Anthropology of religion:a forensic reconstruction. The face of St. Anthony of Padua

"(...) There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls (...)" 

Sir Thomas Browne

On August 31, 2014 in Brusciano took place the annual "Festa dei Gigli" (lilies party). The protagonist of this celebration, even though we are in Campania, is St. Anthony of Padua. The devotion to this Saint is so strong in the town that the party in his honor is felt by people as more important than the country's patron saint, San Sebastian.

This year's celebration, however, was characterized by an important novelty: one of "Gigli" (Italian for lilies) dedicated to the saint, the "Giglio" of Passo Veloce, led at its peak the effigy of St. Anthony of Padua with its true face.

The "Gigli" are constructions made ​​of poplar, fir and chestnut, in the shape of an obelisk, up to 25 meters and weighing till 50 tons, assembled with nails and rope and decorated with religious scenes. 

The forensic reconstruction of the face of the saint was a team work that has involved, among other institutions, the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Padova (Dr. Nicola Carrara), Arc-Team (Cicero Moraes and Luca Bezzi), the Centro Studi Antoniani (Father Luciano Bertazzo) and Antrocom Onlus (Dr. Moreno Tiziani) and was  presented in Padua during the Antonian June 2014.  

The choice of the devotees of Brusciano is an opportunity of interesting considerations from the point of view of anthropology of religion, which gives us an overview of the relationship that believers have with Italian patron saints. 

The cult of the saints is in fact one of the strongest aspects of religiosity in Italy, being a powerful medium of identity. The Saints are not only representing themselves and their figures are not limited to a religious or hagiographical matter: each saint is primarily a sample of the community which he represents; he is a civic emblem that embodies the character of the city in which he is revered, of the community or the group who elected him as a patron saint and turned him into a "supernatural logo", as well summarized by the anthropologist Marino Niola. He is  a sort of totem, which can inform us about the origin of customs, symbols, characters, and rules of conduct, involving the unique relationship that the saint has with that particular community in that particular area.

It is no coincidence that the day dedicated to the local saint is a festivity day. One day that departs from the others through a series of behaviors which are different from those in use in everyday life: eating differently, dressing differently, following different rhythms given by the holiday.

We have also to consider that, according to popular physiognomy,  there is a correlation between physical features (especially facial), and character traits. The face of St. Anthony, given by the forensic reconstruction of Cicero Moraes, validates the folk imagery of the devotees. In this way the day dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua becomes a ritual representation of the city's tradition, a sacralization of the urban space and an opportunity to rewrite the "identity maps", to rebuild the community in the name of the saint.
Here is how to explain the choice of the believers to use the true face of the saint: the symbolic efficiency of the saint is reinforced by his real look, which embraces the whole community gathered in celebration.

In the video below it is possible to see the "Giglio Passo Veloce" with the statue of St. Athony on his peak (Standard YouTube License by Alessio Italo Jr. d'Alise).

In this image you can see the statue of the saint, done by the sculptor Giacomo D'Alterio and painted by the painter Ilaria Auriemma for the Giglio Passo Veloce of the maker Gerardo Di Palma (photo by Antonio Castaldo).

And here is a panoramic image of the "giglio", done by +Cícero Moraes withe the frame of the video.

Happy birthday ATOR! Two years of Open Research

The 27th of July is the "birthday" of ATOR and like last year in this day I would like to share some statistics about the progress of this experiment.

In one year, the number of active authors has increased from 6 to 13, while the posts reached the quote of 160 (79 last year). The reactions of the community led to 271 comments (96 of which were written in 2012). Currently (19:16 pm) the number of visualizations is 109447 (48899 visits since the activation of the Revolver Maps plugin) and we have 37 new members which, added to the 25 persons of 2012, bring the total number to 61 people.

As you see in the image below the main celebration for 2013 is the achievement of 100000 visits.

This short post is intended as a thanks for all the people composing the community of ATOR, readers and authors as well. 

Thank you for your posts, feedbacks and support! 

Your help was very important in improving and speeding up the research presented in this blog. Thanks to you we reached results which, initially, were not foreseen and in some cases ATOR gave birth to new methodologies that have become rapidly very popular in the scientific community . 

We hope to keep this trend also in the next year and to maintain an high quality level in the field of Open Research!

Software recovery: e-foto rectification module for 64 bit

As you can see from this mail (ArcheOS developer mailing list), since July 2011 one of the problem in mainatinnig ArcheOS e-foto package was related with the rectification module of this software. In fact this module seems to be abbandoned in the latest releases. Unfortunatly this code is very important for our archaeological field-work, being connected with the Metodo Aramus (the procedure we use to obtain georeferencad photomosaics).

e-foto's rectification module at work (Metodo Aramus)

For this reason I fisrt tried to contact the software developers (in the official forum) and then, having too few time to dedicate to this problem (I know, my fault...), I decide to upload the code on github at this link: https://github.com/archeos/rectify. This solution should help to keep the rectification module of e-foto ("rectify") an active project as a stand-alone application, avoiding the risk to become an abbandonware.

However, looking to the development of ArcheOS new release (codename Theodoric), there was still a big problem: I was not able to compile "rectify" with Qt4 also for 64 bit, as ArcheOS 5 should have both a 32 and a 64 bit version.

To solve this situation I asked again the help of the community, writing a post in the italian Qt forum. As you can see from the discussion (sorry, just italian) an user (Tom) helped me in updating the source code. It was necessary to modify just two files: matriz.cpp and matriz.h, so I did a new commit on github and now the code is ready to be compiled with Qt4. I did not yet packaged rectify for 64 bit, but I will do it ASAP. Anyway if someone has this kind of machine and needs to compile the module, he can use the source-code in github (It should work, but if there are problems please report them).

I hope it was usefull.

Ciao.

The commit in the source code (Github)

July 27, 2011 - July 27, 2012: a year of ATOR

Hello all,

today ATOR reaches its first year, so I thought to post and analyze some statistics to see how this experiment of shared research is progressing.

Until now we have six active authors, who wrote 79 posts. The community reacted with 96 comments, although most of them are written by the authors in response to direct questions from readers. Overall the blog counted 21484 visits (8695 visits since the activation of the Revolver Maps plugin, as you can see in the image below).

Today ATOR has 25 members and the general trend is still growing, but sinlge posts may affect the statistics with an increase of visitors related both to the quality of the post and to the interest aroused by the topic. A good example of this situation is the post of Cicero Moraes about forensic facial reconstruction, which has captured the attention of the community of 3D modelers and of physical anthropologists, reching the peak traffic you can see in June 2012 in the graph below.

The post reached also the attention of Ton Roosendaal (original creator of Blender), who wrote a tweet about it:

Anyway, the main strength of ATOR and of an open approach to research remains the active collaboration between researchers operating in different fields (not only archaeologists). In this case must be placed, for example, the new collaborations with the 3D artist Cicero Moraes (already mentioned) and with the anthropologist Moreno Tiziani, creator of anthropological association Antrocom Onlus, which publishes the Online Journal of Anthropology. 
We will go on working with this open philosopy in archaeology, inspired by the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movement, and to further increase the quality of posts in ATOR with the help of the community. As usual, if you want to collaborate, just contact us! 
Thank you.