Augustus

thingiverse

In his book God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert muses on leadership as the role of a deity. I captured a 3D model of the Skulpturhalle Basel's plaster cast of an ancient marble bust from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, which is in the style of the famous Prima Porta portrait of Augustus. Camille Paglia describes this iconic image as a masterpiece of aesthetics-as-statecraft in Sexual Personae. The Roman persona, she says, had "severity, weight, density," reflecting the importance of law and custom as sacred ends. My 3D capture project, titled "Through A Scanner, Skulpturhalle," showcases this and other sculptures from the museum. The bust, which is 551mm tall and has 1.2 million triangles in its digital model, has a repaired right nostril from the 19th century. I used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Sigma EX 50mm lens to photograph it, then processed the images with ReCap Photo before refining them with Blender for printing. The Skulpturhalle Basel and Autodesk's Reality Capture division supported this project.