Painstaking effort was put into replicating the marble masterpiece

Nicola Salvioli, who had led the group of restorers, had explained how they rendered “the cracks, fractures, stains, abrasions, the more or less smooth parts” of the stone original onto the 3D prints “to give a soul to what is, in reality, a copy that has been transformed from digital into physical matter.”

Copies of Davids past

The statue has so many replicas worldwide that the list has its own Wikipedia page; yet this is the first copy that has been authorized by the museum, which has won a copyright battle over its top tourist draw in 2017. Back then the Galleria dell ’Accademia won a civil suit against a tour company for using an image of Florence’s famous nude without permission in its marketing materials that touted inflated tour prices of the museum. However, in response to a question about the countless David-themed souvenirs sold even in Florence, Hallberg had described them as technically “not legal, but it’s hard to get to the bottom of this.” Digitized copies of David were already attempted as far back as 1997, when Stanford University and the University of Washington had worked on advancing 3D scanning technology.

Twenty years later, director Ridley Scott wanted a full-scale, accurate replica of David for his 2017 film Alien: Covenant, in which an android played by Michael Fassbender, was named after the sculpture.

For this, the production used the plaster cast of David, part of the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as the basis for the film’s replica. It was scanned for eight hours, after which the various scans were merged to form a virtual copy of the sculpture.

Incidentally, the Victoria and Albert Museum sculpture features a detachable plaster fig leaf displayed nearby: a modest cover reportedly meant to shield Queen Victoria’s sensibilities against the figure’s naked glory.