The Advent of the 4D Mirror World

The 4D Mirror World is considered to be the next planetary-scale information platform. This commentary gives an overview of the history of the converging trends that have progressively shaped this concept. It retraces how large-scale photographic surveys served to build the first 3D models of buildings, cities, and territories, how these models got shaped into physical and virtual globes, and how eventually the temporal dimension was introduced as an additional way for navigating not only through space but also through time. The underlying assumption of the early large-scale photographic campaign was that image archives had deeper depths of latent knowledge still to be mined. The technology that currently permits the advent of the 4D World through new articulations of dense photographic material combining aerial imagery, historic photo archives, huge video libraries, and crowd-sourced photo documentation precisely exploits this latent potential. Through the automatic recognition of “homologous points,” the photographic material gets connected in time and space, enabling the geometrical computation of hypothetical reconstructions accounting for a perpetually evolving reality. The 4D world emerges as a series of sparse spatiotemporal zones that are progressively connected, forming a denser fabric of representations. On this 4D skeleton, information of cadastral maps, BIM data, or any other specific layers of a geographical information system can be easily articulated. Most of our future planning activities will use it as a way not only to have smooth access to the past but also to plan collectively shared scenarios for the future

From calle to insula: the case of Santa Maria della Carità in Venice

The histories of the monastery of Santa Maria della Carità and of the Scuola Grande della Carità are interwoven with the urban physiognomy of the extreme offshoot of the sestiere of Dorsoduro, the very tip of which overlooks St. Mark’s basin, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore (where the Benedictine monastery lies) and the island of the Giudecca.The history of the original founding of the monastery of Santa Maria della Carità has its beginnings on land owned by the Zulian family, on which Marco Zulian had decided to establish a place of worship surrounded by other properties owned by the family1. The land was located along the San Vidal canal, which would eventually become the Grand Canal. The monastery had been affiliated with Santa Maria in Porto outside Ravenna since1134, and the decision to relocate seems to have been imposed from aboveby Pope Innocent II, who urged the canons either to establish themselves inthe assigned seat or to give it up. A few years later the new coenoby cameinto its own, cutting loose from the founder’s family and following the Ruleof St. Augustine. The monastery’s next two settlements in the lagoon were San Salvador and San Clemente in Isola, the religious founding of which was promoted by Enrico Dandolo. Both were crucial parts of Venice’s early urban fabric: the church of San Salvador was built upon divine revelation in the central commercial area of Rialto while the monastery of San Clemente was a resting-place for pilgrims on the island of the same name, located on the route connecting the area of St. Mark’s, the Lido and the mouths of the lagoon. The complex of the Trinità, located near the abbey of San Gregorio and thus connected to the monastery of Santa Maria della Carità, was another transit point for pilgrims en route to the Holy Land2

Big Data of the Past

Big Data is not a new phenomenon. History is punctuated by regimes of data acceleration, characterized by feelings of information overload accompanied by periods of social transformation and the invention of new technologies. During these moments, private organizations, administrative powers, and sometimes isolated individuals have produced important datasets, organized following a logic that is often subsequently superseded but was at the time, nevertheless, coherent. To be translated into relevant sources of information about our past, these document series need to be redocumented using contemporary paradigms. The intellectual, methodological, and technological challenges linked to this translation process are the central subject of this article

Machine Vision Algorithms on Cadaster Plans

Cadaster plans are cornerstones for reconstructing dense representations of the history of the city. They provide information about the city urban shape, enabling to reconstruct footprints of most important urban components as well as information about the urban population and city functions. However, as some of these handwritten documents are more than 200 years old, the establishment of processing pipeline for interpreting them remains extremely challenging. We present the first implementation of a fully automated process capable of segmenting and interpreting Napoleonic Cadaster Maps of the Veneto Region dating from the beginning of the 19th century. Our system extracts the geometry of each of the drawn parcels, classifies, reads and interprets the handwritten labels

Une approche computationnelle du cadastre napoléonien de Venise

Au début du xixᵉ siècle, l’administration napoléonienne impose à la ville de Venise la mise en place d’un nouveau système de description standardisé pour rendre compte de manière objective de la forme et des fonctions du tissu urbain. Le cadastre, déployé à l’échelle européenne, offre pour la première fois une vue articulée et précise de la structure de la ville et de ses activités grâce à une approche méthodique et à des catégories standardisées. Les techniques numériques, basées notamment sur l’apprentissage profond, permettent aujourd’hui d’extraire de ces documents une représentation à la fois précise et dense de la ville et de ses habitants. En s’attachant à vérifier systématiquement la cohérence de l’information extraite, ces techniques évaluent aussi la précision et la systématicité du travail des arpenteurs et des sondeurs de l’Empire et qualifient par conséquent, de façon indirecte, la confiance à accorder aux informations extraites. Cet article revient sur l’histoire de ce protosystème computationnel, décrit la manière dont les techniques numériques offrent non seulement une documentation systématique, mais aussi des perspectives d’extraction d’informations latentes, encore non explicitées, mais implicitement présentes dans ce système d’information du passé.At the beginning of the 19th century, the Napoleonic administration introduced a new standardised description system to give an objective account of the form and functions of the city of Venice. The cadastre, deployed on a European scale, was offering for the first time an articulated and precise view of the structure of the city and its activities, through a methodical approach and standardised categories. With the use of digital techniques, based in particular on deep learning, it is now possible to extract from these documents an accurate and dense representation of the city and its inhabitants. By systematically checking the consistency of the extracted information, these techniques also evaluate the precision and systematicity of the surveyors’ work and therefore indirectly qualify the trust to be placed in the extracted information. This article reviews the history of this computational protosystem and describes how digital techniques offer not only systematic documentation, but also extraction perspectives for latent information, as yet uncharted, but implicitly present in this information system of the past

Visual Patterns Discovery in Large Databases of Paintings

The digitization of large databases of works of arts photographs opens new avenue for research in art history. For instance, collecting and analyzing painting representations beyond the relatively small number of commonly accessible works was previously extremely challenging. In the coming years,researchers are likely to have an easier access not only to representations of paintings from museums archives but also from private collections, fine arts auction houses, art historian However, the access to large online database is in itself not sufficient. There is a need for efficient search engines, capable of searching painting representations not only on the basis of textual metadata but also directly through visual queries. In this paper we explore how convolutional neural network descriptors can be used in combination with algebraic queries to express powerful search queries in the context of art history research

The Replica Project: Co-Designing a Discovery Engine for Digital Art History

This article explains how the Replica project is a particular case of different professionals coming together to achieve the digitization of a historical photographic archive, intersecting complementary knowledge specific to normally unconnected communities. In particular the community of Art History researchers, brought together here in relation to their common methodologies in the practice of visual pattern research, became protagonists in the construction of a specific tool, the Morphograph, to navigate through the archive’s photos. A specific research problem, the recognition of visual patterns migrating from one work to another, became the key to developing a new technology initially intended for a specific community of users, but with such a generic character in its approach that it could easily be made available to other uninformed users as learning by doing tools. The Morphograph tool also made it possible to demonstrate how, within a community, the partial expertise of individuality needs to be related to each other and benefits enormously from the knowledge densification mechanism made possible by the sharing. The digital context easily makes it possible to create tools that are specific in terms of content but generic in form that can be communicated and shared with even diverse and uninformed communities

The oltramontani Network in Venice: Hans von Aachen in Context

Thanks to recent archival and historical researches it is now possible to specify the identity of some personalities told in the Lives of Van Mander relating and in close contact with Hans von Aachen. The reconstruction of Venice and Treviso context, in which the artist moves, shows a thick network of relationships woven by Flemish and German communities. The presence of a portrait by Hans von Aachen in the collection of paintings of Francesco Vrients is information very valuable: firstly outlines the painter as an intimate friend of the family Vrients, and in the same time the discovery of the inscription on the drawings of Cephalus and Procri (presented for this exhbition) it is an important pointer for profiling the Vrients-circle and its relationships with the flemish jewellers lobby. Indeed is him the collector of Maastricht mentioned by Van Mander and one of the most eminent flemish personality in the lagoon, around whom, probably, gravitated intellectuals and artists: is a fact that in his house, in Campo Santa Maria Formosa, found hospitality the literate Pieter Cornelisz de Hooft on the occasion of his trip in Italy in 1599. Additional documents shall also specify the role of Gaspar Rem in a venetian and international context: his strong tie to the circle of the “Sadelers” who, especially with a shrewd art dealer like Giusto, play a crucial role promoting artists “Oltramontani” weaving friendship with Dirck de Vries, Rottenhammer, Joannes Koenig to name a few

"Een Italische Keucken van Dirick de Vriese" The Commercialisation of the Artistic Identity between Venice and the 'North'

In the second half of the sixteenth century the artistic exchanges between Venice and the Low Countries intensified. Although no Venetian painters settled in Antwerp or in the cities of the Low Countries, several painters of Flemish origin, in particular Dirck de Vries and Ludovico Pozzoserrato, moved to Venice. These two personalities fostered the circulation in Venice of paintings produced in Flanders and, in the meantime, produced paintings featuring some subjects characterized by a marked Venetian identity.The essay examines in particular the subjects of Kitchens, domestic interiors with various characterizations, and the Carnival, another subject matter peculiar of the lagoon, which was exported and spread rapidly to the North. The presence in the collections of wealthy Antwerp merchants of these subjects, codified as 'Venetian', even though produced by artists of Flemish origin, is an important element defining the perception of this production identified as a 'Venetianity' and carefully managed by foreign artists

Carlo Helman : merchant, patron and collector in the Antwerp – Venice migrant network

This contribution is part of the monographic number of the Nederlands Yearbook for History of Art dedicated to a large overview on the “Art and Migration. Nethelandish Artists on the Move, 1400-1750”. In the dynamics of migration, circulation, establishing trough Europe in the Modern Era, the network’s analysis play a fundamental role. The essay explores the prominent role played by Antwerp merchants in Venice in forging contacts between artists, patrons and agent of art in promoting the exchange of goods and ideas within their adopted home. In the course of the 16th century, and more particularly towards the end of that period, the complex network of Netherlandish merchant families, operating on a European level, played a crucial role in the circulation of artists, paintings and other artworks in Italy and beyond. The article proposed here deals with Carlo Helman, a Venetian resident of Antwerp origins, a major figure whose importance in this context has been insufficiently studied. Helman’s family firm traded in practically every kind of commodity, ranging from wool and spices to pearls and diamonds, and, indeed, artworks, “in omnibus mundis regnis”, as we read in the commemorative inscription on his monumental tomb in the Venetian church of Santa Maria Formosa. A high-class international trader in Venice, Helman was consul of the “Nattione Fiamenga”. Helman had a conspicuous collection of art, including classics of the “Venetian maniera” like Titian, Veronese and Bassano, but also important pictures by Northern masters. Moreover, his collection contained a remarkable cartographic section. In Venice, Helman had contacts with the Bassano dynasty, Paolo Fiammingo, Dirck de Vries, Lodewijck Toeput (Pozzoserrato) and the Sadeler brothers, artists who, in one way or another, introduced novel themes and typologies on the Italian, and, indeed, European market. The dedication to Helman on a print by Raphael Sadeler, reproducing Bassano’s Parable of the Sower, photographs the merchant’s role in the diffusion of Bassanesque themes in the North. Helman’s connections with the Zanfort brothers, dealers in tapestries and commercial agents of Hieronymus Cock are further indications of the merchant’s exemplary role of collector, merchant and agent of artists in a European network of “art” commerce