THE MASK OF THE CLASSICAL THEATER FOR A TACTILE MUSEUM, THROUGH ARTISANAL APPROACHES AND DIGITAL PROTOCOLS

The mask is a magical tool, rich of values, meanings and functions. The ritual function prevails above all, because it represents a device able to introduce the person who wears it inside a mystic and extraordinary world. A huge collection of terracotta artifacts is stored in the ‘L. Bernabò Brea’ Archeological Museum of Lipari. It represents the widest and completest corpus about the theatrical mask and about the scenic costumes, ever arrived from the Classic antiquity, a real ‘material deposit for the theatrical memory’. Thanks to those founds it is possible to retrace almost two centuries of Greek theater: from the Age of the great tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, until the Menander’s New Comedy. During a three-years Research, we tried to appreciate the historical profoundness that foments the material culture of theater, the tradition of a civilization that from the V century has been linked to the masks, first of all for a theatrical use, then for a ritual one, as funeral supply. This second use allowed to preserve the artifacts, revealing all the iconographic features of the Tragedy and the Comedy’s characters, belonging to the Classic world. Thanks to an advanced photogrammetric survey and to some new digital techniques, we analyzed many mask’s fragments with the aim of the knowledge, of the documentation and of the dissemination of the material culture of theater. We studied almost a thousand of fragments and we tried to draw up an useful methodology to rebuilt and to reintegrate, in a digital way, the terracotta founds. The digital workflow, of reconstruction and anastylosis, was also finalized to define some Edutainment’s methodologies, for an innovative cultural offer, thought to adhere to different cultural contexts.