Restoring the Ruin
Shaping missing pieces
Before carving a new piece of marble to fill a gap,
team members first fashion a plaster cast of the absent piece, like the brown cast seen to the
far right here. As they have in
many instances throughout this project, they then turn to an ancient tool and
technique. They use an antique mason's device called a pantograph, seen
here, to record the three-dimensional shape of the cast. They then
painstakingly transfer that shape, point by point, to the new marble.