Methodology Part 2: Santa Croce Model
Despite the fact that the Renaissance Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence is very well-studied and has been photographed by an endless number of professionals and tourists, there is still no wholesome model of the church's interior online for people to get a complete sense of where every artwork is in relation to the others. Given that the Novitiate Altarpiece by Filippo Lippi and Francesco Pesellino, which is the main artwork that my thesis is focusing on, used to be in the Medici Chapel at Santa Croce but has been replaced by a Della Robbia work and moved to the Uffizi Gallery in the 19th century, it is particularly difficult to visualize how this artwork looked in relation to others and how it fit conceptually in the context of other works commissioned by bankers before Cosimo de' Medici.
Therefore, in order to see for myself and explain to others how exactly the Novitiate Altarpiece fit into the chain of earlier artworks commissioend by bankers in Santa Croce, I have started to design a model of the church in SketchUp and placing each artwork on the appropriate wall inside it in order to see where everything was originally positioned in relation to one another. Naturally, the church is of an extremely intricate design, and creating an exact model of it is not something a novice in SketchUp could do within several weeks. For that reason, I am focusing mainly on its plan and on the position of the paintings on the walls in relation to one another, rather than on the facade or the modern tombs that were placed there later.
The images provided here are a representation of a work in progress: the first one depicts a plan that I used to model the church in SketchUp; second one is my attempt to examine each side of the basilica's exterior in Google Earth in order to get a better sense of the proportions; third and fourth are the very early stages of my modeling as seen from the outside; and fourth and fifth is a glimpse of the Novitiate Altarpiece positioned in the incomplete Medici Chapel.
As mentioned before, this model is to be embedded into the Neatline map of Florence in the end in order for the viewers to be able to see the position, both geographical and chronological, of the works located in Santa Croce to the works commissioned outside of it. As a supplement to the 3D model, screenshots of the model's interior will be provided as well, since the model is difficult to navigate when it is embedded in Omeka.