Tracing the Past: a digital analysis of the Lady Chapel vaults at Ely cathedral

摘要

This paper describes how contemporary digital surveying and modelling tools are used to augment our understanding of medieval vault design. The Lady Chapel at Ely cathedral in the east of England forms a case study to demonstrate this process, which is contributing to a larger investigation of medieval vaults across England and beyond. The use of laser scanning to document church and cathedral ceilings is described and how subsequent outputs from this, notably orthographic point cloud images and 3D mesh models, enable us to interrogate key geometry relating to vault ribs. With the acquired digital data, a process of reverse engineering is performed, starting in plan followed by full 3D projections, to hypothesise how medieval vaults were designed.