Digital reconstruction of a lost heritage: The San Geminiano’s church in San Marco’s Square in Venice

Very often our Cultural Heritage deals with several cases of lost monuments or part of them, due to destruction, replacement or radical changes caused over time. Today the documentation of intangible because lost heritage can be supported by virtual reconstruction, based on a multidisciplinary approach, for both scientific and cultural-leisure applications. Currently, the use of 3D digital acquisition techniques represents the most popular means for the documentation and digitization of our Heritage. The advantage of recreating a detailed virtual model of an invisible place can, on one hand, support scholars in their associated studies, to better understand urban or architectural transformations for example; on the other hand, improving the spread of Cultural Heritage artefacts by using different medium of visualization reaching a wider public directly. To this purpose, geomatics techniques and survey data processing provide a very powerful tool, extracting both geometric and descriptive information. The paper deals with a virtual reconstruction of the San Geminiano Church in San Marco’s Square in Venice, a masterpiece of architecture by the great master Jacopo Sansovino, demolished during the Napoleonic domination of Venice. This is a particular case of today intangible heritage, as part of the artworks, such as statues, altar, paintings, that belonged to this church are now preserved and relocated in the other buildings, distributed over the Venetian territory. Point clouds coming from laser scanning and photogrammetry of the current San Marco’s Square and of the various artworks, distributed in several places of the city, integrated with historical analysis and iconographic sources are the rigorous starting point for the virtual reconstruction of the today invisible Church, by using tools of modeling, of computer graphics up to the creation of 3d printed physical models. These can be considered as an augmented replica, meaning the interaction between digital fabrication (3d printed model), rendering of the digital models, videos and video-mapping just to support communication and disseminating the results and the hypotheses we made about the Church reconstruction, with the most appropriate tools