Artworks at our fingertips: A solution starting from the digital replication experience of the Annunciation in San Giovanni Valdarno

Abstract

The Annunciation is a remarkable artwork painted in the early 1430s by the Dominican friar Giovanni da Fiesole, better known as Beato Angelico, and now preserved at the Museum of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy. It is a wide tempera painting with some fine gold foil placed on a wooden support, representing many symbolic details hard to be fully appreciated at a distance by the observer. To enhance the museum's visitor experience on it, as well as providing scholars with a tool to help deep investigations, a digital high-resolution Digital Twin of the painting was developed. This paper summarizes the outcomes of the process, introducing the custom software applications and hardware solutions that were customized for the artwork's digital replication. Exploiting digital photogrammetry and photometric stereo techniques, the model was prepared to host colorimetrically corrected maps at Gigapixel resolution, reaching a high-definition measurable detail threshold and following a well-established process refined over time by the authors. The fruition of such a complex model was performed through a custom process ending in AnnunciatiOn App, a solution integrated by both graphical and physical touch interfaces, whose features grant a deep interaction with the Digital Twin on kiosks destined to exhibitions. The results feed the discussion on the production and communication of digital replicas of artworks in museum collections and how they can be upscaled to be targeted to simple visitors as well as scholars and restorers.