Modeling Marble Artworks: The Statue “Oceanus” by Giambologna

The assessment of the structural safety of art works requires the availability of proper models to represent their behavior after the expected excitations. Marble artworks, such as sculptures made in Florence during the Renaissance, are especially sensitive to seismic actions, due to their slenderness, weight, and shape irregularity. The reliable modeling of marble artworks, therefore, is very important for their protection. In these years, many experiences have been made aimed at representing the dynamic response of sculptures after seismic excitations. In this work, a high-fidelity Finite Element model has been compared to a new simple one, consisting of concentrated mass placed in the barycenter of the statue and connected to the soil through two “equivalent” trusses. The comparison has been made on the marble statue “Oceanus”, made by Giambologna in 1570. The sculpture, currently exhibited at the courtyard of the Museo del Bargello in Florence, has a mass of about 2 tons, and a height of over three meters, and it is the only giant statue made by Giambologna. The geometrical modeling of the case-study has been made based on a detailed laser-scanner survey, which provided a comprehensive knowledge of its geometry. The paper provides the first results obtained through the proposed simplified model and a more detailed FE representation.