Ancient Rome Meets Modern Tech: How 3D Printing Recreated Trajan’s Column for the Saint Louis Art Museum

When the Saint Louis Art Museum wanted to display the power and influence of the Roman Empire, it used 3D printing to bridge a 2,000 year gap. The museum’s current exhibit, “Ancient Splendor: Roman Art in the Time of Trajan,” features unprecedented artifacts on loan from Italy. But one piece they could not pack in a shipping crate was Trajan’s Column, 38 meters of carved marble column still standing today in the Foro di Traiano, in Rome.

The art museum wanted to bring the sights, sounds, and even smells of ancient Rome to their Midwestern America exhibit. Visitors can see sculptures of Trajan and his family, smell recreated gardens and foods, and listen to field recordings made at the Roman Baths in Bath, England. But a vital piece of Trajan’s legacy is the massive Trajan’s Column, erected by the Emperor himself to tell the story of his victory in the Dacian Wars. The column later became Trajan’s tomb.  

Trajan’s Column tells a story in a series of 155 bas-relief scenes, each about a meter tall, that spiral around the column 23 times. The Saint Louis Art Museum replica is a life size reproduction of one scene. It was digitally captured by Flyover Zone, an education tech (edtech) company working to democratize world heritage sites and monuments.

The Saint Louis Art Museum reached out to a local 3D printer company that specializes in large architectural pieces. Printerior, a St. Louis-based firm known for its large-scale 3D printing, makes its own recycled filament to craft furniture, wall panels, and sculptural light fixtures in massive scale. But this project needed a more delicate approach than could be achieved with a robot arm wielding an 8mm nozzle. Instead, Printerior deployed its Bambu Lab FDM print farm, and spread the work across 30 H2S printers simultaneously.

 

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“Working with the Saint Louis Art Museum on the Trajan exhibit was a perfect example of how modern technology can serve ancient storytelling,” said Trent Esser, Co-Founder and CEO of Printerior. “This is a structure that has stood as one of the greatest achievements of Roman art for nearly two thousand years, and we were able to recreate it at full scale in just a few days of print time.

“We approached this project by rethinking scale and speed from the ground up. Instead of relying on a single production line, we distributed the build across 30 FDM printers running simultaneously, allowing us to compress what would traditionally take nearly two months of print time into just a few days.”

Once the segments were completed, the team hand-finished the prints and applied a bronze treatment meant to give museum visitors a true glimpse of the past. Today’s tourists may see the ruins of Rome in pale marble, but when this monument was new, it would have been vividly colored. Historians can’t agree if it was brightly painted, or colored bronze to mimic the statue of the Emperor Trajan mounted on top of the column. But they do know it was originally adorned with tiny bronze swords, lances, and armor.

The replica depicts the Roman army on a river bank loading goods onto ships. Emperor Trajan is standing off to the side in his traveling clothes, speaking to soldiers. The background shows an amphitheater outside the city walls, with a temple and triumphal arches. 

Esser is proud to say his team produced a true piece of museum-quality, 3D printed art. The finished piece is part of the exhibit’s finale, with visitors able to touch and feel the column segment. They are then invited to make drawings of their own life to add to a St. Louis column on a nearby wall.

This replica is a great example of how 3D printing can make art and history more accessible to the public.

“Ancient Splendor: Roman Art in the Time of Trajan” runs through August 16, 2026, at the Saint Louis Art Museum.