Scan the World brings Canova to your living room

Hello, I'm Dr Michael Waldron, Assistant Curator of Collections & Special Projects at Crawford Art Gallery. This is a visual arts National Cultural Institution in the centre of Cork, Ireland that welcomes over 250,000 visitors a year.

My role draws on my background in art history, which I taught for 12 years, and my particular interest in sculpture, cast collections, and print objects.  

Digitising our historic Canova Casts seemed appropriate as we marked their bicentenary in Cork. The parallel between 19th-century casting and 21st-century scanning as technologies of reproduction presented a compelling argument for digitisation, while also assisting in the fuller documentation of our wider cast and sculpture collections. The possibilities are endless…  

As a public institution, it is important for Crawford Art Gallery to continue to make its collection accessible and to support knowledge generation. Digitising three-dimensional objects in a manner that communicates their modelling more fully allows our publics, the curious, and researchers alike to appreciate this stunning, sometimes unique forms.  

3D-scanning has enabled the Crawford Art Gallery team to consider our sculpture and cast collections in new ways. Printing in 3D holds exciting potential and adds a new chapter to the storied history of these historic objects.

So many to choose from, but just one of my favourites is Hibernia and Brian Boroimhe (1855) by John Hogan. The artist was an early student of the Crawford when it functioned as a school of art. This sculpture, the original plaster model, came at the end of Hogan's career and is perhaps his most overtly political work, particularly due to its allegorical slant.