Church Floor Artifact

This article contains information on a typical Church Floor Artifact.

For a list of Churches, see Churches. For a more information on the artifacts, see Church Floor Artifacts.

Church Floor Artifacts

Total Number of Artifacts	2221

Classification

Tombs

A tomb, or tomba, is the most common form of floor artifact. These tombs mark the location of an actual burial at one point in time. Due to health concerns and flooding, the body may have been moved so may no longer be in the Church. A tomb marker may be either a large rectange or small square, depeding on the type of burial and the wealth of the family. Both types can be seen below.

• 
  A rectanguar tomb
• 
  A smallet tomb marker

Plaques

An example Plaque from SS. Nome de Gues

A plaque, or placca, is the second type of artifact. A plaque has an inscription, but is not a tomb. They often represent years of constuction/restoration or prominet contributers. More importantly, they do not mark the final resting place of someone. Plaques are less common than tombs and are often smaller. An example can be seen here.

Condition Evalutation

In order to create a ranked list of atifact damage, an equation that takes into account the five different types of damagea assessed by past WPI projects was created. The types of damage are fading and wear, text readability, cracks, holes and joint gaps. The equation was developed through experimentation with different weights in the equation so that could be seen visually (such as surface damage and text wear) could be expressed numerically. After using the following equation to standardize the rankings assigned to each artifact, the conditions were divided into five catagories of damage.

(.25)(Fading and Wear) + (.25)(Readability) + (.20)(Cracks) + (.05)(Holes) + (.20)(Joint Gaps)

The five catagories of damage are as follows:

Excessive Damage: The artifact is too far degraded that no more information would be saved if the artifact were to undergo restoration.

High Damage: The artifact is in need of preservation in order to maintain the image or text visable on the artifact. The text is still readiable, but is in danger of being worn away to an extentent that would lose all information on it.

Intermediate Damage: The artifact has sustained some damage in any of the mentioned types of damage, but is still mostly readable. Preservation could occur, but the artifact is not yet in critical condition.

Low Damage: The artifact has very little damage on its surface. The text is nearly flawless adn only minimal efforts would need to be made in order to maintain the artifact.

Minimal Damage: The artifact has hardly any damage, all the text and artworl is readable. At this time, there is no need for preservation.

See Also

For a complete list of Churches in Venice, see Churches. For statistics on these foor artifacts found in the churchs of Venice, see Church Floor Artifacts.

Bibliography

Dechaine, Danielle, Hennessey, Meghan, Orszulak, Jeffrey, Rullmann, Kevin. Treasures Underfoot: Preserving Venice's Church Floor Artifacts. An Interactive Qualifying Project for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. 2012.

S. Hoey, M. Kahan, P Marchetti, K Mazza. Convents, Palaces and Churches: Transformation of Historic Buildings and the Impact on Venice’s Neighborhoods. An Interactive Qualifying Project for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. 2003.

Santos,Luiz G., Petrowski,Craig Peter, Kristant,Elaine Hazel, Delaive,Amanda Leigh. The Church Floors in Venice, Italy -- an Archeological Study and Analysis. An Interactive Qualifying Project for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. 2002.

External Links

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