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Bombed Fresco: Using Math to Piece Together a Lost Treasure (2011)

In 1944, a bombing raid almost completely destroyed an enormous Padua church fresco that dated back to the Renaissance and had once been admired by Goethe. Some 88,000 tiny pieces of plaster were rescued from the rubble, and a mathematician has managed to piece some of the masterpiece back together.

But mathematician Massimo Fornasier, who now works as professor at Munich's Technical University, developed something that the art historians and restaurateurs lacked -- an algorithm that helps locate the proper placing for each fragment. To give visitors to the medieval church in Padua some impression of what the original fresco looked like, some of the missing parts were painted in black and white on the wall between the restored fragments, which maintain their color. It may be on a computer screen, but now art lovers can finally catch a glimpse at what once made Goethe gush and what the Italian officials had been so keen to protect during the Second World War.

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