We have seen technology venture into the arts in assisting connoisseurship, and in authentication. There have always been fakes and copies, but the new technology seems extremely accurate and will assist scholarship as well as replicate delicate works for viewing.
To read the full WSJ article, click HERE.Whether to rewrite history or reinterpret masterpieces, replicas made with a palette of high-tech tools are changing the way tourists see art.
All three of these faithful fakes are the work of Madrid-based Factum Arte, a company that employs high-resolution 3-D scanners of its own devising to reproduce artworks.
The scans result in thousands of files whose images are stitched together, then churned out by flatbed pigment printer onto canvas primed with historically accurate paints. To get the clone closer to the real thing, conservators fill in any ridges or creases from manhandling or restoration by hand afterward.
Founded by painters Adam Lowe and Manuel Franquelo, Factum Arte now employs 30 specialists, with offices in London and Madrid. The company's first major project was a facsimile of Spain's Altamira cave completed in 2001. The cave, whose ceiling dances with Paleolithic drawings of animals, closed in the late 1970s because carbon dioxide was destroying the Unesco heritage site.
"We had to overcome a lot of prejudice at the beginning," said Mr. Lowe. "There were a lot of bad, theme-parky copies made in the '60s and '70s. We're not making big posters. We now have the technology that can give people an emotional double-take."
Mr. Lowe imagines a near future where facsimiles substitute some real attractions that are too fragile to endure the harmful carbon dioxide from the mouths of awed tourists
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