Photo Gallery Padua Fresco Puzzle Pieced Back Together
Andrea Mantegna painted the fresco during the 15th century at the the Eremitani Church in Padua, a city in northern Italy. But it was destroyed by a bombing raid in 1944. Its virtual reconstruction can be seen in this image.
A team under Massimo Fornasier, a mathematician based in Munich, has created a computer program to help find the original location of some 88,000 fragments. Still, these made up just 10 percent of the original. In between they've painted what the original would have looked like in black and white.
A view of the exterior of the Erimitani Church
The church was reconstructed after the war, but some of the walls remained white. The recent fresco reconstruction has changed this.
The only images of the original fresco were in black and white, though, prompting researchers to use the fragments as a color reference point. This close-up of one photo shows a detail...
...to which the researchers were able to match several fresco fragments with their software.
They also used a process from the field of physics to add color to the old black and white photographs.
Without the algorithm created by the team of mathematicians, it would have been nearly impossible to reconstruct the fresco.
Many of the fragments were no bigger than a coin. Here is a photograph of the restoration ...
... compared to the virtual reconstruction with color.
This series of images shows how the virtual colors were chosen. The image on the far left is the current restoration, followed by computer-generated images to calculate the missing colors.
