Beyond the Lab: Bringing Forensic 3D Scanning Directly to the Fresco

The Collaboration

Overcoming the Boundaries of the Fresco

In a historic partnership with the Comune di Sansepolcro, Italy, Arius successfully completed the on-site digitization of Piero della Francesca’s iconic Renaissance masterpiece, The Resurrection. Deeply rooted in the town’s identity and featured on its official coat of arms, this centuries-old fresco is recognized by art historians as one of the greatest works of Western art.

For centuries, the immovable nature of wall-bound frescoes made high-fidelity, conservation-grade digitization nearly impossible. Frescoes are uniquely vulnerable to environmental degradation and structural shifts, yet they cannot be moved to a lab. 

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Precision and Speed: Scanning In Situ

The Municipality of Sansepolcro became the first in Italy to adopt this futuristic approach, allowing the Arius team to bring our groundbreaking mobile scanning technology directly into the Museo Civico, capturing the masterpiece in situ without any risk to the original plaster. 

Arius’ technical team safely recorded the fresco’s surface geometry and colour with extreme precision down to 10 microns (one-tenth the thickness of a human hair). This advanced system operates eight times faster than previous scanning generations, providing unprecedented field efficiency while strictly preserving the integrity of the masterpiece.

Crucially, the digitization was completed while the Museo Civico remained fully open to the public. Visitors, local citizens, and art historians had the unique opportunity to witness the convergence of 21st-century technology and Renaissance art in real-time, transforming a complex forensic data-capture project into a transparent celebration of cultural heritage.