Documenting cultural heritage sites and objects to the highest possible standards.

In late January 2026, a team from Factum Foundation carried out a two-day specialised practical training session at the Biblioteca Universitaria Hospital Real of the University of Granada, employing a portable Selene Photometric Stereo System to digitise a selection of items from the Library’s collection.

Organised by invitation of the Master’s programme in Advanced Methods in Conservation (UGR+UNIA) and coordinated by Prof. Domingo Campillo, the session was led by Costanza Blaskovic and Carlos Bayod. It introduced a group of graduate students to the documentation of surfaces of works on paper — including manuscripts and maps — providing new layers for research and conservation, thanks to the participation of the Library’s Director Olga María Moreno Trujillo and her team.

The Selene PSS is playing an increasingly important role in Factum Foundation’s ongoing collaboration with the University of Granada, which focuses on the study of different forms of written and inscribed text, from manuscripts to carved epigraphy. Further announcements about new collaborations will follow soon.

On 9–12 April, during the IFPDA Print Fair in New York, the installation ‘Capturing Culture’ will feature evidence of the game-changing techniques being developed and promoted by Factum Foundation Americas. At a time when our natural environment faces unprecedented threats, this installation underscores the urgent need to document and celebrate our planet’s fragile beauty before it vanishes.

Matthew Zucker, publisher of the 2022 book Capturing Nature quips: “Naomi Osaka’s stunning Australian Open look reminded me of that unforgettable moment when a butterfly landed on her nose—proof that nature knows how to make a statement! Just like fashion, art collecting has its trends, and this Spring, it seems butterflies are truly taking flight.” He goes on to mention that “I wanted to create an installation that not only celebrates these creatures but also highlights the importance of preserving our natural world.”

Part of the installation will focus on Factum Foundation’s Selene Photometric Stereo System, developed over eight years of research. This state-of-the-art technology captures surfaces with astonishing precision and has already been employed by the Bodleian Library, British Museum, the Vatican Apostolic Library, and Princeton University. The National Gallery in Washington has just installed a Selene PSS.

The display will also showcase 50 Japanese butterfly and moth nature prints, originally discovered as a manuscript from the Aichi Prefecture created in 1939, and unearthed by Zucker Art Books in 2026.

Factum has been commissioned by Strawberry Hill House & Garden to recreate one of the most iconic features of Horace Walpole’s garden: the Shell Seat, a monumental half-clam shell bench originally designed in 1754 by Richard Bentley. Positioned on Walpole’s “sweet walk” to frame a view of the River Thames, the seat was conceived as both a visual spectacle and a place of sociable engagement — an extension of the drama of the Gothic house into the garden. Walpole was enchanted by it, writing in 1759 about the Duchesses of Hamilton and Richmond and Lady Ailesbury seated together: “There never was so pretty a sight as to see all three of them sitting in the shell.”

A recreation of the bench, installed during the major restoration of Strawberry Hill between 2007 and 2010, has now deteriorated significantly after fifteen years exposed to the elements. Strawberry Hill has launched an appeal to raise £30,000 for a new reconstruction — one built to last. Factum Arte is now working to produce an exact digital record of Bentley’s original eighteenth-century design, enabling a faithful replica to be made in durable, weather-resistant materials. The restored Shell Seat will also serve as a memorial to Derek Purnell, Director of Strawberry Hill from 2020 to 2024, who championed the project before his death last year.

The project deepens a collaboration stretching back over a decade, during which Factum Arte and the Factum Foundation have produced many facsimiles of major works for Strawberry Hill.

Working with one of Factum Foundation London’s trustees, Professor Jerry Brotton, Factum recorded and made a facsimile of a 15th-century Afro-Portuguese ivory salt cellar, one of the most significant and delicate objects in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (PRM) so that it can be used to engage with wider publics on African history and ivory trade.

The salt cellar is part of a body of ivory artworks known to art historians as “Afro-Portuguese” carved ivories (cutlery, hunting horns, salt cellars, boxes) that were made by West African Sapi artists in the 15th and 16th centuries for Portuguese merchants as part of gifts and patronage. It is European in form but the motifs and decorative elements combine West African with European cultural symbols. Because of the Portuguese and later European colonial extraction of raw ivory after this period, the salt cellars and carvings represent a specific interaction between artists and European buyers, as these specific pieces were being commissioned, which gives us a glimpse into the life and knowledge systems of the carvers in a way that we can’t access with raw ivory being traded, or with written records of Portuguese observers.

The finished piece is now in Oxford and will be used in PRM study days and family handling events, as well as exhibited in Brotton’s forthcoming exhibition on cultural exchange in Tudor England and beyond at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to which Factum will contribute other works.

In 2018, the Hill Art Foundation commissioned Factum to make an exact facsimile of Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap. The painting, which was at the centre of a failed fundraising initiative by the National Gallery in 2016, is a portrait of the young, Florentine noble Carlo Neroni. It is one of the paintings mentioned by Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Artists in the chapter dedicated to Pontormo.
The facsimile was made as part of an initiative by Hill Art Foundation to make masterpieces of its collection accessible to a wider audience. The facsimile is on the front and back of the wooden panel.

Every time an original is scanned with the Selene PSS, the volume of data generated is immense. A single scan can produce hundreds of millions of pixels of surface information — heightmaps with sub-millimetre precision that record every detail of the relief surface of the object.

Until now, you could only handle images online that could be viewed as if they were the printed pages of a book. But the data captured by the Selene is not flat: each pixel encodes a height. To understand what the scanner has recorded — to read the surface — one needs to see the relief, light it, rotate it, zoom in. One needs a 3D viewer.

The problem was that no adequate viewer existed. Available 3D visualisation systems are designed for polygonal meshes or geographical data, not for 2.5D surface data at this scale and resolution. Loading a Selene dataset into any of them meant conversions that lost precision, software that needed to be installed, or hardware that not everyone has access to.

Selene Strata is the response to that problem. Developed by Jorge Cano with an open-source ethos, it is a web-based 3D viewer built specifically for the data generated by the Selene PSS. It runs directly in the browser — no installations, no downloads, no special hardware requirements. The aim is to give access to the widest possible number of users.

The video accompanying this text shows an early technical test. The piece being visualised is a nature print by Alois Auer (1853) — a print on paper produced at the Imperial and Royal Court and State Printing Office in Vienna, where the texture of a botanical specimen was captured by pressure between lead and steel plates. The print, measuring 22 × 13 cm, has been scanned at 12.3 microns of resolution, generating a depthmap of nearly 200 million pixels.

In the viewer, the user can change the direction of the light in real time to reveal the micro-relief of the surface — in a way analogous to the raking light inspection used in conservation — and adjust the relief exaggeration to study the most subtle details.

There is still much to refine. What is shown here is an early technical demonstration, not a finished product. But the progress, we believe, justifies sharing it — because it points towards one of the most important goals of the project: that any Selene PSS operator, conservator or researcher should be able to inspect, compare and share the surface data captured by the scanner simply by opening a link.

Among the next steps, compatibility with IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) will make it possible to share Selene data through a standard adopted by museums, libraries and archives around the world, integrating the results of the Selene PSS into institutional catalogues and viewers.