This new National Gallery exhibition takes the background architecture of Renaissance paintings and places it centre stage

Groaning under the weight of its own opulence … The Annunciation (1307/08-11) by Duccio. Photograph: National Gallery. Click to view full image

Standing there in her trademark blue gown, golden halo jauntily placed behind her head, Mary is framed by the simple, round arch of a Romanesque portico, as Gabriel arrives to impregnate her with the son of God. Finished with plain pastel render, it is a simple building, ornamented only by a small pot of flowers. Nearby, the same scene is re-enacted, painted a century later, in an elaborate palazzo, the Virgin closed in by richly carved pilasters topped with shining bronze capitals, sandwiched between floors and ceilings inlaid with coloured marble. Every surface groans under the weight of its own opulence, to such an extent that you might miss the holy laser beam that bursts from the clouds, bringing with it a tiny foetal Jesus in the form of a dove.

"Buildings in paintings have always been treated as a background, as something subordinate to the figures themselves," says art historian Amanda Lillie, co-curator of Building the Picture, a new exhibition at theNational Gallery that aims to put the architecture of Renaissance paintings on centre stage. "We're arguing that the buildings are active protagonists. They're not just propping up the characters, but are also capable of carrying key messages and performing a series of crucial roles themselves."

The two scenes of the Annunciation form part of a section on entrances and thresholds, depicting ways in which painters attempted to lure in their viewers. We are involuntarily implicated in the miraculous events on show through carefully placed windows and archways, steps and plinths, illusory structures merging into the very buildings in which they would have been placed.

The Procession of Pope Leo X, through the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, in 1515 (c 1558), by Giorgio Vasari

In a clever piece of curation, a painting originally displayed in a street tabernacle in Florence is raised above the entrance to the gallery, alongside a contemporary etching and map showing its original position on a ceremonial route through the town. Domenico Veneziano's workdepicts the Virgin and Child seated on a deep, boxy throne, framed by an archway and the structure of the tabernacle. It plays tricks with recession and projection, immuring the scene within the fabric of the building and in the city.

"In many of the works on show, you can see that much more attention has been paid to the architectural setting than the characters in it," says co-curator Caroline Campbell, pointing out an early working sketch by Lorenzo Costa, in which a holy banquet is clearly secondary to the proportions of the Corinthian capitals and the grand barrel-vaulted nave that sails above the heads of the tiny disciples. The people are merely props to offset the magnificent architectural feat.

"It's partly because many of these painters were also architects," Campbell adds. "There was very little separation between practitioners of different art forms in the Renaissance. These artists and designers would use canvases as the testing ground for new ideas."

Like the modern-day architectural rendering, the paintings show impossible flights of fancy, structures that go above and beyond the laws of physics and the limits of their patron's purse strings. They depict fantastical worlds, in which bits of ancient Rome have mysteriously landed in contemporary Venice, pagan symbols mingle with early Jewish forms, buildings not yet finished are depicted as weed-encrusted ruins. Some seem to be premonitions, foreshadowing buildings that had not yet materialised, as if serving as a kind of billboard.

A painting by Marcello Venusti, a protege of Michelangelo, depicts a scene in the Temple of Jerusalem, figures framed by spiralling barley-sugar columns, like stone snakes wiggling towards the vaulted heavens. They are almost identical to the columns that would soon appear in St Peter's Basilica, claimed to have come from Solomon's Temple. Venusti is clearly using the painting to help massage his master's mythology.

Could the temple painting have ever sported such richly encrusted Byzantine forms in the first place? Not according to four other artists on show in the same room, whose depictions of this holy of holies range from a lavish Doric pile on the banks of the Venetian lagoon, as imagined by Lambert Sustris, to an imposing Roman basilica, heavy with the weight of judgment, in the hands of Sebastiano del Piombo. In the former scene, the figures have been so thinly painted that the architecture thrusts to the fore, the Queen of Sheba and her entourage barely registering as flimsy apparitions, hovering over the strongly painted steps and columns of the classical portico. The architectonics are here revealed as the very bones of the composition, tying the protagonists into place.

"The architecture is serving much more than an ordering device," says Lillie, walking into the final room that addresses time, full of broken columns and fractured pediments, crumbling ruins used to express the destruction of the old order when Jesus appears on the scene. "The buildings are creative amalgams, rich in suggestion, and highly evocative. We usually think of the figures carrying the feeling of the painting, but we hope to show that the architecture is just as important in conveying these emotions."

Providing such a sharply focused lens over a broad cross-section of Renaissance works, many drawn from the National's permanent collection, the exhibition has a transformative effect on the rest of the gallery. Wandering the endless halls of the same stock characters undergoing the same miraculous events, common to any major gallery in the west, not much changes. Saint Jerome is always to be found concentrating hard in his study, generally in a sumptuous red cloak, with a skull somewhere to hand. The three wise men are always there in line, gathered around the manger in their exotic robes, like the climax of every primary school nativity play.

What differentiates these staple scenes – besides the variously successful attempts at rendering supernatural pain or ecstasy, and the occasionally different choice of outfits – is where they are set. Building the Picture helps to opens our eyes to why these stage sets matter, and it might just change the way you look.

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