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Can you solve the mystery of at Saint-Gaudens Historic Site?

 

More than a century ago, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his assistants to sealed shut roughly two dozen sculpture molds. The molds were put into storage for safekeeping.

Since then, the molds have passed from the Saint-Gaudens family to the non-profit Saint-Gaudens Memorial to the National Park Service. They also survived a catastrophic studio fire in 1944. Through the years, the identities of many of these sealed molds had been lost. Until now.

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The National Park Service at Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish and the Department of Diagnostic Radiology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock?s medical center in Lebanon have developed a partnership to non-invasively peek at what these molds contain.

With computed tomography (CT) scanning, normally used for creating an image of the inside of a patient?s body without surgical intervention, radiologists were able to scan the open interior spaces of these molds and then extrapolate the negative space into a positive digital image of what these molds would have been used to cast.

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They also took the additional step of converting these CT scans into stereo lithography which have been used to 3-D print casts of these original Saint-Gaudens works.

One of the scanned mold, after processing was found to be a Saint-Gaudens work previously unknown to art history. Park staff would love public assistance in trying to identify this individual.

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