500彩票网

Laying bare the reality of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture
With the use of VR technology

Virtual reality (VR) technology has become a familiar presence in our lives. In fact, its impact is being felt even in the world of art history research. Armed with the latest in 3D scanning techniques, Associate Professor Kyoko Sengoku-Haga has penetrated deep into issues surrounding the reproduction of ancient sculptures and the identification of their creators. Here, she shows how VR technology offers us a glimpse of reality from over two millennia ago.

By Kyoko Sengoku-Haga Associate Professor,

The Latin for art is “ars,” which, while originally having the meaning of “skill,” remains nonetheless familiar to us as the etymological origin of the English term. Yet when we hear that the Greek word for art is “techne” (τ?χνη), from which we also derive words such as “technique” and “technology,” we might feel that the term is a bit out of place.

However, in ancient Greece, the artists were unquestionably first-rate technicians. When the technology for casting life-size bronze statues was developed in the latter decades of the sixth century BC, it seems that people not only admired the tanned radiance of life-size images of nude males expressing such lifelike movement, but even felt the uncanny sense of discomfort that we ourselves feel in the presence of realistic robots (Figure 1).

On the other hand, while ancient Rome is famous for its construction technology, its massive buildings were also often adorned with huge numbers of statues. This was made possible by a precision reproduction technique for marble sculpture that was devised in the first century BC. A large number of precision copies were produced from a single original by creating a plaster mold from it, carefully measuring the points of the surface in three dimensions using a compass or similar tool, and then copying these o