Seismic analysis of artistic assets: the Piero della Francesca’s fresco called “Resurrection”

The assessment of the vulnerability of historical monuments should regard not only the safety of their architectural and structural components, but also of their movable and unmovable 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. More specifically, a full 3D pushover analyses as well as a simplified approach based on the kinematic theorem of limit analysis were used in order to investigate the large-scale structural performance of the building. Afterwards, finite element analyses were carried out on a refined 3D detailed model of the wall containing the fresco in order to have, at local-scale level, a precise evaluation of the seismic vulnerability of this important artistic asset.