The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, is flogging some of its most famed artworks as NFTs in an innovative fundraising move. First under the hammer was Michelangelo’s painting of the holy family, called the Doni Tondo (1505-06). It sold for €140,000 ($170,000). 

Innovative Digital Artworks

The circular Michelangelo masterpiece in an ornate frame was transformed into a digital artwork, or DAW, in collaboration with Italian company Cinello. The firm makes digital, encrypted versions of famous paintings certified with an NFT token. They then sit inside an exact reproduction of the original artwork’s frame. The artworks are faithful to the original dimensions. Thanks to their status as a certified NFT, they are also unique and safe from copying or theft. The digitized works additionally have an accompanying certificate of authenticity signed by museum director Eike Schmidt. 

The Uffizi Gallery and Cinello company will divide the proceeds from the Doni Tondo NFT sale between them equally. The cash-strapped gallery saw a huge dip in visitor numbers last year — from 4.4 million in 2019 to 1.2 million in 2020 — due to enforced closures. “In the medium term [the NFT sales] will be able to contribute to the finances of a museum, comparable to the proceeds of the restaurant business,” Schmidt told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “It is not a change of direction in terms of revenue, it is an additional revenue. But creating such a market is not a quick thing.”

After the first successful sale, the Uffizi Gallery is already planning to mint other masterpieces in the collection as NFTs. These include Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Caravaggio’s Bacchus and Titian’s Venus of Urbino.   

A Trend-Setting Gallery

This is not the first time the Uffizi Gallery has experimented with on-trend technology. The Italian gallery has found fame on TikTok with its light-hearted, irreverent videos using paintings in its collection. Last year, national paper La Repubblica reported that the Uffizi gallery was the most followed museum on TikTok.

For International Museum Day, on May 18, the museum participated in a live event on TikTok, dubbed #MuseumMoment, along with other galleries around the world. “Young people love art and also look for it through social media,” said director Schmidt in a statement. “The analysis of the numbers confirms this: last summer at the Uffizi Galleries, visitors under 25 recorded stable growth between the end of June and the third week of August.”