“The trouble with tech: You get tempted to do some seductive but counterproductive things, just because you can … Hokey digital mashups, I believe, run counter to promoting deeper understanding of the works in @MetMuseum’s collection.”—Lee Rosenbaum, @CultureGrrl

This is my 3D capture of the Skulpturhalle Basel’s plaster cast of the Louvre’s Imaginary Portrait of the Blind Homer, a 2nd-century AD Roman copy of a Greek original.

There are many portraits of Homer that share similar idealized features. Rembrandt’s anachronistic 1653 Aristotle with a Bust of Homer depicts a more finely detailed version than the Louvre’s, but the two busts are similar enough that I was tempted to try a very rough estimate of the positions of Rembrandt’s light sources and vantage point.

In the images above, I have superimposed the results—a rendering of my digitally-lit 3D model—over a high-quality photograph of the Rembrandt made available by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access for Scholarly Content program (which is limited to 2D offerings at present).

If you want solemnity, religiosity, order, and their like, you can pay your respects to original works in museums. But if you favor performance, artifice, and play over earnestness, Homer is now available for your own experiments and retellings.

Download the files at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:196042