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Mattia Mercante

External collaborator


Activity information

Curriculum

He obtained his diploma in 2007 from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in the Ceramic, Plastic and Glass Materials department, and has worked as a cultural heritage conservator since 2008. Alongside traditional conservation practice, he employs a methodology that makes use of digital three-dimensional data acquisition and management tools. Following a period at a private studio in Milan, where he also worked on contemporary art, he resumed his collaboration — as a freelance conservator — with the Opificio from 2014, on the occasion of the restoration of Michelangelo’s *River God* at Casa Buonarroti. Since then he has accumulated extensive experience combining conservation with digital documentation and the direct integration of 3D scanning and printing into everyday workflows, also as a direct intervention on cultural heritage objects — including the *Visitation* in Pistoia by Luca della Robbia, a multi-material reliquary from the Treasure of the Grand Dukes of Florence, the Cosimo panel by Grinling Gibbons, and the *Annunciating Angel* of Capannori. In addition to documentation, planning and conservation work, he has undertaken commissions relating to the communication of art for visually impaired audiences, carried out through three-dimensional digital scanning and printing — including the survey of Michelangelo’s *Bandini Pietà* at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, collaborations with Studio Tactile in Paris for tactile replicas of sculptures at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier and Palazzo Zevallos in Naples, and others. Within the OPD he manages the scanning and printing equipment in the Ceramic, Plastic and Glass Materials department. Since 2018 he has been responsible for three-dimensional surveys of the Winged Victory of Brescia and collaborates with the ISCR in Rome on the documentation and conservation project for a first-century AD *caldarium* discovered in the Tor Vergata area.