Test site
Pinacoteca Nazionale of Cagliari | SARDINIA
The Pinacoteca Nazionale (i.e., National Gallery) is one of the expository sites of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Cagliari (the National Archeological Museum of Cagliari). It is located in the Castello district of Cagliari, in the Cittadella dei Musei (the city’s museum fortress), which has been created in the old Royal Arsenal and the city’s medieval fortifications by the architects Libero Cecchini and Piero Gazzola.
The Gallery’s collection of painted works dates from the 15th to the 20th centuries and is exhibited on three floors. The main part of the collection is focused on Sardinia. A particularly relevant part of the collection is a series of retables, which was gathered through the law passed in 1866 on the suppression of religious authorities and the destruction of the church of San Francis, in the old city district of Stampace; later, yet more works from other suppressed religious bodies were added to the collection. In later times, the Gallery acquired important ethnographic collections, of which traditional textiles form a relevant part; the production techniques and the particular colours of these works makes the collection extraordinarily original, as does the variety of Sardinian jewels exhibiting sacred, magical and secular themes.
IDEHA experimentation
The experimentation activities at this site will contribute to the validation of the innovations produced by the IDEHA project in the fields of sensor-based climate monitoring and the enrichment of cultural experiences with multimedia content.
The climate monitoring
In general, monitoring the indoor climate of an exposition space is fundamental to the preservation of works that it hosts. The interaction of the materials which comprise the work with its surrounding environment can cause the transformations commonly referred to as degradation processes. Contrasting these degradation processes requires keeping the works under tightly controlled climatic conditions – this is particularly relevant for works containing hygroscopic materials, such as many of those in the collection of the Pinacoteca. Through this work, IDEHA will allow the Pinacoteca to characterize and monitor the climatic conditions of the exposition environment in more detail than was previously possible, with continuous, detailed and simultaneous measurements of a number of relevant parameters at strategic points across the entire exhibition space. This data will help better understand the interactions over time between the works to be preserved and the environment that hosts them, evaluate the efficacy of the current climate control methods at maintaining ideal ambient conditions and, if necessary, provide important data for the design of an upgraded climate control system.
Multimedia content
On the other hand, regarding the experimentation activities pertaining to the delivery of multimedia content, the IDEHA platform will be used to provide digital content (audio, images, video) to enrich the visits to the Pinacoteca. This part of the work will be focused on the exposition of paintings dating to the XVI century, and particularly those created by the atelier Cavaro – a family of painters that were active between the 15th and the 16th centuries. Starting from their atelier and their retables exposed in the gallery, the multimedia contents will provide a view into the context in which those works were created, allowing the visitor to learn about context provided by the city of Cagliari in the 16th century and some of the most important events of the time.
