Bernini’s Bust Portrait of Pope Alessandro VII Chigi at Corsini Gallery in Rome. Improving Knowledge Using Digital Technologies

Nowadays, contemporary technological advances and digital contents offer innovative tools to support cultural heritage preservation and play a key role in sharing and improving knowledge, in several contexts. They offer a very interesting approach for the representation of archaeological, architectonical, and historical assets and for the definition of geometrical relief by the acquisition of metric data. In particular, the image-based technologies to reconstruct 3D models are useful both to acquire three-dimensional information to fix critical areas and to put in evidence some hidden details. They do not replace conventional methodologies and nondestructive technologies (NDTs), whereas they are integrative, especially when the environmental conditions do not allow us to apply other instrumental investigations. Because the photogrammetric reconstruction is a noninvasive, low-cost, noncontact, and easy to execute technique, it was chosen to create the 3D virtual model of the portrait bust of Alessandro VII Chigi, a terracotta sketch attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, located at the Corsini Gallery in Rome, improving the visibility of less-known artworks, with the aim of attracting different types of audience and enriched the Web site documentation of the museum. The 3D numerical model shows a good accuracy in terms of texture and metric data, such as shapes, geometries, and crack dimension which can be easily monitored over time. It was performed by Photoscan Pro, exploiting the ENEA ICT infrastructure named “REsearch Computational center on COmplex System” (CRESCO6) of high-performance scientific computing (HPC), through the hardware/software capabilities available in the network.