British Museum Puts Sculptures of Dürer's 'Rhinoceros' on Bitcoin Blockchain

Silver sculpture based on Albrecht Dürer's "Rhinoceros." Image: Asprey Studio/British Museum/Decrypt

Albrecht Dürer’s iconic 1515 artwork “The Rhinoceros” has been reinterpreted as a set of 11 sterling silver sculptures by Asprey Studio, each of which will be sold alongside a digital inscription on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Produced by Asprey Studio in partnership with the British Museum, which holds Dürer’s original preparatory sketch for the woodcut, the sculptures are accompanied by a “a parent/child inscription that prevents any further additions and serves as a modern family tree of provenance,” according to a press release shared with Decrypt.

“It’s inscribed in Ordinals, in [a] full block,” Asprey Studio Chief Creative Officer Ali Walker told Decrypt. He explained that, “it's a parent/child inscription, so the parents are Asprey Studio and the British Museum, and the child is the actual work.”

Buyers will receive the digital inscription first, said Walker, since it takes several months to make the silver sculpture, which is produced to order. Creating the 40cm solid silver sculptures was a challenge, he explained, because of the metal’s unique properties.

“We have digital sculptures at Asprey Studio,” he said. “So we first sculpted it digitally, and then we worked out how we cut it up into small, manageable pieces.” Those pieces are then welded together, a months-long process that “only a couple of people in the UK” can undertake, Walker said.

Dürer, artistic pioneer

Born in 1471, Albrecht Dürer was one of the pioneers of the German Renaissance, combining  the emerging technology of printmaking with new discoveries in optics and anatomy to produce revolutionary works.

Dürer’s seminal “Rhinoceros” print was completed without the artist actually having seen a live rhino, instead basing his work on a description from a Portuguese merchant’s newsletter.

“In his time, he was so advanced,” Walker told Decrypt. “Not just as an artist; he was doing self portraits at a time when no one else was, he was doing wood block prints and he made money out of printing his own work.”

He was also an early adopter of modern branding, designing a monogram based on his initials that functioned as his own logo, and brought “the first art-specific intellectual property lawsuit in Venice,” according to “The Art of Forgery” author Noah Charney.