Opening up to the world — developing the image policy of the Pinacoteca di Brera
Italy’s Pinacoteca di Brera has a more liberal image reproduction policy than most Italian museums. I spoke with Marco Toscano, Communication Manager at the Brera, to discover how the policy was conceived and what its impact has been.
In recent years Italian law on cultural heritage has been updated to allow anyone to freely take photographs in museums, libraries and archives run by the state and to use them for study purposes or on personal social media channels. It’s also permitted to use them for the “promotion of Italian cultural heritage”, but commercial uses are still forbidden without a prearranged authorization and — very likely — the payment of a fee.
Publication is usually considered a commercial use by Italian GLAM institutions, and only scholarly books or journals with low print-runs are exempt from the payment of reproduction rights.
Despite these limitations, the change in the law has been a major step towards accessibility and has favoured students, scholars and cultural heritage lovers. Yet Italian state-run museums haven’t fully digitized and opened up their collections to users.
The only exception is the Pinacoteca di Brera (Brera Art Gallery), Milan’s main public art gallery. Directed by James Bradburne since 2015, the Brera makes high-resolution images of its collection freely available online, inviting journalists, publishers, broadcasters, scholars and curators to use them.
A few images from the Brera ‘s collection are also available on Europeana with a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. In fact, the museum retains the right to evaluate image requests for other revenue-generating usages, such as merchandising or advertising.
To find out more, I spoke to Marco Toscano, the Communications Manager of the gallery.
Marco, the current website of the Pinacoteca di Brera has been online since 2016 and has been displaying high-resolution images of the collection ever since. Have they been made available for download right from the start?
Yes. Before uploading the images, so that they could be freely downloadable by users, we worked to retrieve all the existing high-quality pictures of the collection and to digitize the missing ones. And when we launched the new website, we had almost all the works on display in the museum available online. The digitisation of the collection is still ongoing, though, and also includes works not on display.
How did the idea of making images available for download come about?
It was a natural consequence of two processes started at the Brera: on the one hand, the dematerialisation of the communication, that involved the creation of a new website, more up-to-date and user-friendly; on the other, the introduction of a new kind of relationship with the visitors.
We sought to give to each visitor, seen as a person with specific characteristics, the means of creating a personalised visit experience. The intent of empowering and valorising the visitor is also physically visible in the museum: we introduced different kinds of labels, provided benches for drawing, new signs, educational materials and thematic tours.
How has your new image policy changed everyday work?
The user gained autonomy. However I should point out that the resolution of images available online is still insufficient for some purposes. We still receive image requests and adequately deal with them. [Author’s note: the average resolution of the images is of sufficent quality for most publishing.]
Have you considered using Creative Commons licences on your website? They are international and could make it easier for users to understand how to reuse images.
No, we haven’t. We prefer to evaluate, depending on the destination and purpose, whether to authorise the use of an image and whether to grant permission free of charge or to request a fee.
Digitising and opening up collections are hot topics in the GLAM sector, yet I don’t think that your initiative has been much publicised. Why?
We didn’t feel the need to publicise it. We just wanted to align the Pinacoteca with the trend already followed by the main museums in the world for image management.
Your image policy makes the Pinacoteca di Brera a unique museum in the Italian panorama. In your experience, what reasons prevent other Italian art museums from following your example?
I believe that the difficulty of digitisation is one of the reasons, but I also think that images are often considered a source of income for the museum. Actually, it’s easy to figure out that charging everyone for any kind of image use has a cost, and that cost far outweighs the revenue.
The benefit to museums’ reputations that open access brings — although difficult to quantify — is undeniable and extremely fruitful.
It’s easy to imagine that licensing images for advertising or merchandising can be profitable. But’s it’s harder to estimate the profits that can come from other uses, for example, from the publishing sector. Did you study this aspect before making the images available, or have you determined if there have been any losses since then?
We can make three fundamental considerations about that.
First of all, image licensing revenue from the publishing sector is barely significant.
Secondly, in an era of proliferation of images and accessibility granted by the internet, we should be more concerned with quality– especially for reproductions of works of art — and aim for dissemination that promotes the museum and its collection.
And lastly, in the case of cultural purposes which contribute to producing knowledge, it is right to grant images of works of art. The museum doesn’t own the collection but rather preserves it, with the duty to share its beauty with the greatest number of people possible.
Several museums that have embraced open access have stated that it has also been good advertising for their institutions. Has it been the same for you?
It wasn’t a result only due to our image policy, but it’s true that the Pinacoteca di Brera in the last few years has regained a visibility — in Italy and abroad — that it hadn’t had in a long time.
Have you been monitoring the downloads and the reuse of images of your collection? Are there any results or thoughts that you would like to share?
I don’t have actual data on downloads but I know that is a very appreciated and used feature. We’re usually being thanked by publishers that can use our images in their publications. Actually, they’re our main source of publicity.
