ABSTRACT

Digital presentation and preservation of cultural heritage is emerging and developed gradually under the condition that the digital technique has been widely spread and reached its peak. They gradually come to the attention of most people who are involved in this field. The application of the advanced digital technology to protecting the valuable and rare cultural heritage is not only the good news for culture heritage protection workers, but also a demonstration of how the modern advanced technological innovation has been implemented1. The religious art includes traditional paintings, frescos, sacrificial utensils such as the Priests’ vestments (using during the religious worships), Tabernacle, Eucharist Light, and chalices and so on. They are the holy, exquisite, simple and distinctive Catholic arts introduced to China by missionaries from Western countries as the sign of western religious civilization. Generally, those paintings and frescos in the Church have higher aesthetic value. In addition, they symbolize the golden age of the Catholic civilization in history. However, unfortunately some of Catholic paintings have been severely damaged due to historical event like the Cultural Revolution in 1960s.Some of them have fallen off or faded naturally as time goes by, especially the frescos. This thesis aims at restoring the religious art, such as frescos in the Catholic Church, sacrificial utensils and sacred images through textual arching, photographing, and video recording. The data collected through the technological means mentioned above, emphasize the integrity of unitary materials. But the link between various kinds of materials is sort of disconnected, especially it seems difficult to fully present the relations between all kinds of different materials while doing in-depth study. In the

meantime, the paintings and frescos are still undergoing a series of changes due to the territorial differences and the extent of protection diversity. Thus, in view of protection and inheritance of religious art, more should be focused on working out the application strategies of digitization innovation and protection of Catholic Church art. At the same time, the data collection technology based on virtual reproduction has also been centered on all kinds of archaeological sites, museum of cultural relics, and ancient architecture of digital reconstruction projects and suchlike. For example, Dongming Lu, a Professor of the School of Computer Science at Zhejiang University, who presided the projects of “Archaeological Sites: Information Collection and Reconstruction Techniques” and “Digital Dunhuang”—a project invested by National Development and Reform Committee.1 These projects put particular emphasis on recording the external information of the material objects, such as the materials, patterns and styles and so on. This thesis works on combining the traditional technique means and digitization techniques. The approach is to implement the integrated digital techniques, which consist of two parts, namely, the material collection and database building. They made an all-round information acquisition toward the cultural space of religious art. In addition, they proceeded with the database construction based on the collected information in order to prepare for the further presentation and research projects.