With the Eye of an Art Historian. Visualizing the Medieval Abbey of Fleury in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (7th-12th century)

This paper focuses on a French medieval monument: the Fleury Abbey in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (France), one of the most significant buildings of the European Middle Ages that provides an excellent example of pre-Romanesque architecture (11th century). This building underwent several transformations since its foundation in the 7th century, and in order to understand the complex history of the building and of its decoration, a new art-historical research was conducted. Firstly, archival research, historiographical and material data were collected and analysed in a wider European cultural and artistic frame. Secondly, the large quantity of data and scientific results were combined in a form that could be suitable to a general audience. For this reason, the research was turned into an exhibition with the Musée Belvédère and the Communauté des Communes du Val de Sully, and in a digital 3D restitution of the monument with to visually communicate its transformations over centuries. Thus, a video was created to present the abbey and its history. This paper focuses on both work-phases and problems of the process of scientific and narrative elaboration, in order to set the methodological steps and results that have value beyond the specific case-study, and that can be refined for future researches