Notes

The facsimile was printed on Factum Arte”s purpose-built flatbed printer (figure 34). This is based on an Epson Pro 9600 digital printer. The printer uses pigment inks in seven colors (cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, black and light black). The bed is fixed, and the print heads move up and down the bed on linear guides. The movement of the heads is accurate to a few microns, and their height can be adjusted during printing. This made it possible to print the image in pigment onto gesso-coated canvas. The gesso coating, a mixture of animal glue, calcium carbonate, and precipitated chalk, used no metal oxides. The texture on the surface of the 16-ounce Irish flax was made from flax fibers and threads mixed with gesso. Due to its history Le Nozze di Cana has a complex and unusual surface. To reproduce this appearance, each piece of canvas was coated with a layer of animal glue, a layer of gesso and fibers, and then two layers of gesso. Acetate sheets printed with the Phase One photographic data were used, with a pin registration system, to ensure accurate placement of the texture on the prepared canvas. Each panel was then printed twice in perfect register. The first layer to be printed was the information recorded on the Phase One photographs. The second layer was the scanner data. The overprinting resulted in accurate color matching and a control of the tonal values of the painting. The entire image was divided into printing files, with io centimetres of overlap. The printed panels were varnished with a satin Golden acrylic varnish with UVLS (an ultraviolet filter)

Factum Arte built a non-contact color scanning sys tem that uses a large format CCD and integrated LED lights. The system records at a scale of i s i at a maximum resolution of i,2oo dots per inch (dpi). The scanning unit is mounted on a telescopic mast, which is operated by an air pump and can accurately position the scanning unit on the vertical axis.

Appendix. The process used to create an accurate facsimile of Le Nozze di Cana by Paolo Caliari (called Veronese)

Veronese’s Nozze di Cana,

There is nothing inherently “virtual” in digital techniques-and for that matter, there is nothing entirely digital in digital computers!’ The association of the digital with the virtual is entirely due to the bad habits associated with just one of its possible displays: the pretty bad screens of our computers. Things are entirely different when digital techniques are only one moment in the move from one material entity-Veronese’s Nozze version n – i in the Louvre-to another equally material entity-version n + i in San Giorgio.

facsimiles have a bad reputation-people assimilate them with a photographic rendering of the original-and “digital” is associated with an increase in virtuality. So, when we speak of digital facsimiles, we are looking for trouble.

three-dimensional

Mona Lisa addicts

“original location”

ethereal design that could be lifted out of its materiality and downloaded into any reproduction without any loss of substance.

reproduction of the Holbein instead of the Holbein itself to the visitors of the National Gallery-“the Ambassadors” remains behind all successive restorations

Some revivals-the good ones-seem to extract from the original latent traits that can now (or again) be made vivid in the minds of the spectators.

BRUNO LATOUR AND ADAM LOWE

unlimited fecundity of the original.

digital reproduction

knee-jerk reaction-“But this is just a facsimile”

To stamp a piece with the mark of originality requires the huge pressure that only a great number of reproductions can provide.

original possesses an aura,

complex digital processes that Factum Arte, a workshop in Madrid, had used to de- then re-materialize the gigantic Parisian painting: laser-scanning it, A4 by A4, photographing it in similarly sized sections, scanning it again with white light to record the relief surface, and then somehow stitching together the digital files before instructing a purpose-built printer to deposit pigments onto a canvas carefully coated with a gesso almost identical to that used by Veronese. (Adam Lowe describes the process in an appendix to this essay.)

in the Mona Lisa room, although every part of the painting looks just the same (as far as she can remember), the meaning of the painting seems entirely lost. Why does it have such a huge gilt frame? Why are there doors on both sides? Why is it hanging so low, making a mockery of the Venetian balcony on which the guests are crowded? The bride and groom, squashed into the left-hand corner, seem peripheral here, while in Venice, they were of great importance, articulating a scene of sexual intrigue that felt like a still from a film.

No description can replace seeing this original … oops, I mean, is this not the very definition of `aura’?”

The Migration of the aura through its facsimiles

Switching Codes