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.