Athena of Velletri

"She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness ... The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology."—Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

This over-life-sized statue’s original design is thought to be from a lost 5th-century BC Greek bronze. Many marble and plaster copies were made in antiquity, and they are all now named after the most famous Roman copy, the ten-foot-tall full-figure marble found near Velletri, Italy, now at the Louvre.

This particular Athena of Velletri data set comes from a 19th-century plaster cast of the Munich Glyptothek’s 2nd-century AD marble. That cast is now in the Skulpturhalle Basel museum in Basel, Switzerland, where I made this 3D capture in September, 2013 as part of my project, Through A Scanner, Skulpturhalle.