3D model of cosmowenman
The models were repaired and checked for printability.
Colossal bust of Ramesses II, the 'Younger Memnon'
I captured this piece
...Show more at the British Museum in October, 2012. I've printed it at around 4" tall, and cast another copy in bronze at around 10" tall.
From the British Museum's web entry:
Weighing 7.25 tons, this fragment of his statue was cut from a single block of two-coloured granite. He is shown wearing the nemes head-dress surmounted by a cobra diadem.
The sculptor has used a slight variation of normal conventions to relate his work to the viewer, angling the eyes down slightly, so that the statue relates more to those looking at it.
It was retrieved from the mortuary temple of Ramesses at Thebes (the 'Ramesseum') by Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. Belzoni wrote a fascinating account of his struggle to remove it, both literally, given its colossal size, and politically. The hole on the right of the torso is said to have been made by members of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the statue.
The imminent arrival of the head in England in 1818 inspired the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to write Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This is not the sharpest of scans -- the original is ten to fifteen feet in the air, so I could only shoot it from a distance, and at very low angles. The lighting wasn't great either. (I'll have much better access, lighting, and results in the near-ideal setting at the Skulpturhalle!) I normally wouldn't publish a low-res scan like this, but the overall form is there, and unmistakable. And some of the hieroglyphs did come through. It makes for a nice, easy print so I thought it'd be worth sharing.
Because the original was made from a single piece of stone, there's something scale-independent about the design, including the fracture. Even printed small, it looks plausible as a "real" object, as opposed to something like, say, a mini Eiffel tower.
I've printed two copies for myself so far, one at 1/20th scale and another at 1/10th scale (in two parts). It makes for a stately little print.
I don't think printing it full scale is in the cards any time soon, but I would like to print one at least human scale. I'll share those multi-part printable files here too when it's done.
https://twitter.com/CosmoWenman
