Articles by Valeria Di Cola

The Forum built in Rome by Trajan is a match of his political and military virtues: the defeated populations materialize with statues and high-reliefs in precious marble and are therefore an integral part of the marble triumph of the emperor and the Roman army. The statues of the Dacians are distributed on the most visible architectural parts of the complex, and they have different size, as well as different back surface treatment, depending on their location. In order to reconstruct the architectural composition together with the sculptural apparatus, a complete metrological analysis of the sculptures has been undertaken, alongside the examination of the material features of Daci statues (clothing, surface treatment) and of data yielded by archives and excavations that took place in the past centuries and recently in the 21st century. The work has been based on a method measuring bi-dimensional photographic shaped-set of all the Daci dispersed in several art collections, starting from the idea of working with a low-cost method without specific expensive software. The workflow combines bi-dimensional images, scaled to 1:1 reference, imported in AutoCAD in order to produce a single .dwg file, with good resolution but easy-to-manage during the data processing. Some interesting, albeit preliminary, goals have been achieved. In the first place, a measured catalogue of all the Dacian statues dispersed in the world has been quickly built. It was therefore possible to start the reconstruction, at least virtual, of the sculptural context of Trajan’s forum. Regarding the size and archaeological aspect of the sculptures, three dimensional series of Dacians have been grouped, which contributed, on the one hand, to confirm the results of previous studies, and on the other to advance the knowledge with new data.

The survey campaign on the monumental remains of the West Hall of the Domitian Complex (Roman Forum) has provided an opportunity for a general reflection on the archaeological surveying of architecture. Above all, there is the problem of how to guarantee an accurate documentation, when approaching 'XXL buildings', like those of this architectural complex. Working with two different methodologies, in particular digital photogrammetry and laser scanning, the authors have detected the best operating procedure for the documentation of such very big structures. The data obtained during the surveying campaign has also allowed the reconstruction of the different historical phases for the West Hall in the Roman Forum.