The object · 01/02
Testa di centauro, inv. MC 1137.
A colossal centaur's head in marble: matted hair, a full parted beard, a brow folded into a scowl, the tip of the nose lost somewhere in the last two thousand years. The neck ends in an ancient break — the body was never found.
The museum ties its style to the sculpture groups of Sperlonga — the Blinding of Polyphemus above all — and reads it as a Tiberian-age creation after late-Pergamene models: Hellenistic baroque, executed for a Roman garden. It surfaced during the 1874 building works on the Esquiline, in the grounds of the ancient Horti Lamiani, the imperial pleasure gardens near today's Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
It is displayed in the Sale degli Horti Lamiani of the Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome.
- Object
- Head of a Centaur — Testa di centauro
- Collection
- Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori — Sale degli Horti Lamiani
- Inventory
- inv. MC 1137
- Period
- Tiberian, AD 14–37
- Material
- Marble, mounted on a grey marble socle
- Height
- 97.5 cm as displayed
- Findspot
- Rome, Esquiline — Horti Lamiani, 1874
The scan · 02/02
Ten photographs, one solid.
Ten handheld photographs
One slow pass around the display stand, 12 megapixels each, museum lighting as found. That is the entire capture rig.
Photogrammetric reconstruction
COLMAP registered every camera, triangulated a dense cloud on consumer GPU hardware, and meshed it watertight. Surface colors are projected straight from the photographs, with per-camera exposure alignment.
The honest part
The photographs covering the left-rear of the head were backlit by a window and slightly blurred, so stereo matching found no reliable depth there. That arc is bridged with a smooth surface instead of invented detail. Ten frames buy you a faithful face and an approximate back of the skull — bring six more photos and the pipeline will finish the job.