Sculpting Virtual Reality

摘要

In 1555, Michelangelo took a hammer and broke his unfinished sculpture of Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary, Nicodemus, and the body of Christ into 15 separate pieces. A contemporary of the temperamental Renaissance man repaired the broken statue, although the left leg of Christ was still missing. It still isn't clear what prompted Michelangelo to mutilate his work, but art historian Jack Wasserman of Temple University in Philadelphia hopes that a new digital representation of the sculpture will offer him some clues. Already, thanks to the work of a team at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., he has been able to see what the main part of the statue would have looked like before the broken pieces were replaced.