The digital model of the S.Zenone chapel inside Santa Prassede in Rome. A case study for the morphological analysis

The presented research deals with the 3D acquisition and modeling of San Zenone’s chapel in Santa Prassede church, a very rich and unique example of byzantine architecture and sculpture. The aim of the paper deals with survey and representation bottlenecks related to a portion of a church, characterized by a very important decorative apparatus. The paper analyses the transition between the acquisition phase and the construction of a 3D model, which contains reliable geometric and radiometric data, defining at the end a useful instrument for architectural, archaeological and architectural interpretation, balanced by the human capacity to read the real context and 3D extracted data.