Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin relocated to place of origin, but it's a clone

After two hundred and twenty-two years , the church of San Francesco in Città di Castello (Perugia) will once again welcome the Marriage of the Virgin, an early work by Raphael, but it will be a clone. From December 23, 2020, thanks to the latest technology applied to art, it will be possible to return to see the work, among Urbino’s most celebrated, which was removed from the church in 1798 by Napoleon’s General Lechi.

Raphael’s masterpiece is now housed at the Pinacoteca di Brera, so a perfect clone will be on display in Città di Castello, a replica created by sophisticated state-of-the-art 3D capture and printing processes capable of faithfully representing the artist’s textural brushstrokes, construction lines, cracks and all the imperfections present on the original panel.

This art-historical recontextualization of the painting in the chapel for which it was made concludes 2020, the year of the five-hundredth anniversary of Raphael’s death, and is the result ofdigital image processingin "gigapixel+3d," acquired last Nov. 2 at the Milan Pinacoteca by Haltadefinizione, a tech company of the Franco Cosimo Panini Editore group dedicated to art and cultural heritage.

The “gigapixel+3d” image technique developed by Haltadefinizione makes it possible to obtain high-resolution digital exemplars of the paintings by combining and processing a large number of individual photographic shots of portions of the same subject (4250 frames in the case of the Wedding), which are then recomposed thanks to specially designed algorithms. Highly detailed images are thus created, consisting of billions of pixels and capable of showing even the smallest and most imperceptible details of a painting. The digitization of the masterpiece required fifteen days of computer processing; the procedure used and developed together with the technological partner Memooria also makes it possible to detect the materiality of the work, that is, to make a sort of digital cast of it that returns a three-dimensional imprint with precision in the tens of microns. Thanks to the data obtained in this way, it is then possible to implement an innovative printing process, through which the pictorial surface is faithfully duplicated in physical and chromatic terms, shaping a true clone, visually identical to the original.

With the relocation of the high-definition clone of the Marriage, anyone entering St. Francis in Città di Castello will have an entirely similar perspective to that which a visitor to the church could grasp in the 16th century. The same gilded wooden frame within which the original of the Marriage was placed has been restored to accommodate the replica.

In addition, a further clone of the Marriage of the Virgin will be donated by Franco Cosimo Panini Editore and Haltadefinizione to the Pinacoteca di Brera, so that it can be used for didactic and educational purposes, as well as offering a useful tool for the instrumental monitoring of the work’s state of preservation, allowing the identification of variations in form and color.
It is especially for the local community that Franco Cosimo Panini Editore and Haltadefinizione, in agreement with the municipal administration and the FEC - Fondo Edifici di Culto, have decided to make this donation.

Starting at 6 p.m. on December 23, the entire facade of the church of San Francesco will come alive with the projection of ultra-definition images of the painting to celebrate the return of the work. An event that anticipates the major exhibition Young Raphael and his gaze, scheduled to be held in Città di Castello in March 2021. The rooms of Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, a still-intact Renaissance mansion that houses the master’s only surviving work in the city, the Banner of the Holy Trinity (1499/1502), will offer the public a chance to retrace the period Raphael spent here between 1500 and 1504.

“The acquisition of the Marriage of the Virgin, Raphael’s masterpiece preserved at the Pinacoteca di Brera,” said Lucia Panini, managing director Franco Cosimo Panini Editore, "is part of the L’arte impossibile project with which we have set ourselves the ambitious goal of creating perfect replicas of the great masterpieces of painting by creating, of each work, both the very faithful physical copy and the very high resolution digital reproduction. Two dimensions that complement each other infinitely expand the mission of those who, like us, have been making facsimile works for decades. To divulge and spread the knowledge of works of art and at the same time preserve their state of preservation were the same intentions that had guided my father in the early 1990s to publish an unpublished facsimile edition of the Bible of Borso d’Este. Today, Haltadefinizione ’s technologies allow a further step, making possible what until a few years ago could only be dreamed of: reproducing the work of art in multiple copies and being able to return it to the place for which it was commissioned."

"Haltadefinizione has developed technologies for digital acquisition and reproduction that offer the possibility of exploring and experimenting with new ways of approaching art appreciation and dissemination with infinite potential," emphasized Luca Ponzio, founder Haltadefinizione. “Thanks to such technologies, from today, in addition to the original work to be admired in all its beauty at the Pinacoteca di Brera, there will be its perfect copy, relocated to its place of origin in Città di Castello, to return to the community an important piece of the territory’s history and, again, a second copy available in Brera for educational, study and even creative uses, to do what cannot be done on the original, such as, for example, touching the three-dimensionality of Raphael’s brushstrokes. Extraordinary opportunities that only a replica can offer.”

“I am grateful to Lucia Panini of Franco Cosimo Panini Editore and Luca Ponzio of Haltadefinizione for this donation to our community,” concludes Luciano Bacchetta, mayor of Città di Castello. "As part of the celebrations for the fifth centenary of Raphael’s death, the placement of this beautiful reproduction of Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin on the Albizzini altar of the church of San Francesco in Città di Castello represents an important opportunity to celebrate this masterpiece that left our city more than two hundred years ago. The panel’s top-notch reproductive technology restores at its best this painting that represents a pride of our city and a turning point in the entire Italian Renaissance."

In the photo, Haltadefinizione image of Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin (detail).

Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin relocated to place of origin, but it's a clone

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