There was a really interesting piece in last week's New Yorker on "The Factory of Fakes" -- Adam Lowe's 3D reproduction project, Factum. A taste:
"Factum made its reputation in 2007, with a replica of Paolo Veronese’s monumental painting 'The Wedding at Cana,' which Napoleon presented to a new museum, the Louvre, after ripping it off the wall of a refectory in Venice in 1797. The painting’s place in the refectory, which was designed by Palladio, had never been filled; Lowe installed his copy in the exact spot. Factum’s noninvasive protocol, in which their scanner’s lasers captured every whorled brushstroke without touching the canvas, was in stark contrast to the Louvre’s restoration of the painting, in the nineteen-nineties, during which it accidentally fell onto some scaffolding and was gored in five places. ... When Italians witnessed the unveiling of the Veronese replica, in the creamily lit space where the artist intended his masterpiece to be seen, many of them wept. Bruno Latour, the French theorist, championed the 'Cana' project, and he and Lowe later wrote an essay about it, in which they referred to a 'migration of the aura' from original to copy."
