Transdisciplinary Conservation of Sant’Andrea Pulpit in Pistoia (Italy): The Structural Perspective

Cultural Heritage structures are key elements of societies’ cultural iden-tity and strategic assets in modern economies. Their conservation requires the collaboration of a wide range of specialized professionals from different technical fields. Statues or other artifacts, composed of an assembly of rigid blocks, are a particular subclass of CH structures with invaluable historic and artistic signifi-cance, often coupled with an inherent structural fragility. This paper discusses the multidisciplinary approach to the conservation problem of the Pulpit in the church of Sant’Andrea in Pistoia (Italy), a medieval masterwork by the Italian sculptor Giovanni Pisano, with a focus on the structural perspective. The conservation project has involved the use of laser scanning techniques, the implementation of an exper-imental campaign for material characterization, the design and installation of a structural monitoring system, the dynamic identification of the structure, and it has just completed the stage of design and calibration of a numerical model for safety assessment. The results of the current stage of the conservation project are presented hereafter.