Multidisciplinary Non-invasive Approach for the Reassembling of two Fragmented Roman Statues

This paper reports a case study on the analyses performed for reassembling two fragmented statues coming from the Archaeological Museum in Turin and belonging to the Savoy collection. A scientific and multidisciplinary approach to conservation is nowadays strongly required. This new approach consists in the dynamic integration of different scientific and digital analyses to determine in detail all phases of the work, with the purpose of minimizing the intervention to what is strictly necessary. For this purpose a precise knowledge of the type of material and conditions of the fragments, of the location and coupling of the ancient pins, and of the overall stability of the reassembled statues is required. Due to the uniqueness of the investigated masterpieces the use of non-invasive techniques is mandatory in order to preserve the materials. Several non-invasive or micro-invasive analyses on the statues' fragments were thus performed and are hereafter reported: laser scanning and close-range photogrammetry, X-ray radiography and ultrasonic measurements, petrographic analyses. The final step of the work will be the preparation of models of the two statues with the Finite Element Method (FEM) for strain localization and stability analyses in order to quantitatively evaluate the feasibility of different restoration options.