Homer by CosmoWenman

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

"The trouble with tech: You get tempted to do some seductive but counterproductive things, just because you can ... Hokey digital mashups, I believe, run counter to promoting deeper understanding of the works in @MetMuseum's collection."—Lee Rosenbaum, @CultureGrrl
This is my 3D capture of the Skulpturhalle Basel's plaster cast of the Louvre's Imaginary Portrait of the Blind Homer, a 2nd-century AD Roman copy of a Greek original.
There are many portraits of Homer that share similar idealized features. Rembrandt's anachronistic 1653 Aristotle with a Bust of Homer depicts a more finely detailed version than the Louvre's, but the two busts are similar enough that I was tempted to try a very rough estimate of the positions of Rembrandt's light sources and vantage point.
In the images above, I have superimposed the results—a rendering of my digitally-lit 3D model—over a high-quality photograph of the Rembrandt made available by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access for Scholarly Content program (which is limited to 2D offerings at present).
If you want solemnity, religiosity, order, and their like, you can pay your respects to original works in museums. But if you favor performance, artifice, and play over earnestness, Homer is now available for your own experiments and retellings.
—Cosmo Wenman@CosmoWenmancosmowenman.com
cosmo.wenman@gmail.com
I captured this work as part of my project, "Through A Scanner, Skulpturhalle." You can see the rest of the results at thingiverse.com/thing:83781
Imaginary Portrait of the Blind Homer
Skulpturhalle Basel accession number 265
Herme des blinden Homer. Römische Marmorkopie nach einer um 150 v. Chr. geschaffenen Bildnisstatue. Paris, Louvre.
Plaster cast molded from the Louvre’s Imaginary Portrait of the Blind Homer, Louvre accession number MR 530.
Photographed with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Sigma EX 50mm lens, September, 2013.
Processed with ReCap Photo.
The Skulpturhalle's plaster cast has broader shoulders than the Louvre's marble. I've included a cropped version of my capture that approximates the width of the original.
The smoothed versions were cleanly decimated with Project Memento, then Catmull-Clark subdivided twice with Blender.
Edited for printing with [Blender]( http://www.blender.org/).
536mm tall
790,000 triangles
My tips for using either ReCap or 123D Catch are here: [cosmowenman.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/using-recap-or-123d/]( http://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/using-recap-or-123d/)
The Aristotle with Homer Simpson cartoon shown above is by Michael Crawford, for The New Yorker, 1992.
Thanks to the [Skulpturhalle Basel]( http://www.skulpturhalle.ch/) museum, and thanks to Autodesk’s Reality Capture division, who sponsored my project, Through A Scanner, Skulpturhalle.