Italy instructs museums to suspend contracts with NFT companies, citing “unregulated” terms that could affect the country’s cultural heritage

When Florence’s Uffizi Gallery sold an NFT of Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo for € 240,000 last year, it seemed like it was finding a big new revenue stream. But it turns out that the technology company it teamed up with to produce the digital work took so much in fees that the museum harvested only € 70,000 ($ 70,500) of it. The Italian Ministry, which regulates the country’s museums, has now asked institutions to temporarily terminate contracts with NFT suppliers.

The Uffizi sale was orchestrated by the Milan-based technology company Cinello, which had been awarded a five-year contract (which expired in December) to digitally reproduce works of art from the Uffizi collection.

Each of the digital works, which Cinello calls DAWs, was certified on the Ethereum blockchain and traded as NFTs in connection with Unit, a retailer of contemporary art in London. The works were made in nine editions, priced between € 100,000 and € 250,000 ($ 114,000- $ 284,000) each.

It told a spokesman for Cinello Kunstavis that the company would share the revenue with the Uffizi 50 / 50—after production costs. These costs – which included taxes, a platform commission, the cost of producing a framework and an operating fee of 20 percent – amounted to € 100,000.

Originally, NFT was designed to be in a hybrid digital and physical artifact, combining a wooden copy of the original frame, with a screen and a chip where the copy of the work was recorded as an NFT.

However, the sale created public scrutiny after the Italian daily newspaper The Republic had a headline in May last year and wondered who owns the digital rights to Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo. In it articleUffizi’s director, Eike Schmidt, admitted that the museum had not done sufficient due diligence when it came to structuring the agreement around NFT.

“It is fundamental to inform yourself not only from a technical point of view but also from a legal point of view,” he said. He added that “certain platforms where you register ownership do not provide adequate guarantees and you risk losing everything,” he said.

By purchasing digital copies of works in Uffizi’s collection, new owners can theoretically exhibit and control them in augmented and virtual reality, as well as in new environments such as the metaverse. This can make institutions like the Uffizi high and dry when it comes to controlling the works they sell from their own collection on budding metaverse platforms.

“Grant that this case is complex and unregulated,” said a spokesman for the Italian Ministry of Museums. Kunstavis, «The ministry has temporarily asked its institutions to refrain from signing contracts related to NFTs. The basic intention is to avoid unfair contracts. “

For his part, Cinello maintains that all rights to the work remain with the museum, adding that the goal is “not to spread Italian heritage around the world”, but to help the museum receive royalties and help raise much-needed funds for to protect, preserve and maintain the originals in the collection.

Although the contract with the Uffizi is technically over, Cinello is currently working on 10 other Italian museums, including the Museo di Palazzo Pretorio and the Pinacoteca di Brera di Milano.

The company has not responded to a request for comment on whether it will continue to offer and structure similar NFT agreements.

Other companies, such as LaCollection, have also recently announced similar partnerships, including with the British Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, have also implemented similar schemes. In September, the Hermitage auctioned NFT replicas of his five most famous paintings, giving them $ 444,000 at the time. Belvedere digitized and fractionalized a picture of Gustav Klimts Kissed, released as a series of 10,000 NFT last Valentine’s Day, each priced at 0.65 Ethereum (about $ 1,950 at the time), and generated around $ 4.5 million.

While the move to digitize priceless works of art seems to be gaining momentum (despite recent accident around NFT prices as a whole), the question remains as to who will ultimately benefit from a provisionally unregulated market.

Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Do you want to be at the forefront of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest news, eye-opening interviews and sharp reviews that drive the conversation forward.