Da Vinci's masterpiece is digitized, selling for the same price as a Lamborghini supercar

The painting “Lady with Disheveled Hair” believed to be by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci was sold for $450 million at the most recent auction.

Italian authorities are now making it possible for the public to own a digital copy of the painting, authenticated as a painting by this Renaissance genius, for a price approximately equivalent to a Lamborghini (250,000 euros, equivalent to nearly 290,000 USD).

Italian nonprofit Save the Artistic Heritage and technology partner Cinello are making it possible for wealthy collectors to own authentic projections of original Italian masterpieces, resized and framed to recreate the immersive museum experience.

Participating museums will sign a certificate of authenticity and in return receive 50% of the profits.

John Blem, a Danish-Italian businessman, Chairman of Cinello and Vice Chairman of the non-profit organization, is behind the initiative.

He stressed that revenue sharing is an integral part of the project to help financially struggling museums gain new sources of income and is also an important part of the sales strategy.

Over the past two years, Save the Artistic Heritage has contributed 300,000 euros (about $347,000) to Italian partner museums, with the price of each digital version of the masterpiece ranging from 30,000 to 300,000 euros.

To add to the value, each copy is sold in a limited edition of fewer than nine. The catalogue includes around 250 Italian works of art from around 10 museums and foundations, including the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Capodimonte in Naples and the Pilotta in Parma, which owns Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished woodcut of a woman with tangled hair.

Digital versions of the artwork appear backlit on screens the same size as the original.

This luminescent effect is similar to the color film technology that gives vibrant color masterpieces such as Raffaelo's “ The Marriage of the Virgin,” now on display at the Brera Museum of Art in Milan.

Other works on display at the nonprofit’s Milan office, like Da Vinci’s portrait of Lady with Tangled Hair and Andrea Mantegna’s “Lamentation over a Dead Christ,” are more muted in tone. When viewed closely, the details and brushstrokes are still visible, but lack the physical texture of the original.

Digital technology is increasingly popular in the art field, including digital paintings and even TVs that alternately display artwork and photographs.

The Save the Artistic Heritage organization is said to be continuing a long tradition of Italian institutions using copies of works of art to support their operations and preserve their painting collections.

Several museums and institutions in Italy have pioneered these technologies, such as the Alinari Archives in Florence (which has a collection of more than 5 million photographic documents dating back to the mid-1800s) and the Vatican Museums (which used high-resolution digital imaging to create a detailed record of the Sistine Chapel).

Elsewhere, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) has experimented with two limited-time projects: textured multidimensional scans of select masterpieces and the interactive "Meet Vincent Van Gogh" experience that attracted more than 1 million viewers worldwide.

Comment (0)