3-D Digital Modeling and Giuliano da Sangallo's Designs for Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato

摘要

Giuliano da Sangallo (ca. 1445-1516) was an architect capable of managing the entire architectural process, from conception through realization. The pilgrimage church of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato (begun 1485), a milestone in Italian Renaissance debates around Greek cross-shaped churches, reveals both Sangallo's competence in building complex structural elements and his adherence to Leon Battista Alberti's theories (Figure 1). The complexity of Sangallo's design process makes it difficult to understand many of the architectural issues he tackled in this project, the solutions proposed in his drawings, and the eventual translation of his drawings into brick and stone. In this article, we overcome these difficulties by using three-dimensional models to analyze the church and its design process (Figure 2). Typically, a digital 3-D model of a building results from the virtual assembly of many architectural components. When those individual elements are coded to identify their mutual structural relationships (for example, where columns bear the load of a lintel, or where a cupola distributes its weight onto a drum), the 3-D model can be described as a semantic data model.