Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

This project uses an exhibition at the National Gallery in London to explore the fictive architecture which became a strategic and conspicuous feature of Italian Renaissance painting. Most historians of this period of Italian art have focused on the figure, and those who have studied pictorial space have tended to concentrate on mathematical perspective. A new study of the buildings and architectural frameworks created within images entirely changes the way we perceive these paintings. The exhibition and research project 'Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting' addresses a fundamental question: what does architecture do for painting? It investigates how and why fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian artists not only incorporated buildings in their work, but often took an architectural approach to painting. The exhibition is designed around 5 themes:
1) 'Building the picture' investigates the ways in which architecture underpins painting. Rather than being something added on or subordinate to the rest of the image, an architectonic approach often structures the whole painting at the initial planning stage. In setting out the composition, painters designed the architectural framework first, constructing a space and placing figures within it, as the technical evidence of underdrawing, incised or ruled lines and pin-holes often demonstrates.
2) 'Inhabiting the picture' explores the ways in which inner frameworks create the illusion of pictorial space.The way in which we visually enter and inhabit the picture greatly depends on architectural devices: frames and portals that invite the spectator into pictorial space, streets and piazzas through which we imagine strolling, or deep perspectival passages and barrel vaults that direct us inexorably to a vanishing destination. Certain architectural frameworks were favoured to make virtual buildings accessible to viewers: façades were opened up to create cut-away views, and the advantages of the loggia or portico were explored. It is painted architecture that creates an entry to the image which is virtually built by the painter.
3) 'Place making' is an essential part of painting as the subject and the story need a location for the action or event. Architecture very often creates the place, whether it be real or imaginary, foreign or local, a city square or street, a church, monastery, stable or palace, an exterior or interior.The subtle characterisation of place plays a key role in visual story telling and is often achieved by architectural means.
4) 'Architectural time' investigates how painters imagined and constructed a time for the visual narrative. Although we might expect a straightforward rendering of, say, ancient buildings in a mythological subject, notions of history are often confused or complicated by hybrid architectural inventions, so that architecture in painting might seem at first to establish a time, but on looking more closely, a clear sense of period often collapses or is destroyed.
5) 'Fantasy architecture' explores what painters can do that architects cannot, displaying the power of the painter to create what could never be built. Extravagant buildings held a special appeal for artists, patrons and architects themselves, as the aesthetic principle is allowed to rule over the practical in a way that would never be possible in real structures. This section is about architectural desire: exhibiting unachievably complex or structurally impossible designs, dream-like colours and materials including bronze capitals or priceless coloured marbles, and surprising or grotesque decoration.

The project will also generate a program of scholarly and curatorial events and publications, including a website with an online catalogue, pod casts, and inventive digital reconstructions; a pre-exhibition conference session to explore the field; and an international symposium and student workshop during the exhibition period.

Who will benefit from this research and how will they benefit? Among non-academic beneficiaries the project will have an impact on the following groups:
1) It will benefit the wider public, particularly gallery visitors, tourists, and those who attend public lectures and educational events at the National Gallery in London. Italian Renaissance painting attracts a vast audience across the world. It has been collected and publicly displayed in museums and galleries on every continent, and is taught in schools and universities as a canonical product of European culture. On a more popular level it is consumed and disseminated in every medium from posters to internet sites. There is therefore a large, enthusiastic general audience for research in this field, especially when presented in visual form as this exhibition project will do. Being a free summer exhibition in the Sunley Room on the main floor of the Gallery, 'Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting' will provide the widest possible public access. The National Gallery had over 5.2 million visitors from 1 April 2011-31 March 2012, while the three most recent free exhibitions in the Sunley Room were each seen by between 130,000 and 270,000 visitors. In addition, the searchable, zoomable and interactive catalogue will be available online, as will podcasts or short filmed conversations with artists, architects and designers of virtual environments, conveying the wider creative implications of this research.The National Gallery website had just over 6.5 million visits from 1 April 2011-31 March 2012. The online material will have the potential for long-term impact since it will continue to be available after the exhibition as part of the National Gallery website. As part of a cycle of innovative, thought-provoking and beautiful exhibitions, this will enhance the quality of the nation's cultural life, providing visual, creative and intellectual stimulus for the public.
2) It will have an impact on the research and exhibitions policy of a national museum in the public sector. A crucial benefit for The National Gallery is the way in which this exhibition is integrated with the Gallery's strategic development, both as part of a series of exhibitions highlighting lesser known aspects of the National Gallery's own holdings, while also being linked to a series of free summer exhibitions exploring connections between painting and other arts. 'Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting' follows in a sequence after 'Metamorphosis:Titian 2012' relating painting to poetry, and 'Music in the Paintings of Vermeer' in summer 2013. Furthermore, it is timed to coincide in 2014 with a major exhibition on Veronese, in whose paintings architecture plays a crucial role.
3) It has the potential for impact on urban planners, architects and designers. Since this project focuses on the architectural imagination it may inspire all those concerned with architectural ideas, theory, designs and planning. The creation by painters of ideal cities, civic spaces, interrelated buildings, interiors and exteriors sheds light on concepts of what a building can be and ways in which we rethink cities.
4) It has the potential for impact on the commercial private sector in the computer games industry.The construction of virtual reality through the visualisation of architecture in Italian Renaissance painting can be seen as the ancestor of the virtual worlds presented to the modern public through digital media and screens. The computer games industry exploits architectural history and archeological research to reconstruct historic sites such as Renaissance Florence and Venice as used by players of 'Assassins Creed' [Ubisoft]. This research has the potential to inspire that section of the games industry engaged in constructing historic fantasies based around virtual buildings and urban topographies.