The digital acquisition work performed on the Standard of the Holy Trinity is the latest step in the established collaboration between Haltadefinizione and the municipality of Città di Castello. It follows the recent ambitious project that replaced the Marriage of the Virgin in the Church of San Francesco with a cloned copy.
This is one of Raphael’s first paintings. It was digitally photographed in ultra-high definition Gigapixel format, before the start of restoration work done by the ISCR, the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro (Higher Institute for Conservation and Restoration) in preparation for the exhibition “The Vision of the Young Raphael in Città di Castello.” The exhibition opens on September 18, at the municipal art gallery of Città di Castello.
Vincenzo Tofanelli, municipal director of cultural affairs, states, “Haltadefinizione has had a key role in highlighting Città di Castello’s role in Raphael’s artistic career, by digitizing the Standard of the Holy Trinity, one of the works at the center of the exhibition next September. The show will be an important opportunity to learn about Raphael’s early work from his time in Città di Castello. We’re grateful to Haltadefinizione for agreeing about its importance and we hope our collaboration in the arts may continue.”
Despite conservation efforts that have been attempted over the centuries, the painting is in poor condition and restoration work is underway, done by ISCR.
The digital acquisition of the work using Haltadefinizione’s ultra-high definition Gigapixel technology produces a baseline image of the work’s conservation status at the beginning of restoration work. This extremely close vision of the work allows us to construct a very detailed ditigal map that reveals every single brush stroke and surface crack down to a tenth of a micron in size. In cases such as this, a digital copy of the work is a useful tool to evaluate forms of degradation of the image surface, such as peeling.
Luca Ponzio, the founder of Haltadefinizione, has this to say: “We’re very happy to be back in Città di Castello after the success of the previous project we did together with the Pinacoteca di Brera, to return a digital clone of the Marriage of the Virgin to the city, after 222 years. We are pleased to be back in town, this time for digital photography of the only work of Raphael’s that is located here. The digital acquisition of the Standard, with our proprietary technology, will be useful in the future, as a baseline for monitoring its consersation status. What’s more, everyone will be able to share in the vision of this masterpiece with digital online display, even if they are far away from its home. One of the greatest advantages that digitalization offers is its value to students, scholars and researchers all around the world.”
Haltadefinizione has added important works of Raphael of Urbino to its online gallery during the last year, which was dedicated to celebration of the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death.
