Badia, Church and Cloisters, Florence

Florence As It Was has multiple aims within its broad goal of recreating selected structures in the city as they appeared in the year 1500. The pointclouds and photogrammetric models we build certainly serve their purposes as visual portals into the past, but the translations of early modern descriptions, transcriptions of contemporary documents, and the creation of a database of people, places, and things weaves these images into layers of information that help us interpret what we see. Intended as a study tool (as opposed to a substitution for the real thing), this project provides users with a combination of the type of original source materials that historians of art and architecture in particular typically use when crafting scholarly works. Its multi-variances routinely force us to make choices and adhere to a list of priorities as we go. We have progressed deliberately and with an eye toward posting the most original portions of our work first, and then filling in the gaps later on. We have concentrated much of our attention on the physically and politically challenging work of securing permissions, traveling to Florence, and then using state-of-the-art technology to scan the most important structures in the city before editing and modeling those scans so that they reflect accurately the dimensions and color patterns of those buildings.

“Florence As It Was”项目的总体目标是还原佛罗伦萨市内部分选定建筑在1500年时的原貌，在此框架下包含多项具体工作目标。我们所构建的点云（pointcloud）与摄影测量模型（photogrammetric model），本就可作为通往往昔的视觉窗口发挥作用；但结合早期近代文献描述的译介、同时代原始文献的转录，以及构建涵盖人物、地点与事物的数据库，可将这些视觉影像整合为多层级信息体系，助力我们解读所观测到的内容。本项目旨在作为学术研究工具（而非实体古迹的替代品），为用户提供艺术史与建筑史研究者在撰写学术成果时通常会使用的各类原始史料整合资源。项目推进过程中存在诸多不确定性，这要求我们不断做出抉择，并始终遵循既定优先级清单开展工作。我们始终稳步推进工作，优先将已完成的原创性成果公开上线，后续再逐步填补现有空白。我们已将大量精力投入到兼具实操与行政双重挑战的工作中：包括获取相关使用许可、赴佛罗伦萨开展实地数据采集，随后使用最先进的技术对市内核心建筑进行扫描，再对扫描数据进行后期编辑与建模，以精准还原这些建筑的尺寸参数与色彩纹理。