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The Digital Sculpture Project: Credits


Digital Sculpture Project Director:

3D Technologies:

Web Design:

Sponsors:

Institutional Sponsor:

Corporate Partners:

University Partners:

We thank the following scholars for permission to post digital versions of their publications:

We express special thanks to the collaborators who helped us with the following specific projects:

Augustus of Prima Porta Project: We are grateful to Prof. Martin Boss, Director of the Antikensammlung of the University of Erlangen, for permission to scan the cast of the statue in his collection. The work of 3D data capture and modeling was done by Dip.-Ing. Christiane Bathow of Breuckmann GmbH. We thank her and Dr. rer. nat. Bernd Breuckmann for their many important contributions to this project. The polychromy of the statue was digitally restored by Svyatoslav Gerasymchuk and Matthew Brennan. We are grateful to both for their collaboration. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Prof. Paolo Liverani, the world's leading expert on the statue, for his encouragement and support throughout this project. We thank Prof. Giovanni Verri and Prof. Ulderico Santamaria for the new polychromy studies they undertook on the original in the Vatican, whose results they kindly shared with Prof. Liverani and with our modeling team. Prof. Liverani was our main advisor for creating Model 2; Prof. Verri for Model 3. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the project by the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant nr. HD-51022: "New Digital Tools For Adding Polychromy to Digital Models of Sculpture").

Caligula Project: We express our thanks to the Dr. Peter Schertz, Jack and Mary Ann Frable Curator of Ancient Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and to Dr. Kathy Gillis, Head of Objects Conservation, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, for permission to scan and study the statue in their museum as part of the overall project entitled "Creating a 'Total Environment' for the 'Caligula' in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA)." Direct Dimensions, Inc. was responsible for 3D data capture, modeling, and digital restoration of the statue. We express our gratitude to President and Chief Engineer Michael Raphael for his strong support of a project and to Production Manager Peter Kennedy and Engineer Greg Chaprnka for scanning the statue. We also express special kudos to Industrial Designer Jason Page and Digital Modeler Eric Hall for their painstaking and brilliant work of digital restoration. Matthew Brennan modified the reconstruction model produced by Direct Dimensions to create alternative reconstructions necessitated by the overall research project. Jack Roebuck provided the elegant web design. The major responsibility for archaeological oversight and verification of the digital restoration of the statue fell to Prof. Mark Abbe, to whom we owe an enormous debt of gratitude. We are grateful to the many contributions of Dr. Kathy Gillis on matters of conservation of the statue. Important contributions on archaeological matters arising during the restoration were made by the following members of the scholarly team that collaborated in the overall project of reinterpreting the statue: Prof. Paolo Liverani, Prof. Jan Stubbe Østergaard, Prof. Eric Varner, and Prof. John Pollini. Prof. Maria Grazia Picozzi made brilliant archival discoveries that made it possible to locate the find spot of the statue in the 19C and to trace its history thereafter. Professors Vasily Rudich and Steven Fine studied the reception of the portrait of Caligula in antiquity. Dr. Peter Schertz investigated the reputation and image of Caligula in modern times. This research and the related project of digital scanning, modeling, and restoration was made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (nr. RZ-51221).

Dresden Project: We are grateful to Dr. Moritz Woelk, Director of the Department of Sculpture, Dresden State Museums, for permission to scan statues and casts in his collection. We thank Thomas Wurzer (FARO Europe GmbH & Co. KG) and Bernd Breuckmann (Breuckmann GmbH) for their sharing of scanning equipment. For their help with all matters, practical and scientific, we express our gratitude to Kordelia Knoll and Jürgen Lange of the Conservation Department of the Dresden State Museums. We owe a debt of gratitude to Klaus Werner, Musei Capitolini (Rome), for having promoted the idea of a project involving our Laboratory and the Dresden State Museums. Finally, we acknowledge a special debt to Direct Dimensions for the many contributions it generously made to the project, including solving technical problems in processing the raw scan data and aligning the individual models of fragments so that the pre-1894 appearance of "Alexander" and "Pan-Nymph" could be digitally restored.

Epicurus Project: The digitization and reconstruction of Epicurus' portrait statue is a project in collaboration with the TECHLab at the University of Florence. The 3D scanning was performed by Alessandro Spinetti, Carlo Atzeni, and Tommaso Grasso of the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, University of Florence. We thank Dottoressa Maria Rosario Borriello, Director of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, and Dottoressa Carlotta Cianferoni, the Director of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze, for permission to digitize works in their collections.

Laocoon Project: The scan data are copyright 2010 by The Vatican Museums, which have kindly granted to the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory a nonexclusive, noncommercial right to display the scan models on its Digital Sculpture website. The scan data were collected by Bernd Breuckmann and Laurent Wurmser of Breuckmann GmbH assisted by Chad Keller and David Koller of the University of Virginia. Preliminary 3D models were created by Bernd Breuckmann, whose many signal contributions to this project we gratefully acknowledge. The models seen since 2023 were made by Mohamed Abdelaziz. We also thank Prof. Antonio Paolucci, Director of The Vatican Museums, for permission to scan the Laocoon statue group and to publish it on our website. We are pleased to acknowledge the help given us by the following personnel of the Vatican Museums: Guy Devreux and the staff of the Laboratorio Restauro Materiali Lapidei; Giandomenico Spinola, Curator of the Reparto Antichità Classiche; Claudia Valeri, Assistant Curator of the same Reparto; and Rosanna Di Pinto, Director of the Archivio Fotografico. We express our heartfelt thanks to Prof. Paolo Liverani (Professor, University of Florence; Consultant, The Vatican Museums) for his constant support of and invaluable participation in this project. In 2023, we were able to add a model of the cast showing the sculpture's condition in the nineteenth century in the Spurlock Museum of the University of Illinois thanks to the kind permission granted by Director Elizabeth Sutton. We also thank Assistant Registrar Travis Stansel for his assistance and hospitality. Finally, we thank The Samuel H. Kress Foundation for the generous sponsorship it gave this project at its inception.


Copyright © 2009-23. Last updated: September 12, 2023.

This project is sponsored by the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory.