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The De Piro-Leopardi Collection

The De Piro-Leopardi Collection was first identified at the Milwaukee Public Museum. In the early 1970s, a large collection of Maltese antiquities was sold and donated to the Milwaukee Public Museum by a Mr. Leopardi and his wife Francoise née De Piro. Research on the collection revealed that the collection was part of a much larger antiquities collection that had been amassed in earlier generations of the noble De Piro family. The project has subsequently traced different pieces of the collection through historical research and seeks to unite them all in a virtual collection.

The Collection(s)

Between 2017 and 2021, 217 archaeological artifacts from the Milwaukee Public Museum the Haggerty Museum in (Milwaukee, WI) and St. Agatha’s Museum and the Domus Romana in Rabat, Malta were captured and processed to be “e-united” virtually (P.I. Stephan Hassam). These objects cover a large range of chronology, from the Phoenician period to the early modern period, and consist primarily of funerary goods related to funerary feasting in the Punic and Roman periods of Mata, with a smattering of terracotta figurines, glass, and metal objects relating to other periods.

Virtualization and Data Curation

The objects were captured at their respective museums using structured light 3D scanning and digital photogrammetry Archaeological and historical metadata of the various artifacts in the different collections require substantial research to reconstruct and recontextualize them archaeologically and historically. Research spanned archives in Malta and Milwaukee and is periodically updated as more information becomes available. The IDEx database is structured according to the Dublin Core schema.

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Global Digital Dissemination

The 3D models of the archaeological artifacts from the various museums will be disseminated online on the 91tvӰԺ IDEx Sketchfab to reconstruct a fuller version of the original collection than any museum could individually display. 91tvӰԺ IDEx is also working on an innovative method to link the historical data with the 3D objects to narrate the provenances of each collection.

 

Miniature ceramic theatrical mask by 91tvӰԺ Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) on Sketchfab