Abstract :

The Digital Reconstruction method is part of a broader research project, Architectura Redepicta, aimed at intersecting various methodological approaches to the study of the domestic interior in pictorial art history. The project has a double aim: to establish a critical method for analyzing images as repositories of data, information, and knowledge, and to develop pedagogical applications in which architectural representation serves as a heuristic tool for teaching art and architectural history. In pursuing these goals, the visualization process is repositioned within an art-historical context, where it expands the interpretative tools of both disciplines and offers a model of interoperability between research and didactic experimentation.

The process is grounded in the figurative tools of architects—their very language—traditionally employed in the service of design and creative production, but here transformed into operative critical instruments. Its application to a series of case studies, drawn from different historical periods and geographical contexts yet united by their authors’ attention to domestic interiors, serves to test its validity. The development of a compilative procedure makes it possible to reorganize the extracted dataset systematically, rendering it comparable across different artworks, generating new connections, and fostering the emergence of new knowledge for specialist scholars.

The project does not seek to replace established approaches—such as formalism, iconology, semiotics, sociology, and material culture—but rather to enter into dialogue with them within a methodological constellation. The analysis starts from the premise that each case study already contains, in latent form, a repository of data to be activated. These data emerge progressively through the process of digital reconstruction, which enables their gradual extraction and subsequent interpretation. Each phase generates new data—always latent within the image—through the integration of the information elaborated in the previous stage. In this way, the procedure produces an initial level of information, subject to revision and refinement in subsequent phases, which serve to validate hypotheses, correct provisional interpretations, and disclose further elements. At each step, digital reconstruction is also confronted with historical knowledge external to the process itself: once brought into relation with the information obtained, this preliminary knowledge allows the development of different and progressively more articulated forms of historical understanding.

Through the phases of Redrawing, Reshaping, Rematerializing, Resynthesizing, and Remanipulating, the process of Digital Reconstruction decodes the artist’s narrative filter and offers a comparative vision of represented and perceived reality.