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CIS has become a veritable third eye for restorers and art historians. Paolo Spezzani, a Venetian radiologist who pioneered the technique with Olivetti, has applied it to hundreds of familiar paintings, sometimes with startling results. In one case, an examination of Titian's Albertini Madonna and Child turned up a praying saint hiding under the baby's chubby legs. In another instance, the procedure helped prove that the so-called Sketchbook of Raphael, long thought to be a 17th century copy, actually did contain early 16th century drawings from Raphael's Umbrian school that had been later covered over in ink.
Sometimes the simplest application of the computer, as an electronic archive, is the most effective. At Pompeii, experts from Fiat and IBM, aided by more than 100 young workers, cataloged thousands of frescoes and mosaics scattered over 36,000 hectares (89,000 acres) of the Vesuvius valley. Result: + a computerized map that makes a great deal of art history instantly accessible. Says Aldo Todini, IBM's operating director for the project: "If you see a house on the map, you can go into that house, go right up to a wall, ask the computer what's painted on it and see the fresco in living color."
Computer operators at the Sistine Chapel can call up a vast library of information for every square meter of fresco, from the location of weakening areas to the curves of the artist's underlying sketches. On the screen, green lines mark the beginning and end of each day's work for Michelangelo, providing historians with a graphic record of his progress as he struggled to master the art of painting face upward in soft plaster. It took him an exhausting 29 days to do 15 square meters (18 sq. yds.) of The Flood, even with several helpers. By the time he reached The Creation of the Sun and Moon, however, he could cover the same space in seven days without any help at all.
Art-restoration computers in Italy have become nearly as ubiquitous as masterpieces. In Bologna's Church of Santa Maria della Vita, a computer analysis of body postures showed art historians how to piece together a disassembled 15th century terra-cotta sculpture of Christ and six grieving figures. In Rome a computer has created a perfect electronic "mold" of the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius. Says Giorgio Accardo, head of the physics lab at Italy's Central Institute for Restoration: "The idea is to put Italy's artworks on a computer disk so that if somebody chops off an arm or a leg, we can re-create it."
But even the smartest computer cannot decide what to do with the information it gathers. An analysis of Tintoretto's Paradiso uncovered a coat of arms that had been painted over with a cloud, presumably by new owners. The decision to remove or not to remove was one that had to be made by art historians. (In the end, they decided to bring the coat of arms back to light.) The loincloths in the Sistine Chapel pose a trickier problem. Michelangelo's nude figures in The Last Judgment so offended the prelates of the 16th century that they ordered papal artists to cover the bodies with strips of cloth. An analysis of the underlying layers makes it unlikely that the outerwear will be removed, however. Before the loincloths were added, Michelangelo's original painting was physically scraped away.