Callimachus and the Corinthian capital. Animating Francesco di Giorgio Martini's interpretation of Vitruvius 4.1. 9-10.

Animation has a long-standing history as a form of communication that can translate abstract or complex concepts into intuitive visualisations. However, these competencies and experience are challenged when animation is asked to communicate the visual content of depicted objects from illuminated codices that document the early stages of modern science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and architecture. The reason is that the relationship between text and images crafted for practitioners centuries ago needs to be decoded with philological accuracy and encoded into a new medium to communicate to a diversified audience. To accomplish this objective, the research team assembled competencies from fields like codicology, palaeography, history of architecture, and animation. The interdisciplinary method described in this paper can be adopted by scholars in the humanities and practitioners in animation to map and decode the knowledge embedded in drawings depicted in Renaissance treatises on architecture and science, technology, and medicine manuscripts. The investigation focuses on the visual communication of Callimachus' invention of the Corinthian capital as recorded by Vitruvius (De Architectura, 4. 1. 9-10) according to Francesco di Giorgio Martini's visual interpretations in MS Ashburnham 361 (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, 1479-1481, folio 13 verso) and MS Saluzzo 148 (Musei Reali, Biblioteca, Turin, 1481-1486, folio 14 verso). The 3D visualisation of the drawings related to the Corinthian capital demonstrated that digital animation could be an effective tool to visually investigate and reverse engineer the creative process of Francesco di Giorgio and produce philologically correct 3D models of the depicted objects. This kind of virtual reconstruction can be displayed on different innovative platforms and contribute to the advancement of learning in the study of Renaissance treatises on civil and military architecture.1