Digital infrastructure in the service of art
What is authentic does not fear time.
Building trust around Artists, Artworks and Collectors.
See the projectProject status
We are completing the legal audit of the platform.
Ichnos is not open yet and sells nothing.
ARTHEIA S.R.L.Innovative startup since 5 October 2026
Scattered documents, in different hands.
The artwork remains.
Its documentation should remain with it.
Every age produced a method. Every method left something behind.
Roman Imperial periodAfter Greek originals
The first failure
The copy outlives the original
Greek sculpture in bronze was worth more melted than kept. Most of it went, and what reaches us instead are marble copies cut centuries later, in another country, by hands nobody recorded.
The object survives. The original does not.
It is one of art history’s great paradoxes: for a great deal of Greek sculpture, we know an original only through reproductions of it. The object in the room is real. The thing it is evidence of is gone.
c. 1470Florence
The second failure
The Baptism of Christ
Verrocchio’s workshop was not a solitary studio. Many hands could work under one master’s name.
The work survives. The authorship becomes a matter of opinion.
So attribution stops being a question with one answer. Not who made it, but how much did each person make, and who gets to decide.
1995 to 2011New York
The third failure
The Warhol Authentication Board
Industrial production had entered the studio. Assistants, printers, acetates, silkscreens and editions made one simple question very hard to answer: where does the artist end and the artwork begin.
The market grew. Judgment could no longer carry the weight of it.
The problem was no longer detecting a fake. It was defining authorship.
2026
The artwork remains physical.
Its identity becomes persistent.
A documented identity, established at the source and made accessible digitally, instantly.
By the artist.For the artwork.For every future collector.
Ichnos is Greek for trace. We gather it at the source and keep it with the work.
In development
The trace of the work.
Digital documentation of the artwork, established at the source. It gathers the artist’s declaration of authorship while they are alive, and keeps it with the work over time, together with its history. It documents the declaration: it is not an appraisal of authenticity.
Artist · Artwork · Documentation · Provenance
Let’s talk about IchnosHow it will work
Two ways to open the documentation of an artwork:
Hold the card to your phone and a notification appears: tap it, and the documentation of the artwork opens.
Every tap makes the chip generate an encrypted message, which is verified: the photographs, the details of the work and the artist’s declaration open.
If the card is not at hand, type the code printed on the document.
A reduced record opens, saying whether the documentation exists and is valid. The full one opens only with the card.
We are collecting letters of expression of interest from artists who want to document their works with Ichnos. Signing one puts you on the waiting list, and we will write to you when the platform opens to its first artists.
Sign the letter of interestAre you a collector, a gallery or a professional in the field? Write to us.
eugenio.cobalto@artheia.it
