Konica Minolta has opened an excellent online Museum of Beauty that allows its visitors to better understand the Louvre’s famous sculpture of Venus de Milo. One of the world’s most famous Greek sculptures, the statue is a slightly over-life size image of Aphrodite or Venus, the goddess of love. She so fascinates the public that the gallery in which she stands in the Louvre is usually mobbed with visitors snapping photos as quickly as possible - making a real and reverential visit impossible. Now, however, with the help of Konica Minolta, devotees and scholars of the sculpture can examine her up-close at the Museum of Beauty.
Discovered in fragments on the Aegean island of Milos in 1820, the sculpture made its way to Paris where it was reassembled in the early 19th century. Now, however, Venus has extended her domain, taking the forces of love and beauty into the virtual world . How does a Greek goddess impose her image on our computer screens? Using a laser measuring instrument, Konica Minolta gathered the 3D data from the statue, then processed it and texture-molded it, in order to make a laser reproduction of the statue.
Data was acquired by means of a non-contact 3D digitizer which projects a red laser light on the statue and captures the reflected light with a CCD camera ( you can see a demo at the Museum of Beauty). Some 300 scans were made.
What was gained by the process? First and foremost, the resultant Museum of Beauty website, provides a way to see and study the Venus de Milo even if you’ve not got time to dash to Louvre. Details abound: the sculpture’s scarred surface - a testament to years of wear and tear before her discovery - is shown up-close; evidence that she once wore a golden ornament in her hair is likewise visible; and so are the holes that once bound a bracelet to her upper right arm.
The missing arms are among the most notable aspects of the Venus. Though she was found with arms, it was discovered in reconstruction that those arms were created later than the sculpture itself, thus a decision was made to leave them off. So what did her original arms look like? Was she holding a hair ornament? A mirror? Was she reaching for her lover, Mars, the god of war? The question remains unanswered, but Konica Minolta used their 3D data to recreate the sculpture in a variety of poses.
