Roman fragmentary painting: Surveying technologies and methodological approaches

Fragmentary painting, starting from recent years, after being treated for long time exclusively from a stylistic point of view, has entered into the broader material culture’s theme. In this new perspective, this material has assumed a growing dignity as a source of architectural, structural, social and economic information, opening up new perspectives that are currently being adopted also in Italy. For fragments filing there are some well-established protocols, however less attention has been devoted to discuss detection methods and graphic documentation standards for this class of material. This paper, albeit with a limited number of cases compared to what would require the vast topic, proposes, through the analysis of three groups of material, to illustrate and compare relevant techniques and methodologies, including photogrammetry, laser scanning and microscopic photogrammetry, in order to identify good practices and solicit a hoped for broader discussion.