The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality

This publication focuses on Factum Foundation’s work to promote the use of high-resolution recording, digital restoration and creative re-materialisation while bringing into focus the changing attitudes towards owning, sharing, preserving and displaying cultural artefacts. It accompanies the exhibition La Riscoperta di un Capolavoro at Palazzo Fava in Bologna, which has reunified the sixteen original panels that still exist from the Polittico Griffoni, a remarkable example of painting from the Bolognese Renaissance.
The altarpiece stood in the Griffoni Chapel in the Church of San Petronio until it was broken up in 1725. The 16 tempera paintings by Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti will be exhibited together with 16 facsimiles arranged in what is thought to be the original configuration of the altarpiece – allowing it to be seen as its patrons and makers intended.
The aim of the collection of thoughts and images in this book is to encourage reflection on the ways that digital technologies in virtual and physical form, are changing our approach to the preservation and conservation of the material evidence of the past.

The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality brings together recent projects by Factum and a wonderfully diverse collection of essays, many written especially for this book, by collaborators and friends. Their widely different backgrounds and disciplines only illustrate the importance of this subject and the huge range of its relevance.
Contributors include Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum; Mari Lending, the author of Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction; Nadja Aksamija, Professor of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture at Wesleyan University; Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves; Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers; Shirley Djukurnã Krenak, Indigenous activist from the Upper Xingu; philosophers Bruno Latour, Brian Cantwell Smith and Alva Noë; Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; architect Charlotte Skene Catling; Jerry Brotton, specialist in cartography and the Renaissance; and Chiara Casarin, Director of the Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa.

Summary

Preface (Fabio Roversi Monaco)
Introduction (Adam Lowe)

CHAPTER 1. RE-THINKING THE FUNCTION OF FACSIMILES
Saving the best wine for last (Richard Powers)
The migration of the aura, or how to explore the original through its facsimiles (Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe)
ReACH: a collective and global re-think of our approach to copies in the age of digital reproduction (Anaïs Aguerre)
3D data, public access, freedom of information laws (Cosmo Wenman)
A Renaissance of the Renaissance (Jonathan Jones)
Returning to distorted origins (Mari Lending)
Reviving Walpole’s narratives at Strawberry Hill House (Silvia Davoli)

CHAPTER 2. PRESERVING, SHARING AND RESPONSIBILITY
Collections entail responsibilities: notes on a global institution (Hartwig Fischer)
Get back. Artifices of return and replication (Simon Schaffer)
Thefts, fakes and facsimiles: preserving the Bakor monoliths of eastern Nigeria (Ferdinand Saumarez Smith)
The resurrection of the Sacred Cave of Kamukuwaká (Akari Waurá, Shirley Djukurnã Krenak, Nathaniel Mann, Irene Gaumé, Mafalda Ramos, and Patricia Rodrigues)
Death and entanglement. Some thoughts about life, love and the aims of art conservation (Alva Noë)
Discrete objects and complex subjects: from Mosul to London and back again (Nicolas Béliard)
Sharing skills and technologies: teaching photogrammetry in AlUla (Otto Lowe)
Digitising the manuscript heritage of Dagestan (Eva Rosenthal)
The return of an interpretation of Caravaggio’s Nativity (Bernardo Tortorici Montaperto)

CHAPTER 3. NEW INFORMATION GENERATING NEW KNOWLEDGE
Atelier Canova: a new vision of Antonio Canova (Chiara Casarin)
Restoring the corpus of Archie Creswell (William Owen)
The Raphael Cartoons at the V&A: close-range digitisation at a monumental scale (Carlos Bayod Lucini)
Malevich’s Black Square (Eva Rosenthal)
Re-SEARCH (Clare Foster)
Rethinking our thinking about thinking: epistemology, architecture, and world (Brian Cantwell Smith)
The hand of the artist: graph analysis and El Greco (Adam Lowe)
Building a Mirror World for Venice (Frédéric Kaplan and Isabella de Lenardo)
ARCHiVe: Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Venice (Adam Lowe)
ARCHiVe case study: exploration of automatic transcription for the index cards from the Daniélou collection (Rashmi Gajare)

CHAPTER 4. CARTOGRAPHY: RECORDING SHAPE, MAPPING SURFACE
The work of mapping in an age of digital mediation (Jerry Brotton)
The way we see the world (Adam Lowe)
Re-creating the lost silver map of al-Idrisi (Elizabeth Mitchell)
Recording an Ottoman-Venetian world map (Guendalina Damone)
The Gough Map. Revealing function through cartography (Catherine Delano-Smith and Damien Bove)

CHAPTER 5. ACCESS AND DISPLAY
Through the looking glass. Transportive architecture (Charlotte Skene Catling)
Verum Factum Arte: Scanning Seti and the afterlife of a pharaonic tomb (Bryan Markovitz)
Recording and displaying Bernardino Luini (Guendalina Damone)
La Casa Natal de Velázquez: re-presenting the Spanish Golden Age (Elizabeth Mitchell)
Proliferation of opera houses, concert halls, museums & art galleries: are we building sepulchres and mausoleums for the future? (Jasper Parrott)
Art in time (Alexander Nagel)

CASE STUDY 1. RESURRECTING THE BOLOGNESE RENAISSANCE
Recording and re-uniting the Polittico Griffoni (Adam Lowe)
Beauty in relief (Carlos Bayod Lucini)
Historic cartography and digital technologies: Factum Foundation and the virtual restoration of the countryside map from the Sala Bologna at the Vatican (Nadja Aksamija and Francesco Ceccarelli)
Publica magnificentia and architectural palimpsest: the restoration of the façade of San Petronio (Roberto Terra)
Restoration, replication, resurrection: choosing a future for Amico Aspertini’s Deposition of Christ (Elizabeth Mitchell)
Recording emotion: Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Tess Tomassini and Guendalina Damone)

CASE STUDY 2. THE THEBAN NECROPOLIS PRESERVATION INITIATIVE. WORK IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS, EGYPT
Immortality and beyond (Nicholas Reeves)
The Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative (texts by the Theban Necropolis Preservation team and the University of Basel)
Stoppelaëre House: the restoration of the building and the establishment of the 3D Scanning, Archiving and Training Centre
The recording of the tomb of Seti I
The sarcophagus of Seti I: recording and re-materialisation
Recording fragments in Egypt and in collections around the world

Conclusion (Adam Lowe)