“Giotto, Italy”, art and technology exhibition

The exhibition "Giotto, Italy", opened until January 9, 2016 at Palazzo Reale, curated by Pietro Petraroia and Serena Romano, offers visitors and scholars a new and thrilling visual experience: from December 12 the exhibition will include the room of the Caryatids, where a multimedia installation offers a completely new experience of the Cappella Peruzzi in Santa Croce, Florence, decorated by Giotto in the first decade of the 14th century with very high quality tempera painting but also great material delicacy; an extraordinary masterpiece that unfortunate events in the following centuries seriously damaged, making it very difficult to observe and understand.

The Municipality of Milan – Palazzo Reale, thanks to Fondazione Cariplo and the support of Bracco Foundation, offers a suggestive life-size reconstruction of the Cappella Peruzzi, thus allowing a broader public to experience in first person scientific discoveries and visual emotions that were before the privilege of a very few experts.

It all began with digital photographs taken in total darkness under rays of ultraviolet light as part of a research project developed by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (Florence), thanks to the support of The Getty Foundation and of Villa I Tatti - The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies.

From here came the project to develop and create the innovative multi-vision proposed in the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale next to the Giotto, Italy exhibition, implemented by an integrated research group of the Milan-Bicocca University and the Istituto di Bioimmagini e Fisiologia Molecolare del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IBFM - CNR). Thanks to a complex intervention of reconstruction and mimetic processing of more than 500 UV photographs and the corresponding natural light photographs, a result of the diagnostic studies carried out on the walls of the chapel, the researchers were able to reproduce that the general public the visual experience of the Giotto frescoes “revealed” in a new light.