Bust of Athena of Velletri, goddess of technology

"She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness ... The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology."—Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

This over-life-sized statue’s original design is thought to be from a lost 5th-century BC Greek bronze. Many marble and plaster copies were made in antiquity, and they are all now named after the most famous Roman copy, the ten-foot-tall full-figure marble found near Velletri, Italy, now at the Louvre.

This particular Athena of Velletri data set comes from a 19th-century plaster cast of the Munich Glyptothek’s 2nd-century AD marble. That cast is now in the Skulpturhalle Basel museum in Basel, Switzerland, where I made this 3D capture in September, 2013 as part of my project,Through A Scanner, Skulpturhalle.

I used this survey of Athena of Velletri in my presentation, 3D Printing, 3D Capture, and Opportunities for Design Custodians, which I made to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in early 2014. One of my arguments was that museums interested in raising funds to digitize their collections should start with important works which exist in multiple copies in other museums’ collections.

Athena of Velletri exists in the collections of the Skulpturhalle Basel, the Munich Glyptothek, the Louvre, and LACMA—the Lansdowne Bust (http://collections.lacma.org/node/229717), formerly owned by William Randolph Hearst.

Purchase a 3D print, and she will also exist in yours.

—Cosmo Wenman

cosmowenman.com