News Release

Michelangelo cheated

Reports and Proceedings

New Scientist

OH WELL, no one's perfect. For centuries, Michelangelo's sculpture David has been held up as the ultimate in male physical beauty. But now a laser scan of his face has revealed the truth: he squints.

"The gaze directions of his eyes actually diverge," says computer scientist Marc Levoy of Stanford University in California, who spent a sabbatical making computerised images of Italian sculptures.

One of the project's aims was to capture views that Michelangelo never intended us to see. In David's case, this includes the full-frontal view of his face, which is usually hidden by his upraised left hand. Levoy is convinced that Michelangelo did this on purpose.

In the classic three-quarter view (see Photograph, below right), the 5.2-metre-tall David is looking slightly off to his left-eyeballing Goliath, before felling him with a slingshot. In left profile he stares straight ahead like a portrait on a Roman coin. "It's a typical Michelangelo trick," Levoy says. "He optimised each eye for its appearance as seen from the side."

These days you rarely see the left profile because you'd have to look through the wall of the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. But it was in plain view at the sculputure's original site, which was outside the Palazzo Vecchio.

To create his images (see above right), Levoy shone a thin sheet of laser light onto the statue and recorded the shape of the beam edge as it swept across the surface. Repeated scans can be overlaid to generate an image that is detailed enough to show chisel marks less than a millimetre across and tiny cracks in the marble.

Levoy revealed David's squint by hoisting the scanner onto a gantry and pointing it straight at David's face. But first he had to add an extra metre to the gantry to compensate for an error in the Accademia's guidebook, which lists David as standing 14 feet (4.3 metres) tall plus 6 feet of pedestal.

"My initial response is that it's very interesting," says Peta Motture, a Renaissance sculpture expert at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which owns a cast of David. "He's always been interpreted as looking into the distance. I might need to go away and have another look at him."

Levoy has now turned his attention to one of archaeology's most enduring puzzles, the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant map of ancient Rome carved onto marble slabs around 200 AD. The map now lies in more than 1000 pieces waiting to be reconstructed by hand. Levoy hopes that three-dimensional scans of the broken edges can be used by a computer to help piece the jigsaw together.

"The broken surfaces give us strong three-dimensional cues for fitting the pieces back together," he says. Levoy is now developing the algorithms the computer will use to fit the pieces together automatically.

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Author: Graham Lawton

New Scientist issue: 10th June 2000

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