From a Hellenistic burial chamber beneath Naples to an ornate ceiling in Oxford and the surviving fragments of a Michelangelo sculpture, 3D scanning is bringing fragile cultural treasures within closer reach.
The Factum Foundation, founded by artist and technologist Adam Lowe, records their surfaces, colour and form in minute detail, allowing researchers to examine them without touching the originals.
The resulting digital records also provide specialists with a precise reference for monitoring their condition over time.
Factum has spent 25 years developing non-contact systems that capture more than an object’s appearance.
“So people think of digitization as taking a photo. Actually, we record the surface of objects,” Lowe said.
“We use multi-spectral photography. We build different scanning systems that might be photometric stereo or photogrammetry or laser based.”
Laser scanning and lidar measure shape and depth, while photogrammetry creates three-dimensional models from overlapping photographs. Photometric stereo records fine relief under changing light, and multispectral imaging can reveal faded pigments, earlier marks and differences between materials.
Once the information is combined, users can rotate the model, magnify it by up to ten times and control the direction of the light. This can expose carvings, cracks, brushwork and other features that are difficult to observe in person.
At the Ipogeo dei Cristallini in Naples, Factum recorded a Hellenistic underground burial complex containing decorated chambers and funerary art.
Access is limited to around 25 visitors a day. The scans allow the chambers to be explored remotely and have also been used to reproduce the head of Medusa depicted at the site.
The foundation has carried out similar work at the Divinity School in Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries.
Its decorated 15th-century ceiling stands about eight metres above visitors, placing its carved bosses beyond close inspection from the ground.
Factum created an orthographic projection - a flattened and accurately scaled view of the entire ceiling. It also produced facsimiles of individual bosses, allowing forms normally seen from far below to be examined at close range.
The information collected during scanning can also be used to make physical facsimiles reproducing the dimensions, colour, form and texture of a work.
“What we do is more like Star Trek. It’s more like, ‘beam me up, Scotty’,” Lowe said.
“We dematerialize the object, digitalize it. We then transport it somewhere else, allow different forms of digital access to it, and then we have the capacity to re-materialize it.”
Factum used this process to reconstruct Michelangelo’s Young Saint John the Baptist, also known as San Juanito.
The sculpture, made during Michelangelo’s youth, was smashed during the Spanish Civil War. Only ten fragments survived.
Specialists digitally assembled those pieces and used historical photographs to recreate the missing sections. Although the images had not been taken for technical reconstruction, they contained enough information to help establish the form of the figure.
The completed model was then turned into a physical reconstruction of the sculpture.
Factum does not carry out conservation or restoration work itself. It provides information to the specialists responsible for protecting cultural heritage.
“This is about getting up close and personal without ever touching,” Lowe said.
“We are absolutely not conservators or restorers. We provide data for conservators and restorers, and curators and scholars.”
A scan establishes the condition of an object or site at a specific moment. Recordings made later can be compared with that reference to identify cracking, erosion, fading, movement or other changes.
The foundation has also worked in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings through the Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative, recording tombs and training local specialists in the same techniques.
Its wider projects include paintings, manuscripts, sculptures and architectural spaces across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
The growing collection of high-resolution data is also being used in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Pattern-recognition systems are beginning to identify distinctive characteristics in the surfaces of paintings, drawings and other artefacts.
Lowe said the original object remains the evidence researchers are interested in. The purpose of the technology is to make more of that evidence visible while limiting the need for physical contact.
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