Along with the renovation of the rooms of the Galleria Nazionale of Umbria, the management also began an ambitious digitization project, involving more than one hundred works of art including paintings, statues, sculpture, altarpieces and interiors.
The selection includes many important works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Arnolfo di Cambio, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Gentile da Fabriano, Beato Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Giovanni Boccati and Piero della Francesca. Umbrian artists are also well represented, including Benedetto Bonfigli, Bartolomeo Caporali, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Perugino, Pinturicchio and their students and followers.
The project made use of several technologies including ultra-high definition gigapixel photography, multi-spectral UV and IR photography and 3D mapping of statues and other objects.
Three simultaneous operations were set up to do the work. The Galleria Nazionale of Umbria’s digitization project is a perfect demonstration of how to apply these new technologies to any type of artwork, with the highest quality outcome.
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Two rooms of frescoes will be digitized using cameras on mobile nodal mounts, capable of capturing images of the whole rooms. The pictures will be seen on a 360-degree multimedia viewing platform, which will allow multiple factors of enlargement without losing high-definition image quality.
The objective is to make a digital archive of ultra-high definition images available to the museum, which can be used to fulfill a wide variety of needs, including online and offline digital uses, cataloging, reproduction, scholarly study and monitoring of conservation status.
The digital acquisition of the works was performed using various hardware systems with data processing systems developed in collaboration with partner company Memooria. These make the high-resolution displays possible, while maintaining fine image quality, very low levels of distortion and good color fidelity, using specific color value targets.
The Galleria Nazionale of Umbria’s digitization project was previewed at the twenty-seventh meeting of Restauro, The International Convention of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, in a lecture entitled, “gigapixel, multi-spectral and 3D acquisition for diagnostics, care and valorization of the cultural heritage; the National Gallery of Umbria and other case studies.” Making the presentation were Marco Pierini, Director of the National Gallery of Umbria, Luca Ponzio, CEO of Haltadefinizione, Giovanni Borelli, CTO of Haltadefinizione and Luca Panini, CEO of Franco Cosimo Panini Editore.
