Seismic vulnerability of the Piero Della Francesca’s fresco called “Resurrection"

The structural analysis of monumental buildings requires to consider safety and conservation objectives, including also the possible presence of artistic assets. In order to face these issues, the paper presents an account of the results of diagnostic analyses conducted by the authors on a specific monumental masonry building: the Civic Museum of Sansepolcro, a small town near Arezzo; in fact, besides to be one of the most renowned civic structures built by Italian communes of Central Italy during the High Middle Ages to house their city governments, it is also characterized by the presence of Piero Della Francesca’s fresco, known as “Resurrection”, that is widely hailed as one of the masterpieces of late 15th century Italian art. Within this context, the integrate use of three different modelling strategies of different complexity is discussed: the equivalent frame approach, the macro-block model and the finite element model. In the first part, a full 3D pushover analyses and a simplified approach based on the kinematic theorem of limit analysis are used in order to understand the large-scale structural performance of the building. Next, the results of the finite element method (FEM) tests conducted on a detailed 3D model of the wall containing the Piero Della Francesca’s fresco are employed in order to investigate the origin of the surveyed crack pattern on this important artistic asset.