If a museum souvenir becomes a digital copy of a masterpiece

The Cinello startup works in HD version of works of art by the greatest masters as a new form of revenue for Italian museums, using NFT technology

Franco Losi, co-founder of Cinello (left) , poses in front of Michelangelo's Tondo Doni. On the right Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi Museum in Florence. Source Cinello press office Reproduce works of art in the form of certified digital copies. This is the project of the Cinello startup, founded by two long-time IT engineers and entrepreneurs, united by a passion for Italy and for art. The two partners are the Italian-Danish John Blem, founder of the company Milestone Systems then acquired by Canon, and Franco Losi, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, who already in the early nineties had opened a company for the development of this technology in Mountain View, California.

Cinello, entirely financed by its partners for a total of about 7 million euros, came to the attention of the public a few weeks ago, after the sale of their first digital art work (Daw ), a reproduction of Michelangelo's famous Tondi Doni, treasure of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. "The sale of Tondo Doni is only the first stage of a long journey, which stems from the love for the immense Italian artistic heritage and the desire to demonstrate, especially to the youngest, that we can be first in the field of digital innovation too. to the world - explains Losi -. Today the patent we have developed for our Daws is registered in Italy and in Europe and will soon be registered in the United States as well. In fact, we have created something unique in the world ”.

The Daw of the Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci. Source Cinello press office

What are the Daw?

These are digital reproductions of a single or very limited edition work, in 1: 1 scale and very high definition. The file is then encrypted and coupled with a special device, which is in fact the screen on which the work is projected. The frame of the painting is made by copying the original and using the same material. The encrypted file of the painting can be associated with only one device at a time (identified through the serial number) and, once paired, the created Daw can no longer be modified, except by Cinello itself. In addition, each Daw is associated with both a non-fungible token (NFT) and a more traditional certificate, issued by the museum where the original work is located. In practice, a Daw is a collector's item that mixes material and digital.

But the interest in these digital reproductions does not end on the technological side. It is also economical. “We have activated partnerships with many Italian museums for the creation and sale of Daw. The museum decides the circulation, the sale takes place by private negotiation and we pay the museum 50% of the final price, after deducting the expenses - explains Losi, who is also a child of art, since his father Umberto was an artist -. In this way museums can activate a new revenue stream, different from ticket sales. In the case of the Uffizi, for example, the Daw of the Tondo Doni collected € 70,000 from the museum. Precisely for this reason we are also receiving requests from foreign museums, but it is too early to give details on this expansion outside Italy ".

Cinello today employs 13 people between Florence and Milan and the catalog of works currently on sale as Daw is constantly updated. The list includes, among others, Caravaggio's Bacchus, Mantegna's Dead Christ, Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus. Waiting for Raphael's Birth of Venus to arrive, already announced and certainly among the most anticipated pieces. Business growth and turnover forecasts are less clear. Asked directly by Wired, Cinello declined to share any data.


Culture - 3 minutes ago

Guido Catalano and the digital dilemmas of contemporary poetry


NFT and music, because they are made for each other


There is an error in the Berners-Lee code sold at auction for $ 5.4 million

Topics

Art Blockchain Nft startup globalData.fldTopic = "Art, Blockchain, Nft, startup"

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.