updated Thu March 18 10:25 am by Nicole Martinelli
Two magnificent warrior statues are at the center of a heated debate in Italy on cloning artwork.
The Riace bronzes, 6.5-foot tall Greek statues found in the 1970s off the coast of Calabria, are credited with creating tourism in this impoverished Southern area.
Although remarkably well preserved, they are too fragile to be sent abroad for exhibits, so authorities argue that instead of holding them hostage, high-tech super copies would act as a sort of itinerant travel brochure for the region.
More than just passable copies, clones are created using a laser scanning technique that copies and reproduces the surface on resin, including minute details like chisel marks. Models, first made in foam, are molded into plaster and then cast using resin filled with marble dust. The price tag for cloning the Riace statues is estimated at 500,000 euro. Italian officials wanted them ready to send to Athens for the 2006 Olympics.
The tug-of-war over cloning the statues is passionate, even by Italian standards.
After 3,000 grass-roots protesters turned out in a candlelight vigil to protest the operation, cloning was blocked by a regional court. Federal government overturned the local sentence, then Culture Minister Giuliano Urbani stepped into the fray by ordering an investigation into the ramifications of cloning the statues. Press reports claimed, with typical Italian drama, that it was too late — that partial clones have already been made in secret.
“It’s insane, they’re throwing what we have away,” said Calabrian architect Michele Servidio, who spent his university years studying Renaissance masterpieces first-hand in Florence. “Art shouldn’t always come to you. In this case they are also taking the art and leaving us with very little.”
According to Italy’s national tourist board, Calabria owes “eternal gratitude” to the bronzes for creating a flow of “hundreds of thousands” of visitors to the country’s poorest region, better known for an unforgiving rocky landscape and organized crime. Locals fear visitors would not travel all the way down to the toe of Italy to see the statues if clones made a world tour.
Debates over these exact copies will likely become more common as technological advances meet a country that UNESCO estimates holds 60% of the world’s art treasures. In May 2002, two statue clones of Priapos and Flora by Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini were installed in the Garden of Delights at Rome’s Borghese Gallery, filling a gap left when indebted heirs sold the originals over 50 years ago.
Cloning has also been proposed for the Dancing Satyr, another statue coughed up by the sea between Sicily and Tunisia after 2,400 years in 1998. After five years of restoration, the Greek bronze left Sicily for a temporary exhibit in Rome in 2003, sparking a still unsettled debate over ownership and ‘parking rights’ to the masterpiece.?1999-2004 zoomata.com
Zoomata is the brainchild of a bilingualjournalist based in Italy who thinks out of the box. This brain is for hire.
Related resources:
Stolen Figs: And Other Adventures in Calabria
http://www.museionline.it/museicalabria/eng/cerca/museo.asp?id=1718
The National Museum of Archaeology in Reggio, current home to the Riace bronzes