Within the field of cultural heritage restoration, experts are interested in the analysis of data describing the condition and history of ancient monuments. Data are usually distributed over many sites. VRML and Java technology, which are well-suited for describing geometrical models and data interaction over the Internet. Unfortunately, the poor quality of VRML real time rendering is a bottleneck for any analysis based on accurate image synthesis methods. Another problem in reproducing images with photorealistic rendering derives from the adaptation mechanisms of the human visual system. We describe a method and its implementation for providing high quality photorealistic image synthesis of ancicnt building materials. In this method, a network based Java application manages geometric 3D models of an ancient building to provide an editing interface and to manage high quality photorealistic snapshots. Simple 3D VRML data are enhanced with radiometric data derived by gathering measureme...