Adam Lowe saunters between the works of classical art and antique sculpture littering his giant studio in the backstreets of Madrid. He stops at the sarcophagus of the Egyptian Pharaoh Seti I — dead for 3,000 years, and whose stone coffin has been ravaged by time, the elements, and the modern humans who exhumed it and then put it on display.

 .

Lowe lays his hands on the surface, probing with his fingers into fragile grooves made by sculptors three millennia ago. “You’ve got absolutely perfect color, surface, and texture,” Lowe says in his refined English dialect. “This is really using technology at its limits.”

 .

Because this artifact isn’t at risk from heavy-handed treatment by Lowe or anyone else. In fact, he and his team made it — a millimeter-accurate facsimile of the original, which survives under heavy protection from further decay at a museum in London.

 .

Lowe is the director and founder of Factum Arte, a team that is astonishing the art world with its ability to make copies of works using 3D scanning and printing techniques that are the very definition of cutting edge.

Click here to view original web page at www.businessinsider.com