Writing on Facebook in 2019<\/a>, three years before becoming prime minister, Meloni remarked: \u201cCenturies before national unity, the ITALIAN painter represented our homeland in this way, with the inscription \u2018YTALIA\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\nThree of the four sections, those depicting Saints John, Luke and Mark, were shattered into relatively large pieces but largely reconstructable, allowing restorers to piece them back together. The fourth section, representing Saint Matthew, collapsed completely, leaving a gaping hole in the vault, and disintegrated into around 120,000 tiny fragments. Each fragment was painstakingly collected, scanned and catalogued. A neutral-coloured curved panel now fills the void in the ceiling,\u00a0with just roughly 30 fragments subsequently reattached.<\/p>\n
Now, a joint project headed by the Galleria Nazionale dell\u2019Umbria in Perugia, which has officially worked with the Basilica\u2019s guardians for the past decade, and the engineering department of Perugia University aims to determine whether AI can help reconstruct the shattered section.<\/p>\n
Working from a photograph<\/p>\n
The team, which includes officials from the Soprintendenza, the culture ministry\u2019s conservation wing, is also working from a high-resolution photograph of the ceiling taken shortly before the 1997 quake. \u201cThe idea is to see if we can somehow find a way to piece together that enormous quantity of fragments based on their shape and colour,\u201d Costantino D\u2019Orazio, the director of the Galleria Nazionale dell\u2019Umbria, tells The Art Newspaper.<\/p>\n
According to D\u2019Orazio, the idea originated with Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli, a Meloni ally, during a visit to the basilica in June. Around 15 staff members from the three institutions are now conducting a feasibility study that D\u2019Orazio says should last at least six months. He indicates it is too early to say whether existing AI tools could be adapted for the task or bespoke technology would be required. The basilica\u2019s own restorers would be ultimately responsible for reconstructing the work, he says.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the Galleria Nazionale has collaborated with Ikare, a Florence-based architectural imaging firm, to create a video projection that digitally reconstructs the missing section on the neutral panel. The \u20ac5,000 for the project, D\u2019Orazio says, was primarily spent on renting\u00a0projection equipment installed in the basilica\u2019s right transept.<\/p>\n
Stefano Giannetti, the co-founder of Ikare, explains that the projection was created using a 3D rendering created from the pre-earthquake photograph. It was, he says, a highly complex project because experts had to pinpoint the exact location from which the photo was taken, factor the curvature of the vault into the projection design, and integrate the projection with surviving coloured fragments on the vault. \u201cTo achieve a consistent\u00a0result, I had to turn colours off and on in a long series of tests,\u201d he says. \u201cWe weren\u2019t aiming for simple lighting effects but to restore the sense of the fresco as a whole, in the name of cultural heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Experts are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help reassemble a priceless fresco by the early Renaissance artist Cimabue…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,114971,114972,85,46,2971,3995,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-204931","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-cimabue","12":"tag-frescoes","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-italy","16":"tag-museums-heritage","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}