Mutant Bodies : Statue Digitization and Exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum of Venice

Statuary constitutes a significant field where to involve digital technologies overall, ranging from the survey of artefacts up to their staging, in narratives capable of showing the changes that have distorted their original image during centuries. The valuable collection preserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Venice has many Roman copies of Greek originals, including three Gauls, young warriors who were chosen for mercenary looting expeditions. These statues present manifest physiognomic discontinuities due to removals, collapses, and restorations from the Sixteenth century that inexorably altered their original anthropomorphic conformation. The Venetian Museum was the first to open in Europe in 1596. After several vicissitudes that decreed its closure, it reopened in 1923–1926, with a new set-up designed by archaeology professor Carlo Anti. The modernist approach in conceiving the fruition of the statues, together with their spatial location, is what we see in the current conditions. Part of the exhibited elements, consistent with the searching for the original form typical of modernism, were deprived of the additions of the 16th century historical restorations which attempted to return an image of their past. The first research objective concerns the relationship between indirect survey methodologies—typical of digital photogrammetry—and the restoration practices that over the centuries have left invasive traces upon the artefacts; the second is to test innovative communication projects that intertwine mixed multimedia content, to be implemented in the institutional web channels and the new set-up of the National Archaeological Museum of Venice, scheduled for 2021–2022.