In the evening last Thursday December 9 ARTBOX, the arts program on the Italian TV network LA7, featured a report on the 3D clone of the Marriage of the Virgin of Raphael, which Haltadefinizione digitized in 2020 as part of the national celebration of the divine Raphael. (The report was rebroadcast on LA7d the following Saturday.) The painting has been placed again on the same altar from which it was carried off more than two hundred years earlier.
Napoleon’s troops looted this well-known painting in 1798, leaving a void in its original place, the church of San Francesco (Saint Francis) in Città di Castello, the town where the seventeen-year-old Raphael first emerged as a master. Now, from the original held in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, a perfect clone replica has been made using Haltadefinizione’s most advanced Gigapixel 3D technology. It displays the different material textures of the original, in three dimensions. In the report, project designer Giuseppe Sterparelli explains the symbols in the painting. There is a ring, which we still have, which was the inspiration for the original commission, first to Perugino and then to his young student Raphael. Also, a temple represents the instinctive knowledge of mathematics of Piero della Francesca, from the same valley where the church of the Marriage of the Virgin is located, in the area between Umbria and Tuscany.
“This project is important to us for its historical significance,” says Luca Ponzio, founder of Haltadefinizione, “but it also shows our strategic integration in many areas, including enhanced public awareness of Raphael’s career and integration of the arts into schools. In its own way, it provides a compliment to the experience for visitors to the Pinacoteca di Brera, and what’s more, with our online Image Bank, anyone can view and study the work close-up, from any location.”
The 3D clone of the painting is part of the national exhibition called Raffaello giovane e il suo sguardo or The Gaze of the Young Raphael, which will remain open until January 9, 2022, in the municipal art gallery of Città di Castello. Haltadefinizione has also contributed a replica of Raphael’s Standard of the Holy Trinity, his only work that remains in that location.
(NB: LA7, called “La Sette” lit. “the seven” meaning “Channel 7” is an Italian TV network.)
