The studio copying masterpieces before it’s too late

The idea meets resistance, because a copy sounds like a lesser thing. "Lots of negativity, I think," said Costales Dalton. A painting is held to have an aura a reproduction cannot carry, "and one could argue that maybe that aura is its value, and its financial value.”

Factum's reply is that its copies are not lesser, and that the original is not the fixed, sacred thing people imagine. Its scans are accurate to about 98 per cent, close enough that "the naked eye can't tell if you put them side by side". And the original is always changing. The Mona Lisa has been restored so heavily across four centuries that "you're never looking at the original painting", Costales Dalton explained.

The organisation’s stand at FOS Future Lab made that argument with an original 17^th-century painting, a facsimile of it, a colourless recording of its surface, and an X-ray exposing an earlier painting hidden underneath. "It's also about showing how originality is a process and how surfaces change."  

How you copy a thing you cannot touch

Factum records these surfaces with scanners it designs and builds itself. The first of these, the Selene scanner, was prototyped by Head of R&D and technology Jorge Cano in 2018 and had it working by 2021, capturing surfaces with almost no relief: copper plates, manuscripts, paper, paintings. Alongside it, the Lucida laser scanner maps the fine topography of a painting, because a painting is not flat.

Cano's proudest piece of work is a viewer that runs in an ordinary web browser and lets a researcher handle a painting nobody is allowed to touch, turning it, zooming in and relighting it from any angle. "A raking light is an important technique for researchers," he said. "It's just using a torch and using in a small angle, you can get most of the relief on the surface."

The finished records are kept in at least three copies, in old, universal image file formats like TIFF, chosen so the data can still be opened long after today's software is gone, rather than becoming a disc no one has the machine to play.

From Tutankhamun to a Formula 1 seat

In 25 years, Factum has surface-recorded the tombs of Tutankhamun and Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, gathered every marble sculpture Michelangelo carved into a single exhibition in Copenhagen, and, in a three-week campaign just finished, captured the three Caravaggios of a chapel in Rome, which Costales Dalton describes as "absolutely breathtaking".

Nothing is off the table, and asked what he would record next given the choice, Cano said, "Maybe the surface of the Moon." At the Goodwood Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard, Factum’s technology could capture a 1950s Formula 1 car down to "every small detail of the skin of the seat".

It all rests on a quiet heresy that turns out to be plain fact: nothing lasts. Paint fades, marble cracks, cathedrals burn and ships sink never to be seen again. The object behind the glass is only its latest state, on its way to being lost like the rest. What Factum makes is the copy that survives.

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Main image photography by Charlie Brenninmeijer.

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