Maiolica plate with a fish

Description

A shallow tin-glazed earthenware plate painted in cobalt blue on a white glaze: floral motifs and scrolls on the rim, a band of ornament towards the centre and **a fish in the middle**.

**The plate has been restored.** On the colour scan the original sherds are clearly distinguishable from the white plaster infills, and inventory marks are visible on the sherds — so the scan records **the history of the object** as well as its shape.

The term maiolica is based on the object’s appearance (white glaze, cobalt painting), not on analysis. The date, origin and inventory details of the object have not been established.

## 3D scan

The object was recorded by contact-free 3D scanning. The source model has **5.8 million triangles**, with an average triangle edge of about **0.28 mm**: the finest measure of shape the model retains. The surface colour was captured in an 8,192 × 8,192 pixel texture, about 13.2 pixels per millimetre of surface. The mesh is closed, so both its surface area, 2,010 cm², and its volume, 923 cm³, were measured. For the web the model was reduced to 150,000 triangles and a 2,048-pixel texture; the source scan is kept for documentation, technical drawings and printing replicas.