists of the
Cinquecento.

390

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

CO NCL U S IO N

391

392

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

CO NCL U S IO N

393

394

T HE T H E B AN N E C ROP OL IS P RE S E RVAT IO N INIT IAT IVE

CO NCL U S IO N

395

Tradition is not the worship of ashes
but the preservation of fire
Attributed to both Thomas More and Gustav Mahler

CO NCL U S IO N

397

Silvana Editoriale
Direction
Dario Cimorelli
Art director
Giacomo Merli
Editorial coordinator
Sergio Di Stefano
Copy editor
Emanuela Di Lallo
LayoutDaniela Meda
Production coordinator
Antonio Micelli
Editorial assistants
Ondina Granato, Giulia Mercanti
Photo editors
Alessandra Olivari, Silvia Sala
Press office
Lidia Masolini, press@silvanaeditoriale.it
All reproduction and translationrightsreserved for all countries© 2020 Silvana Editoriale S.p.A.,
Cinisello Balsamo, Milano© 2020 Factum Foundation, Madrid
Under copyright and civil law this volume
cannot be reproduced, wholly or in part,in any form, original or derived, or by any means:print, electronic, digital, mechanical, including
photocopy, microfilm, film or any other medium,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Silvana Editoriale S.p.A.
via dei Lavoratori, 78
20092 Cinisello Balsamo, Milano
tel. 02 453 951 01
fax 02 453 951 51
www.silvanaeditoriale.it
Reproductions, printing and binding in Italy
Printed by Grafiche Peruzzo, Mestrino (Padua)in March 2020