Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

I'm Amanda Lilly and I'm a Reader in History of Art at the University of York and I've got a fellowship from the AHRC to work on this project at the National Gallery, an exhibition on architecture and Italian Renaissance painting called Building the Picture. This exhibition focuses on Italian Renaissance art from about 1300 right the way through to 1550, so a whole 250 years of Italian Renaissance painting is included in the exhibition. The AHRC funding has bought me time out from my job in the university to devote myself entirely to the exhibition project. It offers a whole new way of looking at paintings really. The architectural aspects of paintings tended to have been considered as background, something peripheral or subordinate to the figures, and everyone has always treated the figures as the parts of paintings that carry the meaning and that bear the main emotional content of paintings. But we've discovered, and I think it's clear to people who work in this field, that architecture is also an active protagonist in paintings and carries meaning and has great emotive content. Sebastiano del Piombo's idea of the Temple of Solomon in his Judgment of Solomon is a particularly beautiful and amazingly powerful image of the Temple or the Basilica of Solomon. We have Solomon on his dais in the centre of this court of law making his judgment between two women and their two babies, one dead, one still alive. The extraordinary thing about images of the Temple of Solomon is that they all vary so much from each other. It seems to free artists to invent extraordinary architectural ideas of what that temple, that ancient Temple of Solomon, might have looked like. It was also a place full of sanctity, it was the most sacred place on earth really. So artists take their imagined image of it and keep remaking it. One of the key features about being an architect in the Italian Renaissance was that you were not trained as such. Artists moved quite fluidly between different art forms. You might be a sculptor and also design buildings or a painter and do the same and I think this is something which is increasingly becoming interesting to contemporary architects and it's for that reason we were very keen to commission a set of five contemporary thinkers and cultural figures talking about the relationship of the pictures and the objects shown in this exhibition to our attitudes on our own day to architecture, the built environment and how it's depicted not just in paintings but also in films and other art forms we use today. We have commissioned Martha Fiennes, an artist and filmmaker, also Peter Zumthor, the world famous architect, and two historians and also a computer games designer who have all showed us how architecture and imaginary architecture is explored in their work. One of the pictures I find most stimulating to look at in the context of this show is a painting I'd never really thought of as being particularly architectural before and that's a tondo or circular painting by Botticelli of the Eradication of the Kings made for a palace in Florence in probably the 1470s and it shows the Virgin and Child with Joseph in the nativity in a stable. Round them is this extraordinary architectural context of ruins and even the keystone of the building is collapsing or about to collapse as we look at it. What I've realised as we've worked on this is that Botticelli was a much more interesting painter of architecture than I'd ever thought. This exhibition is lasting longer than most exhibitions, it's a five-month run, it's also entirely free and it also includes an online catalogue which is also freely accessible to everyone throughout the world. Of course the opportunity for collaboration with Amanda from the University of York has been an incredibly enriching opportunity for me and my colleagues at the National Gallery as I think it's also been mutually so to Amanda. Now research has been critical to the National Gallery since its inception in 1824. We're a research active institution and we're delighted that we're an independent research organisation supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. One of the really great things about this project has been the opportunity as well to think about research as it develops in future generations. We've had a PhD student, Alistair Flint, who's been working with us since the inception on the one particular aspect, the architecture of the House of the Virgin and it's been wonderful to think of the work that Alistair does continuing in academic work for many years to come. We hope visitors will gain a whole new perspective on these pictures and really a new way of looking at Renaissance painting, bringing forwards from the periphery and the background of these crucial parts of pictures. They're not just subordinate or of minor importance, they actually change the way we think about and look at paintings.