"Buildings in paintings have too often been viewed as background."

'Three Miracles of St. Zenobius' (c.1500) by Sandro Botticelli The National Gallery, London

Let's admit that some of us are occasionally uncertain about just where to focus our attention when enjoying an Italian Renaissance painting. Help is in sight—well, at least at London's National Gallery. "Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting," currently on view there, presents far more than the already satisfying feast for the eyes of some splendid paintings. Drawn primarily from the museum's own collections, this exhibition helps us understand why a Virgin or Christ figure may occasionally be less interesting than the alluring space in which its story takes place. An examination of the various architectural devices that are available to the artist turns out to be essential in fully grasping the visual dynamics of a painting.

As the scholar Amanda Lillie writes in the online catalog (itself a bold model for a museum to follow): "Buildings in paintings have too often been viewed as background or as space fillers which play a passive or at best supporting role, propping up the figures that carry the main message of the picture. By looking afresh at buildings within paintings, treating them as active protagonists, it becomes clear that they performed a series of crucial roles."

A concise gathering of 25 paintings and five drawings dating from about the mid-14th to the mid-16th century by artists such as Botticelli, Carlo Crivelli, Duccio, Sebastiano del Piombo and Sassetta demonstrates the various ways in which architecture creates the physical settings for sacred stories, depicts real places and conjures up imagined ones, and can also play an active role within a narrative. In one of the videos that accompany the exhibition (and are also thoughtfully available online), film scholar John David Rhodes argues that cinematic space was born in Renaissance paintings. The exhibition is astutely organized into nuanced, nonchronological sections including "Constructing the Picture," "Entering the Picture," "Place Making" and "Architectural Time."...Continue Reading

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