The Wall Street Journal looks at a company that replicates art:

Whether to rewrite history or reinterpret masterpieces, replicas made with a palette of high-tech tools are changing the way tourists see art.

[…] Madrid-based Factum Arte, a company that employs high-resolution 3-D scanners of its own devising to reproduce artworks. The scans result in thousands of files whose images are stitched together, then churned out by flatbed pigment printer onto canvas primed with historically accurate paints. To get the clone closer to the real thing, conservators fill in any ridges or creases from manhandling or restoration by hand afterward.

Founded by painters Adam Lowe and Manuel Franquelo, Factum Arte now employs 30 specialists, with offices in London and Madrid. The company’s first major project was a facsimile of Spain’s Altamira cave completed in 2001. The cave, whose ceiling dances with Paleolithic drawings of animals, closed in the late 1970s because carbon dioxide was destroying the Unesco heritage site.

The Art of Replicating Masterpieces (Wall Street Journal)