Digital Restoration of the Empress Procession
The Empress Procession is one of several large reliefs that was removed by chipping and burning from the cave walls in the 1930s. It is the companion to the Emperor Procession and together they were prominent parts of the cave's exit wall, depicting royal processions with a quality of carving that made visitors in the early 1900s like Langdon Warner and Laurence Sickman “swoon with emotion".
The two procession reliefs are believed to honor the emperor Xuanwu’s deceased parents, the emperor Xiaowen 孝文帝 (467-499) and the empress Wenzhao 文昭皇后 (469-496), to whom the Binyang Central Cave is dedicated. Flanking the doorway, they depict royal assemblies of figures entering the cave to worship the Buddha. On the empress side, palace attendant ladies holding offerings of lotus flowers and containers of incense, fruits, and water accompany two royal figures wearing imperial crowns that resemble lotus blossoms. The more prominent one has a particularly voluminous robe with an elaborately pleated hem and seems likely to be the empress Wenzhao. The smaller figure behind her may be the Grand empress dowager Feng 冯皇太后 (442-490), who was the emperor Xiaowen’s powerful regent and mentor. Two members of the group at the back of the procession carry large fans resembling palm leaves.
In the early 1900s, as global demand for Chinese art objects rose, both of the large procession reliefs, as well as large sections of other relief carvings from Binyang Central Cave were were removed and, in many cases, sold as fragments. Laurence Sickman of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City managed to obtain a number of fragments believed to have been from the Empress Procession, and the museum performed a restoration with these pieces in the late 1930s. The relief that was put on display in 1941 was widely celebrated, though in the eyes of Laurence Sickman, it was a pale approximation of the grandeur and grace of the original.
The museum archives show that the relief was reconstituted from fragments obtained over a period of years, and the finished restoration on display since 1941 includes less than half of the fragments from the original relief carving.
Much of the surface area was filled in with plaster and painted to match the color of the stone. In addition, the wall surface originally occupied by the Empress Procession extended from the east wall onto the south wall, turning 90 degrees at the corner of the cave, while the 1941 museum restoration represents only the section taken from the east wall.
Thanks to the diligence and care taken by Laurence Sickman and the Nelson Atkins Museum, meticulous records were maintained throughout the production of this original 1941 restoration–these records would prove vital to the process of creating a modern digital restoration.
In 2019 the Center for Art of East Asia, in collaboration with Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJU) and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, embarked on a project led by XJU professor Jia Zhuofei to create a historically accurate digital restoration of the Empress Procession relief. What follows is a brief look at the process. For more information, see the links at the end of this article.
The project began with 3d scanning of the East wall of Binyang Central Cave from which the relief was originally cut, and the 1941 restoration at the Nelson museum.
Comparing photos of the relief prior to destruction with the 3d model of the empty wall, common points were located, and a unified coordinate system was produced. This facilitated the correction of distortions in the original photographs.
Next, the 3D model of the 1941 Nelson Atkins restoration was brought into the unified coordinate system and the fragments were aligned with the corrected photograph.
Next, Professor Jia created a hand-sculpted clay model approximating the relief based on the historic images, first at 1:3 scale and then at 1:1 scale. The 1:1 scale model was scanned and brought into the unified coordinate system and refined further through a process of mutual error correction incorporating the historic photo, model of the residual wall, and corrected 1941 restoration. Finally the digitally restored relief was placed into a model of the entire cave.
For further details on the restoration of the Empress Procession, see:
- Documentary: Digital Restoration of the Empress Procession (video)
- Restoring the Former Life of Dismembered Cultural Artifacts, delivered by Jia Zhuofei and Ouyang Zhenyu at the 2023 Advancing Digital Exhibition of Cultural Heritage Symposium