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On July 1, 1998, IBM unveiled the details of a remarkable collaboration between a team of IBM scientists and an eminent Renaissance art historian to reconstruct Michelangelo's (second) Pietá, a most laborious work intended as the artist's tomb monument and later ruined by his own hand. The project, based on new computerized geometric three dimensional modeling techniques that will make possible near-perfect digital replication of very large scale objects, will yield nearly two billion bits of data.
Taking place at IBM's T.J. Watson Research lab in New York and the Museum of the Opera del Duomo in the Cathedral of Florence, the project represents the most extensive study ever done on a single work of art.
For Jack Wasserman, distinguished historian of Italian art and Temple University professor emeritus, the building of a single visual virtual model of the Pietá will help shed new light on the mysteries surrounding the Florentine Pietá and Michelangelo's attempt to ruin it.
"The final result of this study," says Wasserman, "will be a near perfect replica of the work, set up in a way that will enable me to carefully study the image inch by inch, from all possible vantage points and draw some long-awaited conclusions."
Michelangelo took up work on the Florentine Pietá, the second of three such sculptures, when he was in his 70's. The work is a group of four larger-than-life figures carved from a single block of marble: the broken body of Christ is held up by Mary Magdelan, aided by Nicodemus above her, and the Virgin Mary to the right. Only the figure of Christ is finished, although the left arm has been broken and repaired and the left leg is missing. Nicodemus displays the unfinished features of the artist himself, while Mary Magadelan's face is blocked out.
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