Salviati’s ceiling at Palazzo Grimani

A sixteenth-century painted ceiling has been returned to the Palazzo Grimani in Venice in the form of a facsimile made by Factum Foundation. The original ceiling was painted for the Palazzo by Giuseppe Porta, also known as Giuseppe Salviati, and shows the dispute between Minerva and Neptune over the city of Athens. Factum recorded both the ceiling itself, which is now in the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, and the oval space which it once occupied in the Palazzo Grimani; this data was used to ensure that the final facsimile would fit into the ceiling’s original context.

Francesco Salviati’s ceiling painting of the dispute between Minerva and Neptune, now in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris – Institut de France © Studio Sébert Photographes

The painting was commissioned for the ceiling of the Vestibolo della Tribuna in the Palazzo Grimani, one of the great 16th century palazzi of Venice, and executed in the 1560s. In 1893 it was sold by a Milanese dealer to the French collector Edouard André, and before the end of the decade it entered the collections of André and his wife Nélie Jacquemart, which in 1913 would become the Musée Jacquemart-André. To this day, the museum houses one of the major collections of Italian art in France. Within the museum, the painting is displayed on the ceiling at the centre of a square smoking room.

Le Fumoir in the Musée Jacquemart André, the room in which the painting is now kept © Factum Foundation

From 7 May 2019 to November 2022, the Palazzo Grimani welcomed back many of its original sculpture collections for an extended exhibition. To coincide with this, they commissioned Factum Foundation to create a facsimile of Salviati’s ceiling, which was placed in its original location, the entryway to the Tribuna, the vast room in which a collection of 130 ancient sculptures was once exhibited.

The ceiling in the Palazzo Grimani © Factum Foundation

Recording the painting in the Musée Jacquemart-André

As the painting is fixed to a ceiling in the Musée Jacquemart-André and could not be recorded using the Lucida 3D scanner, Factum Foundation used panoramic photography and photogrammetry to scan the work in February 2019. Panoramic photography, which involves taking hundreds of paintings from a static point (single point), was used to record the surface of the painting itself. These photos are joined together into a single composite image, and software is used to correct the distortion which results from the fact that every picture is taken from a single point (and therefore some parts of the painting are inevitably further away from the camera’s lens than others). Panoramic photography is also used by Factum to ensure that the colours of a scan and a facsimile correspond precisely to the colours of the original. Photogrammetry, which involves taking hundreds of photos from different angles, was used to record the frame. This technique allows for the capture of the contours of a complex, multifaceted surface.