Acropolis Kore 678

"[Kore 678] is attired in a travesty of the Ionic costume betraying faulty imitation ... The garments fit so closely to the body behind as to suggest absolute nudity. Here again we have unintelligent imitation."—Guy Dickins, Catalogue Of The Acropolis Museum, 1912

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This is my 3D scan of the Skulpturhalle Basel's late 19th-century plaster cast of the Athens Acropolis Museum's Kore 678. The 6th-century BC marble figure was found west of the Erechtheion in 1886.

The thin raised lines that trace the figure's contours are remnants from the 19th-century piece-mold technique used to make the plaster cast. These parting lines were not considered defects, and expert mold-makers would leave them intact, thereby leaving a record of their work.

Kore 678 has been described as "Pseudo-Ionic" because its clothing appears to be an odd and imperfect rendering of the Ionic style. A 1912 catalog of the Acropolis Museum speculates that Kore 678 could have been made by "an early Attic sculptor, who wanted to make a figure in imitation of the new fashion just coming in."

Unlike the bulkier dress of most korai, Kore 678's clothing is impossibly close-fitting, revealing an idealized female form beneath.

—Cosmo Wenman
@CosmoWenman
cosmowenman.com
[email protected]

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I captured this work as part of my project, "Through A Scanner, Skulpturhalle." You can see the rest of the results at thingiverse.com/thing:83781

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Mädchen mit Mäntelchen
Skulpturhalle Basel accession number 407

Mädchen mit Mäntelchen. Inselmarmor. Vom "Rampinmeister" abhängig. Um 530 v. Chr. Athen, Akropolismuseum Nr. 678.

Plaster cast molded from the Acropolis Museum's Kore 678. (The Skulpturhalle has two such plasters with the same identification. They are identical except one has a faux patina likely added in the 1950s. This scan is of the pure white one.)

Scanned with a FARO Edge Arm with V5 Laser Line Probe at 0.25mm line space with 0.035mm precision, September, 2013.

A few very small mesh holes were repaired with Project Memento.

The lower-res versions were cleanly decimated with Project Memento.

Oriented and cropped with Blender.

1015mm tall

9 million triangles

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Thanks to the Skulpturhalle Basel museum.

Thanks to FARO and FARO's Daniel Mazzolini and Thomas Weinert for making laser scanning equipment available to me.

Thanks to Chris Bartschat and Florian Fünfschilling for their expertise and for operating the equipment.

And thanks to Autodesk’s Reality Capture division, who sponsored this project.

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