Virtualization of the Chiurazzi Sculpture Collection at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, Florida) Madeleine Kraft 1 , Kaitlyn Kingsland 1 , Stephan Hassam 1 , Paolino Trapani 2 , and Davide Tanasi 1(B ) 1 Institute for Digital Exploration, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA dtanasi@usf.edu 2 Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Universit`a degli Studi di Catania, Sicily, Italy Abstract. The concept of using replicas as teaching tools and works of art in and of themselves is not new. Replicas of sculpture and other cul- tural heritage artifacts have been created for important or iconic originals for centuries, with these displayed in some of the most prominent muse- ums around the world. The Chiurazzi Foundry is one workshop of note in the creation of replicas in the 19th century. A large number of these Chiurazzi replicas of statuary from Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as other Roman and Greek sites, are displayed and housed at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. The Ringlings, of circus fame, purchased 50 authentic replicas from the Chiurazzi Foundry in the early 20th cen- tury. These bronze copies are still on display at the museum. With the rise of digitization and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use for these physical replicas in education and accessibility looks increas- ingly to the educational space. Digital replicas hold the same value as the physical replicas and, in this way, the need to digitize these Chiurazzi sculptures for access and education is demonstrated. In the Fall of 2020, the Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) at the University of South Florida (USF) used digital photogrammetry for the purposes of gener- ating a digital collection of the most representative Chiurazzi statues at the Ringling Museum. This paper discusses the best practices and the technical issues in digitizing large-scale bronze statuary and explores the methods for dissemination of a collection for public consumption. Keywords: digital archaeology · digital photogrammetry · cultural heritage · sculpture · virtual collections 1 Introduction The practice of creating replicas of masterpieces of the Classical statuary to offer a more direct experience with ancient art, for training art history scholars c  Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J.-J. Rousseau and B. Kapralos (Eds.): ICPR 2022 Workshops, LNCS 13645, pp. 50–63, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37731-0_5