Roberto Cremesini: un artista al servizio della scienza

Roberto Cremesini turned his artistic skills to various scientific uses. On the one hand, his art created medals to celebrate famous men and physicians of the past. On the other hand, his hands shaped facial reconstructions of these same men and others. Through this activity, Cremesini perpetuated the intimate relationship between science and art, as well as between medicine and art, demonstrating how this connection could be relevant also for the development of scientific knowledge. He reconstructed the faces of Saint Anthony (1981); Saint Mercuriale (1983); “Antenor”, the mythical Trojan founder of Padua (1989); Saint Giustino (1999); and Saint Barbara (1999). He made the gypsum cast of the skulls of Blessed Luca Belludi (1986) and Giovanni Battista Morgagni (2012). Finally, he created celebrative medals for Saint Anthony (1988); “Antenor” (1989); Luigi Calza (1998); Saint Giustino (1999) and Saint Luca (2000). The most interesting works, from a scientific point of view, are probably the facial reconstructions of Saint Anthony, the gypsum cast of Morgagni’s skull and the medal for Luigi Calza. The facial reconstruction of Saint Anthony, in particular, deserves an in-depth analysis because a virtual reconstruction has been recently made by a group of anthropologists coordinated by the 3D designer Cicero Moraes. In my opinion, Cremesini’s works remains more accurate than the one by Moraes inasmuch as it is confirmed by both the historical sources about the life and disease of Saint Anthony and the scientific data acquired from the study of Saint Anthony’s remains when they were exhumed in 1981. Artistic sensitivity and skills do not represent a limit when interacting with scientific research. On the contrary, they could well provide a fundamental perspective for the advancement of scientific knowledge itself.