Search Results (2)

There is currently a certain pressure from various mnemonic communities, animated by vernacular interests, to canonize new saints within what is regarded as the flawed saints’ cultural-political movement. Among these new, uncanonized saints, whose memory is commemorated unofficially in various cultural-political registers, there is also the football star Diego Armando Maradona, called by his millions of fans “the Hand of God” (La Mano de Dios). The commemorative culture that thrived around Maradona’s persona—materialized in artefacts, shrines, icon-like paintings, prints, graffiti, stencils, and other memorabilia—do not fit the customary narratives of sainthood, nor to the display and content of the recently inaugurated (2023) memorial to the new martyrs of both the 20th and 21st centuries at Saint Bartholomew Basilica in Rome. The article argues that the commemoration of Maradona by his fans in Italy, Argentina, and worldwide is enacted in pop culture formats aimed at addressing different sets of contemporary mnemonic and spiritual needs. The aim is to offer a fresh conceptual engagement with the contemporary cultural-political phenomenon of “flawed saints” commemoration through the lens of contemporary popular culture, taking the culture of commemoration of Diego Maradona as a case study. Full article

Here, an avant-garde study of three ancient Doric columns of the precious, ancient Romanesque church of Saints Lorenzo and Pancrazio in the historical town center of Cagliari (Italy) is presented based on the integrated application of different non-destructive testing methods. The limitations of each methodology are overcome by the synergistic application of these methods, affording an accurate, complete 3D image of the studied elements. Our procedure begins with a macroscopic in situ analysis to provide a preliminary diagnosis of the conditions of the building materials. The next step is laboratory tests, in which the porosity and other textural characteristics of the carbonate building materials are studied by optical and scanning electron microscopy. After this, a survey with a terrestrial laser scanner and close-range photogrammetry is planned and executed to produce accurate high-resolution 3D digital models of the entire church and the ancient columns inside. This was the main objective of this study. The high-resolution 3D models allowed us to identify architectural complications occurring in historical buildings. The 3D reconstruction with the above metric techniques was indispensable for planning and carrying out the 3D ultrasonic tomography, which played an important role in detecting defects, voids, and flaws within the body of the studied columns by analyzing the propagation of the ultrasonic waves. The high-resolution 3D multiparametric models allowed us to obtain an extremely accurate picture of the conservation state of the studied columns in order to locate and characterize both shallow and internal defects in the building materials. This integrated procedure can aid in the control of the spatial and temporal variations in the materials’ properties and provides information on the process of deterioration in order to allow adequate restoration solutions to be developed and the structural health of the artefact to be monitored. Full article