Heritage Digital Archive & Digital Collection Planning

Museo dei Saperi is an interactive digital installation that brings thousands of late Renaissance illustrations from the personal library of Duke Francesco Maria II della Rovere to life.

Rather than simply displaying static images, Segmento Futuro has designed an immersive, interactive installation that allows visitors to navigate freely, zooming in and moving around within constellations of illustrations.

At its heart, the installation is an experience in data art: the original sixteenth-century taxonomies—the way the illustrations were categorised in the duke’s library—are faithfully preserved and translated into a digital architecture. Visitors can explore different categories of illustrations, discovering which themes or “folders” were most prevalent and gaining insight into the cultural interests and intellectual priorities of the Renaissance period.

One of the main challenges was to display thousands of images simultaneously while also allowing users to view them in high quality and appreciate every detail of each illustration. We used an approach based on LOD (Level of Detail): each image is loaded at different resolutions. The system selects the resolution according to the zoom level (when an image is far away, the low-resolution version is rendered; when it is close, the higher-resolution version is used), ensuring the system remains optimised and zooming remains smooth.

The project is designed to be self-sustaining over the years, thanks to bespoke software that automatically updates thousands of illustrations from the research department’s online database while preserving the original taxonomy.