András PATAY-HORVÁTH
(Univ. Eötvös Loránd, Budapest, Hungary)
The arrangement of the five central figures of the east pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia has been the subject of scholarly debates since the discovery of the fragments more than a century ago. More than four substantially different reconstructions were put forward in drawings, but they were hardly tested in three-dimensional form because of the monumental scale of the statues. Most recently the author has started a project to produce digital models of the statues by scanning the originals. The scanning (with Breuckmann Tritos structured light scanner) of the white marble statues was made difficult by many technical problems: the pieces are not only of huge dimensions, but they are also not movable and are placed very close to the museum wall. The poster focuses on these technical difficulties encountered during the scanning campaign in the Museum of Olympia and gives an overview of the work in progress: on the basis of the scanned fragments, the original statues are tentatively reconstructed and placed in their original architectural setting. For the virtual reconstruction a new 3D modelling software (Leonar3do) was used. As the preliminary results presented in the poster can clearly demonstrate, the virtual 3D reconstruction will enable archaeologists to compare the various arrangements both from technical and from aesthetical aspects. On the other hand every detail of the world-famous statues is now more thoroughly documented than ever before. The data will be stored both at the university and by the enterprize (Tondo), which carried out the scanning. A copy of the 3D models is provided for the museum.
Keywords: 3D scanning, classical Greek marble sculpture