The Halicarnassus Mausoleum, a Digital Rereading. Step 1: The Statues at the British Museum

Well known as one of the Seven Ancient World’s Wonders, the Mausoleum built by Mausolus in Halicarnassus is one of the many lost masterpieces from the past. Its architectural and artistic high quality just left a large bounce of fragments and ruins, leaving to all the scholars a rich subject for studies and to imagine possible reconstructions. In this ongoing research, a try of collecting the single parts and make some matching with other possible references is done starting from 3D digital modeling. Photogrammetry was used on a set of statues from the British Museum, for creating accurate 3D models, with a great attention in finding correspondences with other sculptures and features (faces, dresses, details) from other artworks from the same area. The use of the SfM/IM (to give it a very specific definition) [Guidi et al. 2015], commonly indicated as SfM/IM photogrammetry (tuned out again to be a great tool for rapid and accurate digitalization, all the models were then edited, simplified and uploaded to the Sketchfab platform to be a quick reference for all the participants to the research group, but also accessible to anyone for seeing and checking these interesting pieces from the past. Such an operation, starting from the statues trays to bring on some reflections about proportions, stiles and relationship with architecture to better understand and verify possible new reconstruction choices about this long lost architectural wonder.