Rucellai Chapel by Leon Battista Alberti in Florence: a new survey aimed to the interpretation and promotion of the monument

Leon Battista Alberti planned, in the middle of XV century, the renovation of Rucellai’s family Chapel in Florence and designed the Holy Sepulchre temple as a Renaissance reinterpretation of the Jerusalem original one. In the occasion of the 5th century anniversary of his birth, new studies have been performed on his works. The Rucellai Chapel appears now to be as a little precious building (the Holy Sepulchre) within another simpler space defined by a barrel vault, pilasters and a complex pediment. This work presents a new complete survey, aimed to support new restoration tasks. Integrated application of innovative survey techniques allowed us to combine high level of detail with effective communication tool as a 3D model, also assuring a projected metric accuracy. Several kinds of data have been collected to store an almost complete geometrical and radiometric documentation of the Chapel: information given by classical topographic survey and analogical stereo-plotting have been integrated with new technology skills offered by 3D scanning systems. Vectorial data, surface model and raster images concur to build different kind of bi-dimensional and three-dimensional graphical representations.