Articles by Donal Cooper

This paper focuses on two digital projects that have attempted to reconstitute Renaissance altarpieces within virtual church interiors. Both concern Florentine churches that are no longer extant: the Clarissan nunnery church of Santa Chiara in the southern Oltrarno quarter and the Benedictine convent church of San Pier Maggiore to the east of the Cathedral. Both reconstructions were commissioned in conjunction with London institutions: Santa Chiara for the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2009; San Pier Maggiore for the National Gallery in 2015. The two virtual reconstructions were, however, very different - in part because the nature of the available data suggested different solutions in each case, in part because the more recent project on San Pier Maggiore was able to build on our experience of the older reconstruction of Santa Chiara. As well as presenting these projects, the paper offers an auto-critical evaluation of them, acknowledging where the final reconstructions could not realize their authors’ original ambitions, and hopefully drawing some lessons to help future work in this area. Key concerns remain the embedding of ‘paradata’ and degrees of uncertainty within 3D visualizations following the guidance of the London Charter, a widely shared but rarely realised aspiration. Meanwhile, new opportunities are offered by the integration of photogrammetry, LIDAR scanning, augmented reality and geo-radar data.