A Spinning Wheel That Brings Renaissance Sketches To Life

Pablo Garcia’s Profilograph transforms a handful of 16th-century sketches into a single three-dimensional object. In 1528, Albrecht Dürer published Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion, or Four Books on Human Proportion, a rigorous catalog of the human form in all its splendid variety. Nearly 500 years later, Pablo Garcia used cutting-edge technologies to combine six of Dürer’s profiles into a single object--an extruded, three-dimensional wheel. Set on a spinning motor and illuminated to create a shadow of fluidly transforming faces, Garcia’s Profilograph is a novel ode to the German master as it could only exist centuries after his lifetime. The seeds for the project were planted nearly a decade ago, in 2004. Garcia had just left graduate school, where he’d been part of the first class to learn the wonders of the then brand new CNC router....