The art world is traveling back in time in an unimaginable way. The famed Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy is turning some of the most coveted artworks in its collection into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), starting with Michelangelo’s 16th-century Doni Tondo.
The digital copy of the panel painting has since been sold to an Italian woman as a birthday present for her husband for €140,000 (US$170,000), Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reports.
To bring revered artworks to the digital world, the Uffizi Gallery worked with Cinello, a company specializing in generating authenticated digital versions of masterpieces, to create virtual facsimiles dubbed as DAWs. The digitized versions supposedly bring honor to the original artworks by appearing in the exact dimensions of the physical art while being “absolutely impossible to copy.” They come with their own unique NFT tokens, as well as a signed certificate of authenticity from the museum.
With that being said, buying an NFT of the painting is not the same as buying the painting itself. The only ownership being transferred is the right of possession to the digital asset.
After the Michelangelo work, the Uffizi Gallery is setting its sights on creating NFT versions of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, and more.
The museum says this project is not being regarded as a key avenue for income, but it will serve as a supplementary means. “[The NFT sales] will be able to contribute to the finances of a museum, comparable to the proceeds of the restaurant business,” Uffizi’s director Eike Schmidt told Corriere della Sera. “It’s not a change of direction in terms of revenue, it is an additional revenue. But creating such a market is not a quick thing.”
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