Articles by Katia Mannino

In 2005-2006 the excavations in the Sanctuary of Apollo conducted by the Italian Archaeological Mission in Hierapolis in Phrygia (MAIER) brought to light about sixty fragments of a larger-than-life marble statue of Athena. This paper presents the discovery, highlighting the role played in the research by digital technologies, especially 3D modelling and reconstruction techniques, the application of which mitigated the highly fragmentary nature of the evidence. The first section of the paper highlights the importance of the context of discovery of the fragments, which were found, together with other sculptural and architectural elements, in front of Temple B, in a deposit of discarded material related to the destruction in situ of part of the sanctuary’s decorations in the Byzantine period. The second section describes the plan drawn up by the MAIER to publish a comprehensive scientific description of the sculptures of the Sanctuary of Apollo. The project aims to reconstruct the sculptural decoration of the sacred area in the Imperial period, combining information on the types of statuary and the iconographic subjects and themes with excavation data and the epigraphical documentation from the sacred area. The project includes the study of the statue of Athena, for which this paper provides the description and the results of the historic and artistic analyses. The final section is centered on the process that led from the creation of the digital model to the virtual reconstruction of the statue of Athena and, lastly, to the 3D printing of the reconstructive hypothesis. Digital models were created for many of the sculpture fragments of the Sanctuary of Apollo. Saved in a database designed to store data on the sculptures, these models facilitate the study of the documentation and have proved to be extremely useful for the dissemination of the finds to the public, especially in problematic situations that limit or impede access to the evidence, as was the case during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On July 19, 1992, in the waters of Punta del Serrone (Brindisi, Italy), over 200 fragments of bronze statues of exceptional manufacture were found. This paper traces the history of the exceptional discovery and fate of the finds. The first part deals with the recovery, conservation and exhibition and the main phases of the analytical study that led to their identification and the reconstruction of the events that caused their abandonment on the seabed. The second part is dedicated to the digital acquisition and processing of the statues through laser scanning and to the virtual restoration and creative modeling of some of them, carried out on the occasion of ‘Nel mare dell’intimità/In the sea of intimacy’, an exhibition set up at the Brindisi airport between July 2019 and January 2021. The third and last part discusses the making of the computer animation video ‘Rottami preziosi. Una ballata del mare profondo/Precious scrap. A ballad from the deep sea’, created for the exhibition, and dedicated to telling the story of the bronzes, retracing the different phases of the creative process and the solutions developed to combine all the available data in a functional narrative.