As a result of a collaboration between Indiana University and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, it’s now possible to view some of the world’s most admired ancient artifacts and sculptures in 3D without traveling overseas. A newly launched website, www.digitalsculpture-uffizi.org, was unveiled Tuesday in a ceremony at the historic Uffizi Gallery attended by IU Vice President for Research Fred H. Cate, as well as other IU faculty. The site currently contains over 300 digitized sculptures and fragments from the collection.
The project was announced in 2016 at the Uffizi Gallery in a joint presentation by IU President Michael A. McRobbie and Uffizi Gallery Director Eike Schmidt.
[Clip] A sculpture at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, is scanned as part of the process to digitize the art in 3D. Photo by Indiana University.
In summer 2018, the IU team digitized 61 statues in the Uffizi and in the Villa Corsini, the complex where the Uffizi stores works of ancient art not on display in the galleries. The team is led by Bernard Frischer, IU professor of informatics, director of the university’s Virtual World Heritage Laboratory and one of the world’s leading virtual archaeologists. A key partner on the project has been the Politecnico di Milano, under the direction of professor Gabriele Guidi.
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The digitization project includes training IU informatics and art history students in the techniques of 3D data capture, digital modeling and interactive online publication; creating a limited number of 3D restoration models of works of interest to individual project participants; and publishing the 3D models on several online sites, including the Italian Ministry of Culture’s internal conservation database, the Uffizi’s public website and the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory’s publicly available Digital Sculpture Project.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
