Romanico

Abstract: 3D modelling tools allow to reconstruct what is not clear to the eyes. This simple and short phrase is quite obvious, but when it meets lost architectures it becomes the key vault of a complex puzzle made of evidences, knowledge, reading strategies and later communication strategies. In the research presented here, the case study of the St. Donato Cathedral in Arezzo, becomes the occasion for analysing a full digital reconstruction process, its adaptation to virtual interactive usage and how this process can bring back useful information on the ruins that today are the last traces of its existence. The St. Donato Cathedral was the core of an ancient and independent citadel out of the Arezzo’s walls. A settlement developed starting from the VIII century over previous Etrurian and Roman remains. It has been completely demolished in the XVI century for its political misalignment in front of the Cosimo de Medici’s domination strategies. Only few remains of the citadel plot are now visible in place. Significant traces of these cathedral walls were never be found during the archaeological investigations, but a various set of representations documents its main aspects. These representations go from very detailed and pictorial images to schematic sculpted items, to plan drawing. Using an accurate and articulated digital reconstruction project a complete 3D digital model is produced out of all the possible traces. The process will be described in all its key passages, from the digital survey of the area, to the definition of architectural elements. An interactive model of the cathedral will be presented in first release. Beyond the common features for this kind of models it will have two specific peculiarities: the indication of the level of liability of each part and the system of references used to guide the process.

Year: 2017
Publisher: L'ERMA di BRETSCHNEIDER
Series: Bibliotheca Archaeologica, 56
ISBN: 978-88-913-1253-2
ISBN: 978-88-913-1228-0 (PDF)
Binding: Hardback
Pages: 130, 8 ill. B/N, 150 ill. Col.
Size: 21,5 x 28 cm
At the beginning of the eleventh century in northwestern Italy builders created a comprehensive system of architecture, integrating the square edges of stacked bricks on the exterior with arches, vaults, and niches inside the wall. They used the continuous verticality of bands to plan and demarcate at ground level the placement and spacing of these dynamic structures intended to provide crucial support higher up the elevation. Throughout southern Europe builders copied this system, combining brick-based construction, dynamic and static support, and an endless aesthetic based on continuous square-edged reveals. Experienced Lombard workers, at least initially, would have been needed to explain and implement this complex and holistic approach to architecture.
In major abbeys in Catalonia builders carefully followed the original Lombard system and also imaginatively enriched it, creating a new type of interior, different from the early Christian model (with a wooden ceiling, tall intermediate wall, and flat elevation) perpetuated in the central vessel of contemporary Italian churches. They coupled bands directly to transverse arches beneath barrel vaults and expanded the shape of bands from narrow strips to wide planes as part of a series of projecting wall layers. They also raised the arcade and compressed the intermediate wall, producing a spacious and luminous nave with narrow, high and open side aisles. In major churches in southern France successive generations incorporated many of these changes to the brick-based model and added significantly to them. Seen in this new light, early eleventh-century architecture in Lombardy and Catalonia belies its longstanding reputation as a superficially decorated, pendulously massive, unprogressively folkloric, and largely irrelevant First Romanesque prelude to High Romanesque architecture.

C. Edson Armi is a research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written books on Cluniac architecture and sculpture, design and construction in Romanesque architecture, Gothic sculpture, and American car design. He received the Society of Architectural Historians Founders' Award, the C.I.N.O.A. International Art History Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.