Experiencing Medieval Life: 3-D Modeling and the Medieval Dining Table

High-resolution digital images can give us a great view of a work of art, but static, two-dimensional images cannot compare to the experience of seeing something right before your eyes – there's nothing like the real thing! But with the emerging technologies of three-dimensional scanning, we can get that much closer to experiencing a work of art as if it were right before our eyes. The pieces of art included in this section are items that would have graced the dining rooms of wealthy households in medieval Europe, all of them beautiful objects from the often-overlooked secular world of medieval art. The 3-D models featured here allow you to rotate the object, turning it over to see what’s underneath, or on the back, just as you might do with your hands. In fact, since rare and valuable works of art like these are usually kept behind glass in the museum, these digital models will give you a different kind of experience than you might have even seeing the works in person. Click on the image to load the digital model, and you can scroll down from the model to learn how these objects were made and used. 

Andy Chen ’ 24, Andrew Kim ’ 20, Harry Sherman ’21