Italian cultural institutions are offering wealthy collectors the opportunity to purchase limited-edition, certified digital copies of Renaissance masterpieces for a fraction of the cost of original artworks. While the last person to acquire a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci paid over $450 million at auction, collectors can now own a high-definition digital reproduction of da Vinci's "Lady with Dishevelled Hair" for roughly the price of a luxury sports car.

The innovative program is led by the Italian non-profit Save the Artistic Heritage, working in partnership with technology company Cinello. The initiative allows well-heeled art enthusiasts to own literal projections of original Italian masterpieces, displayed on screens sized and framed to match the authentic museum experience. Participating museums sign certificates of authenticity for each digital copy and receive 50 percent of the profits from sales.

"We don't want to sell a piece of technology. We want to sell a piece of artwork," explains John Blem, an Italy-born Danish entrepreneur who founded the initiative and serves as chairman of Cinello and vice-president of the non-profit. Revenue sharing is integral to the project, which aims to help cash-strapped museums access new income streams and serves as a key component of their sales strategy.

Over the past two years, Save the Artistic Heritage has contributed €300,000 ($348,000) to its Italian museum partners. The digital masterpieces are priced between €30,000 and €300,000, with each artwork sold in a limited series of nine copies. This number represents the conventional quantity of statues that can be cast from a single mold while still being considered original works.

The catalog features approximately 250 Italian artworks from about 10 Italian museums and foundations, including the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Capodimonte in Naples, and the Pilotta in Parma. The Pilotta owns da Vinci's "Lady with Dishevelled Hair," an unfinished painting on wood depicting a woman with windblown hair, which sold for €250,000. Blem and a partner are currently establishing a similar non-profit organization in the United States, expected to launch next year.

The digital artworks appear backlit on screens sized to match their original counterparts, creating a luminescent effect that borders on Technicolor quality for brightly colored masterpieces such as Raphael's "The Marriage of the Virgin," which hangs in Milan's Brera Art Gallery. Other works on display in the non-profit's Milan offices, including "Lady with Dishevelled Hair" and Andrea Mantegna's "Lamentation over the Dead Christ," appear more subdued. Upon close inspection, details are visible down to individual brush strokes, though without the physical texture that belongs to the original artwork.

"I must say that the digital copy of 'The Marriage of the Virgin' has aroused in me, and all those who have seen it, a great deal of interest," says Angelo Crespi, director of the Brera Art Gallery. "The perfection, the luminosity, the visibility of the painting is amazing. But at the same time, it doesn't deceive – when they get close, people can see that it's a digital copy on a screen."

Digital technology has been gaining significant ground in the art world, including digital canvases and television sets that display rotating artworks and photographs. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has experimented with two limited-time projects: textured, multidimensional scans of selected masterpieces through its Relievo partnership with Fujifilm, and the "Meet Vincent van Gogh" interactive experience, which has been seen by more than 1 million people globally.

Luke Gartlan, head of the art history department at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, notes that Save the Artistic Heritage's project follows a long tradition of Italian institutions using copies of artwork to support their activities and preserve their collections. "Italian museums and bodies have been at the forefront of these technologies," he explains, citing examples such as the Alinari Archives in Florence, which houses a collection of over 5 million photographic materials dating from the mid-1800s, and the Vatican Museums, which collaborated on ultra-high-resolution digital photography to create detailed records of the Sistine Chapel.

Last week, the Brera Art Gallery launched another phase with Save the Artistic Heritage, introducing a second series of nine artworks that can be used to attract donors and for promotional purposes, reinforcing the fundraising mission. Roman numerals distinguish these copies from the commercial series. The Brera receives 30 percent of its roughly €14 million budget from donations, sponsors, and other projects, with only 10 percent coming from state funding. The remainder comes from ticket sales, making any new revenue source particularly valuable.

"Save the Heritage is not just making a sale," Brera director Crespi explains. "They are creating a system that allows anyone who buys an artwork to contribute to the museum." The digital copies are projected onto screens scaled to match original artworks and displayed in replica frames. The patented technology consists of a box containing the digital copy that unlocks when communicating with Cinello's mainframe, with computer code making each digital copy unique.

The technology is patented in Europe, the United States, and China – markets where Blem is looking to expand operations. In a future phase, Blem hopes to support so-called "digital exhibitions" of masterpieces that are rarely, if ever, put on loan, bringing them to remote places where access to museum-quality exhibitions is uncommon. He calls these initiatives "Impossible Exhibitions," representing the program's ultimate goal of democratizing access to the world's greatest artistic treasures while supporting the institutions that preserve them.