Since the advent of photography, art historical research has relied on photographic reproductions of artworks. Photographic reproductions allow art historians to easily compare artworks, and are useful in creating art historical reconstructions, since photographs can be edited and re-positioned with much more flexibility than most museum objects. Authors often connect this reliance on two-dimensional reproduction to the traditionally elevated position of painting in art history, compared to sculpture. However, in the past decade digital methodologies that focus on 3D reproduction have become increasingly prominent, offering a new way to work with reproductions of sculpture and with art historical reconstruction.
My PhD project looks at the epistemic value of digital 3D reconstructions within art historical studies. Currently, I am working on the St Mary altarpiece, sculpted by the Utrecht sculptor Adriaen van Wesel in 1471. This altarpiece was taken apart in the 19th century, but eleven sculpted fragments of the altarpiece are still preserved in various collections. By creating digital 3D scans of these individual pieces and by combining archival sources with technical research, I am working on a digital reconstruction that conveys the historic appearance of the altarpiece when it was completed 1477.
The Mary Altarpiece serves as a case study through which I explore the epistemic value of digital reconstruction as a methodology, and how this methodology can be compared to pre-existing (photographic) methods of reconstruction. In this paper, I focus especially on the way in which 3D digital reconstructions can deal with notions of objectivity and ambiguity. Digital reconstructions are often understood as highly objective, but they often represent knowledge that is uncertain or subjective. By exploring various recent digital reconstruction projects, including projects in architectural history, and by examining my own work in digital reconstruction, I set out to explore this tension between the perceived objectivity and the actual represented knowledge in the digital reconstruction.