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Digital Art
An artist, an old man alive with religious fervour and glittering genius, takes a hammer and tries to destroy his last, as yet, uncompleted statue. Why? No-one knows. The mystery and the repaired statue had survived 450 years. Now science and the tenacity of one art historian, may go some way towards unlocking the secrets of Michaelangelo's "Florentine Pieta". "It is impossible to speak of its beauty and its sorrow - of the grieving and sad faces of them all - especially the afflicted mother. It is a rare thing and one of the most laborious works he has yet done." Ascanio Condivi, Michaelangelo's biographer, 1553. What made Michaelangelo destroy his work only two years later. Nobody knows. His servant stopped him and an unknown sculptor repaired and finished the statue. Today the "Florentine Pieta" which can be seen in the museum of the Cathedral in Florence, has become the focus of a remarkable collaboration between IBM scientists and Renaissance Art Historian, Jack Wasserman.
The sculpture consists of a group of four larger than life figures carved from a single block of marble. The proportion and detail of the work are curious - some parts suspiciously small - others excessively elongated. The figure of Christ has a broken arm and the absence of the left leg remains a mystery. What did the statue look like before Michaelangelo, then in his seventies, tried to destroy it? By re-constructing the statue with IBM technology, Dr. Wasserman hopes to unveil more about it's history. It is thought that Michaelangelo intended the "Pieta" to be his tomb monument.
IBM researchers used a special digital camera to capture the "Pieta's" shape and colour. The six lenses takes six photo's from slightly different points of view, while projecting a light pattern onto the statue's surface. From these photos, a computer alga-rhythm inside the camera computes the exact distance to the surface to re-construct the image and replicate fine detail. IBM Scientists believe this type of process will become more prevalent in the future.
"In the future, we believe that 3D graphics is going to play an increasingly important role in many areas of electronic commerce, including the home market and the Internet. Techniques for handling very large bodies of data and producing very high quality images from them, are still lacking", agues Joshua Mittleman. To build a near perfect 3D digital replica of the "Pieta", researchers took nearly 700 overlapping photographs. New hardware and software had to be developed to manage the enormous amount of data. With a grid of laser beams projected on the statue, the scientists were ableto align all these pictures, or individual digital patches into a single computer model. This method helps to protect the statue in the most extensive way. "It's the unique combination of these two techniques", says Holly Rushmeir," where we use the multi-view to get the overall shape and then we're adding to it the photo-metric technique to get fine detail and to get accurate colours".
"We hope that in the consumer electronics market, the consumer with a simple hand-held device, will be able to record 3D models, store them on his computer, display them on his computer, perhaps use them to build new worlds, very much like the sound-sampling techniques today, continues Joshua Mittleman. "3D sampling techniques could be used so that anybody could build his own virtual world." As work on the statue has continued, many of Dr. Wasserman's hypotheses have been proved correct. It appears that his conjecture that the statue was meant to be viewed from below, makes sense. The perspective for the viewer on the ground makes Michaelangelo's strange proportions, seem correct. As for the other mysteries, who knows? I mean, will we ever really know why Michaelangelo destroyed this magnificent and personal piece of work. He used his own face on the character of Nicodemus. Perhaps one tiny clue resides in his deathbed words. "I regret that I am dying as I am beginning to learn the alphabet of my profession". Contacts
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How does an art historian study and de-construct a 2,5 meter high marble statue when he cannot
move it or take it apart. Well, he goes to IBM, who develop a comprehensive 3D digital model of the statue. Art and technology have combined in the search for the secrets of Michaelangelo's "Florentine Pieta".
Unprecedented in scope, more than two billion bits of data have been captured - far more than
today's ordinary desktop computers can handle, to build a digital 3D replica of the statue. Scientists
say that some day soon, everyday PC's will be powerful enough to allow users to view such large
images. This study, the brainchild of Dr. Wasserman, is shedding new light on the mysteries the
"Florentine Pieta".
"The technology is very very important", explains Dr Jack Wasserman . "It's a new technology that's beginning to develop now. It's a new way of examining works of art and examining statues that we didn't have before and the technology can help me in several ways. One is to create an image on the computer that's a constant image for convenience, so that it can be studied, carefully, without having to return constantly to the statue itself. But more important, is that it can help me solve problems. For example, why Michaelangelo tried to destroy the statue? One of the things we would like to do, is take the repaired parts away, which you can't do in reality because it would destroy the statue, and see what the statue was like after the parts were removed. We would then see what Michaelangelo saw after he destroyed the statue."
"Today, 3D graphics are becoming more and more popular on the Internet", explains Gabriel Taubin. " Using the Internet, you have the need not only to transmit 3D data, you need to create the data, which is more complex and time-consuming, so we believe that the technology that we will develop as a result of this project will be of great use in that environment."
"The proportions, as we see the statue today, seem distorted", continues Jack Wasserman, " which means that he may have wanted to place it at a certain height. To try to raise a statue today, which weighs many tons to various heights, would be impossible, but on the computer, one can do it very very easily - one can place it up - push it back and one can see whether the proportions would be adjusted at certain heights."
