Launched in April 2022, Apollo Belvedere - the first
VISIONNAIRE NFT project - explores innovative art
and design languages granted through the Non-Fungi-
ble Tokens system and Web3. The synergy between the
Visionnaire’s expertise and the Visual artist Jona-
than Monaghan’s aesthetics has created a strong bond
between craftsmanship traditions and digital design.
Imagination is the key element in Visionnaire’s act
of transformation of precious materials into products
for unique environments. Visionnaire NFT expresses the
brand’s ongoing relationship and dialogue with the
Avant-garde. The project goes one step further along-
side Jonathan Monaghan. The first three NFT’s teasers
dropped on March 28, 2022 on the Foundation Market-
place, one of the most important digital platforms for
artists, curators and collectors in the new creative
industries. With deep shared values of harmony and
beauty, Visionnaire and Jonathan Monaghan united and
chose Apollo, the Greek holy archer, as a symbol of
aesthetic perfection and vitality for the future. From
post-Hellenistic art to his 1972 moon landing to the
emergence of a subversive affirmation of digital art,
Apollo Belvedere is the ideal icon to launch Visionaire
NFT. On the occasion of the 60th edition of Salone del
Mobile in Milan, Visionnaire featured the Apollo Bel-
vedere sculpture on June at the Visionnaire showroom
gallery Wunderkammer. Jonathan Monaghan unveiled an
exquisite Carrara marble bust accompanied by a one-
of-a-kind 1/1 NFT. The vision for the final drop was
to create unique artworks that defy the ever-evolving,
huge reproducible space of NFT art. Apollo Belvedere
represents a dialogue between physical and digital
worlds, demonstrating how the relationship between the
two environments can bring new experiences to specta-
tors and collectors. The physical bust was made from
marble sourced from Carrara in Tuscany, where stone has
been sourced since the Roman Empire. Pieces of marble
that were brought to northern Italy were cut, sculpted,
and carved into busts of the god by Italian artisans.
It took months of manual labor to achieve the ideal-
istic vision of texture, detail and ethereal softness
envisioned by Visionnaire and Monaghan. Combined with
the marble sculpture, Monaghan created his video, a
surreal 3D animation of an alien spaceship revealing a
sculpture in a baroque setting.The bust faces the fiery
red panther, a symbol associated with the ancient Greek
god Dionysus and the concept of chaos. Minted on the
sustainable side-chain of Ethereum, Palm Network, with
near-zero carbon emission, “Apollo Belvedere” will be
auctioned off the 4ART NFT + marketplace. As a Ben-
efit Company, Visionnaire’s top concern is to reduce
the environmental impact in developing every project.
Visionnaire partnered with Palm NFT Studio for its low-
er gas fees, fast transaction finality, and a 99.99%
+ reduction in energy consumption when compared to
Proof of Work Systems. Ethereum mainnet is infamous
for being carbon-intensive due to its “Proof of Work”
consensus mechanism which requires a large amount of
computing power for transactions. The Palm network’s
“Proof of Authority” (iBFT2) consensus mechanism re-
quires significantly less computing power. The amount
of energy required to mint on the Palm network is equal
to sending three emails. Moreover, Visionnaire part-
nered again with Rete Clima to cover the CO2 emissions
caused by energy consumption. By overviewing the entire
design and production process, from the 3D rendering
to the transportation of the finalized statue, the to-
tal amount of the energy consumed was accounted for by
taking part in the project “Allain Duhangan Hydropower
Plant in India”, which aims to reduce Southern India’s
fossil fuel dependency. Jonathan Monaghan is an Ameri-
can visual artist who works on the relationship between
physical sculptures and 3D animation. Drawing on a va-
riety of sources like art history and video game sub-
culture, Jonathan is an early adopter of NFTs, and he
has been using the bitcoin blockchain to authenticate
his digital artworks as early as 2013. Since then, he
has been active in the crypto art space, including being
featured in the launch of crypto.com’s NFT platform.
