Renovating the largest room in the Gallery _ National Gallery

The aim of the project first and foremost was to introduce air conditioning into the space. Gallery 32 is the largest room on the estate and what it used to do was it used to take in fresh air from outside the building from Victorian London. The problem with that of course is that Victorian London wasn't very clean so it used to bring in all sorts of other pollutants which would affect the paintings over time. One thing you can see about this magnificent space is the new air conditioning plant which has been installed. This allows us to keep close environmental control both of temperature and relative humidity which are essential to the long-term preservation of the treasures within. So I'm Peter Walker, I'm a project manager with Hare & Humphreys. The job we're doing here at the National Gallery is Gallery 32. We're doing all the painted and gilded decoration above the lower cornice level. The idea is to take it back to as it might have looked in the Victorian period but cleaner and fresher. It was all whitewashed in here so it was impossible to see what was what was here so there was a big long process working with a conservator to get this colour scheme as you see here. Part of the sort of expert analysis was to understand what contemporary pigments were that they would have used at the time so we could then trial and re-represent those colours as they may have originally looked in the room. The room is so big that you can't possibly get a single piece of fabric that size so if you look at that you can that wall now it's stretched you can probably just about see the seams where it's been sewn together. It's 27 widths of material so it's quite a weight and as you can see from the centre we've hung it up just in sections just to hold all the weight up in one position and then we gradually work it out from the centre. It's best to do it in stages you can't rush these especially the size of these walls as well. Even these cast iron grills here these are all bespoke units that we had to design and develop with a foundry. There's the nuts and bolts of the project that I'm quite familiar with like you know timber floors and concrete and things like that but it was really the sort of one-off bespoke items that have made this different for me and also quite a special part of the project. I'm Letizia Treves and I'm the Sassoon curator of later Italian and Spanish paintings here at the National Gallery and I'm standing in room 32 which has just recently been refurbished and what we hang in here is the Italian Baroque paintings the 17th century Italian paintings and it's a room that was designed really to hang large-scale works and that's exactly what we intend to hang in here. So this is every curator's dream to have a gallery that's completely empty so you can really look afresh at your collection and think about how you want to hang pictures, think about groupings, about scale and I suppose in the 17th century what I want to represent in here is the different schools of painting within Italy and obviously there are some big names in here like Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Carracci but it's about representing those pictures here in some sort of context. Now we've re-hung all the pictures and we're currently doing the lighting in preparation for the gallery reopening. So room 32 is the largest hanging space in the National Gallery and that presents a real challenge to me as a curator because you have to give some sense of symmetry to this room and so one of the key things I wanted to do was thinking about the main approach of our visitors having a major picture on Vista and that is Reni's Adoration, it's our largest altarpiece in the Italian Baroque collection. But other things you think about when you hang paintings is of course symmetry but you think about how works will function next to each other, you think about figure scale and colouring and this sort of thing and you also try, or at least I try, and group schools together so on this wall behind me we have a selection of paintings from the Neapolitan school and I wanted to hang these at this end of the gallery because through those doors you walk through to the Spanish 17th century collection and of course Naples in the 17th century was under Spanish rule so it gives some coherence to the visitor journey but in such a long wall as we have on this side you really have to think about how you can break down these sections and so you try and really find major imposing paintings to anchor these walls so in the centre here is Giordano's painting of Perseus and we have an equivalent large picture on the other side. One of the thrills of being able to finally be hanging in this gallery is not only to pull some pictures out of store, things that haven't been viewed for a long time by our public, but also it's a chance to show new things in the collection. So Guido Rami's Lot and His Daughters has just had a conservation treatment, this is the first time people will be able to see it after it had been cleaned and as you can see the colours are so wonderful, the red of Lot's cloth has really jumped out and the figures now sit properly in their space, it's been really transformational this treatment. Another new thing is framing, so we were thinking about the frames on our pictures and we've been able to reframe this portrait by Gaulli of a cardinal, this had a rather fancy 19th century gilt frame and this is now in an Italian 17th century frame which I think is quite austere and the black and gold I think really offset that rich, rich red silk of the cardinal's robes. And one of those thrilling things as a curator is of course to handle new acquisitions and we've been quite active in the Baroque area in recent years and this is of course our most recent acquisition, it's Oranzo Gentileschi's finding of Moses which we acquired at the beginning of this year following a public appeal at the end of last year and of course just a couple of years ago we were able to acquire a painting by Oranzo's daughter Artemisia Gentileschi, Artemisia of course being the subject of a major exhibition here at the National Gallery which had to be postponed unfortunately which was due to open in April and here she hands right aside our great gems of the Italian Baroque collection, the pictures by Caravaggio. So I can't wait for the public to be able to see this room and to see this collection, appreciate it in this magnificent, magnificent gallery and really this refurbishment that's gone on for a number of months would not have been possible without the generous support of Julia and Hans Rausing and that's why the gallery will now be renamed the Julia and Hans Rausing Room. So I hope to welcome you all back here very, very soon.