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| Michelangelo's David captured the spirit of the Renaissance. Now, it's experiencing its own rebirth. Look out for Digital Dave. |
There are no chisels or blocks of marble to be shaped in this rebirth of Michelangelo's David. Nope. This time, lasers, cameras and algorithms will help create 3D images of the famous statue. Images that will allow us to study the David in such detail so as to see the chisel marks as clearly as we can make out the modulations on the skin in a fingerprint.
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| Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel in Rome. It's believed he also sculpted the statues housed in it. |
Called the Digital Michelangelo Project, a group of students led by Stanford computer science professor Marc Levoy is spending a year in Italy to create the first 3D digital archive of the 15th century Italian artist's most famous sculptures: the David and the Unfinished Slaves in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Florence, the seven statues of the Medici Chapel, the Pieta at St. Peter's Basilica and the Moses in Rome. The computer models would allow museum goers and art lovers to admire the sculpting of David's furrowed brow and piercing eyes, for example details one can't see when viewing the actual statue because his head is 23 feet in the air. The 3D images would also allow a viewer to rotate and view the statue from any angle, change lighting conditions and even animate the classic figure all perhaps from a computer screen at your local museum and even eventually downloaded from the Internet on your PC.
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| The prototype scanner scanning a full-size replica of an Egyptian sarcophogus from the British Museum. CLICK for a larger picture. (Photo courtesy Marc Levoy at Stanford University. Levoy added the laser light and camera line in Photoshop) |
Using three scanning cameras made specially for the project, the sculptures will be reproduced by scanning a laser beam across their surfaces from many different angles. Each swipe of light is reflected back to a camera which measures the colour and distance from the particular area of a sculpture thus giving the resulting image its 3D shape. Then, the digital data from all the scanned views will be combined and converted using calculations developed at Stanford into an accurate computer model of the object. "I think I can make an impact in the museum world," says Levoy in a telephone interview from Florence when asked why he's doing the project. "Maybe some people will do virtual museums, some may make replicas of statues, some may use these models for restoration purposes or for other art historical study purposes."
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| The narrow spaces between the fingers in the right hand of Christ from the Pieta in St. Peter's Basilica pose special challenges. CLICK for a better look. (Photo courtesy Marc Levoy) |
The idea of applying digital technology to museum objects isn't new. The Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec had a year-long exhibition of hundreds of digitized museum pieces in 1997-1998 made possible by the Digital 3D Imaging System developed by a researcher at Canada's National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa. But, this $1.5 million (US), multi-year project is the first time such a large group of works by a famous artist is being documented digitally. "No project of this size has been undertaken before on such a large collection of statues and no one has done statues to this level of detail before," says Levoy. Funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Levoy hopes that the high-profile of Michelangelo's works will show the feasibility and value of using laser-scanning technology on museum objects.
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Canada's NRC to assist in Digital Michelangelo Project  Using NRC technology, the Canadian Museum of Civilization had hundreds of museum objects, such as these masks, digitally on display. While Marc Levoy's custom-built scanning cameras will produce high resolution images to a quarter of a millimetre, Canada's scanning technology is the only one in the world capable of scanning images down to 50 microns about the diameter of a human hair. So, Marc Rioux, who developed the Canadian patented technology called synchronized scanning at the NRC's Visual Information Technology lab, will be joining Levoy in February to help capture the very small details of some of Michelangelo's sculptures, such as the chisel marks on the David. "It will probably be along the legs or the foot, but we will have to assess the best area that shows the tool marking that was left there," says Rioux. |
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"It's really a way to document objects," says Marc Rioux, who developed the world's highest resolution 3D laser-scanning camera at the NRC. And it seems it's also become a way to correct previous documentation errors. During the team's preparatory work, Levoy found that the David is not 434 cm (14'3") tall without its six-foot tall pedestal as documented in art history books. Instead, the famous statue is 517 cm (17') tall! The find caused a major problem for Levoy.
The mechanical gantry that will move the scanning equipment along the David was built according to the official figures of the statue's height, so it was too short to reach the top of the actual sculpture. That meant Cyberware, the company that built the scanner and gantry had to work feverishly over the holidays to make the adjustment.
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| The team hopes to capture the chisel marks from the beard of Moses in Rome. CLICK for a look. (Photo courtesy Marc Levoy) |
The team will begin the actual scanning of the sculptures in nine days. While Levoy plans to have the first images with limited rotational views up on his website in a few months, he says it will be another couple of years before a practical virtual museum housing his models would be available. Our computers simply don't have enough memory to view the large models right now. But the Digital Michelangelo Project isn't just limited to the works of Michelangelo. While in Italy, Levoy's team hopes to solve a 500-year-old archeological riddle. Along with the major works of Michelangelo, the team also plans to scan the more than 1,000 pieces of an ancient map of Rome.  The Forma Urbis Romae is a 22-metre by 15-metre map, carved out of marble slabs, that details every building, room and staircase in second-century Rome. Back in 200 A.D., the map graced the back of the Roman census office but later broke into thousands of pieces. Scholars have been trying to put it back together since the Renaissance but only about 15 per cent of the map remains and many of the pieces are undistinguishable at least to us humans. After scanning the pieces, Levoy hopes to write a software program that can use clues like marble veins to solve the 3D jigsaw puzzle. To find out more about this digital endeavor, see
The Digital Michelangelo Project. For more on the work by Canada's National Research Council, check out
Synchronized laser scanners.
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