Found in the Archaeological digs around the Cypriot town of Morphou, this colourful goblet found the the UNE Museum of Antiquities’ Stewart Collection is an excellent example of the Sgraffito techniques that became increasingly more popular throughout Europe & North Africa during the 15th and 16th centuries. (Henry, Alison; Stewart, John, eds. (2011). Practical building conservation. Mortars, plasters and renders. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. p. 99.
This technique involves the surface being covered with a fine pale slip which would be incised through to the underlying body and then covered with a transparent glaze, and often highlighted with splashes of coloured glaze. (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/x116910)
We can see this these techniques on display all over our goblet invoking vivid colours, but something that doesn’t display is the transparent glaze that covers said colours. In person you can see any source of light catching and glinting off this glaze which adds to the effect. This is one of those tricky features of materials that doesn’t play well the reconstruction techniques we have on hand bar fully building a model from scratch.
Transparent materials affects the light that is a building block reconstruction techniques, and in this case a transparent glaze acts as an invisible barrier to the sensors trying to acquire the data of the object. I invite you to go to the surface tool within the Pedestal3D instance of this object and change the ‘diffuse mode’ to ‘colour,’ rather than ‘image’ and look for the carved lines across the goblet. What I think you will notice is that they look far less prominent than you would expect. Now this doesn’t represent the artifact correctly, its a byproduct of the transparent glaze on top.
The sheen of the glaze which adds to the spectacular nature of the artifact in person is also amiss within the model – much due to the same causes mentioned above.
The main takeaway is to say, that whilst these models may work to represent the original as best they can, they cannot, be it through technical or user ability, ever truly represent the original. With this in mind, a viewer should always keep a critical eye about them to see what is shown, but also, what isn’t shown.
I’d also like to make a quick reference, that this model was created by my colleague Gabriel Hooper in collaboration with me.
If you have an object you use in your teaching and learning and would like to talk about what options are available to make them a virtual object – come and have a chat with the Learning Media team (learningmedia@une.edu.au).