The Christ figure in the center rests across the lap of the Virgin Mary, supported on the left by Mary Magdalen. Behind and above, supporting the Christ is a figure believed to represent Nicodemus and to bear the face of Michelangelo himself. At some point, Michelangelo decided for unknown reasons to break off parts of the statue. He then abandoned it, and shortly before his death permitted one of his students, Tiberio Calcagni, to repair the statue. Identifying and separating each phase of the statue's life is of paramount interest to the art historian, and crucial to divining Michelangelo's original intent and his purpose in breaking his work.
Various considerations limit the historian's ability to study the statue by traditional means.
Access to it is restricted, so even those researchers able to travel to Florence may not have the time or freedom they need to study it. A sufficiently-detailed 3D model would transcend all these problems, allowing a researcher to examine the statue at his leisure from any viewpoint, to add or remove parts, and to analyze it using computational techniques impossible in reality. All these considerations combined to convince Dr. Wasserman that a digital model would be a valuable tool for his research. To that end, we decided to restrict ourselves to inexpensive cameras and computers for both the scanning and analysis of our data. We specifically chose to develop a scanning method based on inexpensive hardware.