How do you design a gallery room- - National Gallery

Have you ever wondered how museums design a room to display their paintings? Think of the last time you walked around the National Gallery, or another museum, perhaps your local art gallery. What's the first image that comes to mind? What caught your eye? Perhaps an intimate religious story with soft green grass and a rosy dome bleeding in the sky. Maybe the straight jawline of a bearded man with a pointed cup. Or a young woman rushing out of the picture, away from a famished dragon. But can you paint in your mind the space around those images? The colour of the floor, the texture of the fabric lining, the decoration of the ceiling? Maybe you're not sure, and yet, the room, the display, and even the lighting are all essential to form a bond with those pictures. Of course, museum rooms change over time, they're often refurbished and rehanged, and even minute changes transform the way we make paintings part of our lives. I take you behind the scenes now to see how one room at the National Gallery, precisely Room 29, is renovated. We chat with experts to understand how it's possible that a room someone else has arranged for us is actually the space for our personal, unique experience with art. First stop, the archive. Here we can trace the room in our minds, discover its history, and learn how it has changed over time. Room 29 is located at the back of the main building, but it wasn't part of the original project. How did it come about that we needed an extra room? Well, the Gallery grew, really. So you can see, Carlo, on this map. This map dates from 1871, and you can see that the National Gallery is actually just this one-room-deep building at the front. And then gradually, over the years, it extended back from that building. Over, you can see here, there's a workhouse, and then over here, there is the barracks. They were demolished. So the first extension that took place was here in the northeast corner. That's what we call the Barry Rooms today. That was in 1876. And then in 1887, they constructed a central spine to the building, the central hall. And then over here in 1911, they constructed another suite of galleries, but it was a little bit lopsided in that the northwest corner was still vacant. And that northwest corner, that was where they constructed Room 29. Joseph Duveen was an art dealer, and he offered the money to pay for a room, which would be dedicated to Venetian art. And so we have a number of things from the archives, actually, that I can show you. This is a letter to Charles Holmes, who was the director of the National Gallery at the time, from Joe Duveen. There's a rather nice sort of postscript at the end where he says, how long do you think it will take to build the Venetian Room? I would so much appreciate hearing from you in detail about this. And the reason why I want to know about it in detail, because he was quite involved, like to get hands-on with things. So we believe that the reason why it's slightly different to other rooms in the gallery, the barrel vaulting, for example, is because Joseph Duveen personally wanted to see that. And just over here, this rather large volume is the board minutes from early 1928, where Charles Holmes reported the proposed gift by Duveen of Room 29 to the nation. And then construction work started. So the room was opened by Prince George, as was, who later became King George VI. This is January 1930. These are all the press cuttings from the time. And you can see Prince George here, next to one of the gallery's trustees, Lord Crawford. And then it did change over time. The gallery was hit by bombs during the Second World War. And this was one of the rooms that suffered particularly heavy bomb damage. And then it had various changes made to it over the years. In 1975, they put in raised platforms, they lowered the ceiling, they did all sorts of things. And so all these changes took place to the room over the years. What about now? We see an even more transformed gallery? Or we try to actually recreate the original flavour of the room? The new refurbishment is, let's say, it takes something from the original design. What do you think makes the room unique in the gallery? And we celebrate how unique this room is in the gallery. It has the barrel vault, it's divided in three bays, and makes it very different from everywhere else. The last time it was refurbished before this one was in the 90s when the Sainsbury Wing opened. So the full ceiling and the raised platform disappeared. And the gallery was redecorated to match stylistically the other rooms. After 30 years now of wear and tear and various changes, the room really needed to be refurbished again. So for this refurbishment, we try to work with what makes this room unique and try to make the best of the light that's come in. So the top moulding in the 90s was painted as a green faux marble, and now it's been returned to its original white and gold scheme so that the ceiling reads as a whole. On the walls as well, there was a dark damask green lining that was somewhat sombre, and we changed it to a warm olive green plain fabric that is also less distracting from the painting. The floor over 30 years was over-varnished and became very dark and glossy. So we replaced it completely and now we have a natural light oak that makes the room feel wider and pleasing to the eye as well. And the ley lights that give these floating natural lights to the three bays were just plain glass in the 90s, so we introduced a new contemporary frame on them that is a nod to the original laded glass. And above the ley lights on the roof, we replaced the blinds with a slimmer profile that allows better control over the amount of natural light that comes into the room and that works with the new artificial light scheme to have the paintings presented in the best possible light. The main principle of the project was to give the first place to the art. Second stop, the curators. With a deep knowledge of the collection, they know how to make the paintings the focus of the room. Paintings don't magically appear on the wall, right? Someone created the room, someone like you curated the experience for us, right? So what do you have to consider when hanging Room 29? So Maria and Matthias and I curated a hang of the 15th and 16th century Phoenician paintings in this newly refurbished Room 29. And these include some of the most beloved pictures in the collection, such as Bellini's striking portrait of Doge Louridan or Titian's amazing Bacchus and Ariadne. So here we were and we had this newly refurbished space which looked amazing. So we were really excited but we also had to take into account the unique features of this specific room because unlike most other rooms in the gallery which are rectangular, this one is made up of three bays. And in addition to that, it is also on a unique location in the gallery because it doesn't have just one or two doorways but it's got four. It's really at this point where it connects many different other galleries. So we had to take into account the four ways in which people could first encounter walking into this room. So we had to think, for example, about the scale and the size of the pictures. So ask questions such as how many pictures do we want to gather on the wall, right? Do we want a very dense wall, many of them? Or do we want to give them space? Can we hang small pictures next to larger pictures? And in addition to that, we also had to think about spacing and about height. So questions like those were constantly on our minds while hanging this room. So I suppose that there must be sort of a link of maybe a visual thematically between the works of art so they might talk to each other somehow. Yeah, so taking into account the kind of unique space and location of Room 29, we really wanted to create a display that cohered with the features of the room. So thinking about the three different bays, we decided on a hang in which we drew out some of the kind of key themes with the Venetian collection here at the Gallery, which is one of the richest outside of Italy. So we begin in the first bay in the 15th century, looking at paintings by, say, Bellini and Mantegna and thinking about how artists drew on nature and also the inspiration from antiquity as principal sources of their painting. We then moved to the second bay where we look at, for example, how there was a greater emphasis placed on landscape in terms of evoking greater spiritual sentiment in pictures and also the great importance of portraiture as a genre in Venice at the time for communicating the idea of power, status and identity of Venice's citizens. And then in the final bay, in the third bay, we moved to the later 16th century and really looking at how artists experimented with innovative brushwork and pigment to put their own sense of artistic self-expression, particularly through their own reincarnations of mythological subject matter. And we wanted to also think about the way that the bays allowed us to bring particular painters together and these kind of multiple viewpoints that we had with the particular locus of Room 29 also allowed us to bring out some interesting juxtapositions, some of them more familiar, such as Mantegna and Bellini's Agony in the Gardens, both kind of artists looking to each other, Bellini inspired by his brother-in-law's earlier version, and then some more unusual juxtapositions that you don't normally see in the main galleries, such as Tintoretto next to El Greco. And we know, for example, that El Greco did spend time in Venice where he was really inspired by the kind of scintillating brushwork and prismatic colour palette of Tintoretto. And when he moved to Spain, indeed, he hoped that this kind of Venetian sympathy on his part would win him the patronage of King Philip II. Speaking of Philip II, so how did you display two of the most iconic mythologies that Titian painted for Philip II? So you're talking about one of the great glories of the collection, which is Dianon Actaeon and Dianon Callisto, painted by Titian in the late 1550s for King Philip II of Spain. They were painted at the same time, on the easel simultaneously, and conceived as a pair. And indeed, they've remained together for their entire history. The way that they're painted, the way the composition is arranged, with the landscape seeming to continue across from them, and individual figures seeming to rhyme, echo, visually, suggest that they have to be hung quite close together. Then you get that beautiful bow-like movement of the stream in the front, and you get the hill ascending, and then descending in the back. We also decided to hang them quite low, because these, although they're very large pictures, they benefit from a certain intimacy. When you get up close to them, you are able better to appreciate them, I think, in part because you're better able to appreciate Titian's expressive brushwork, which is really part of the whole narrative we're telling in this gallery. The development and innovations in painting, and specifically the handling of the brush and the use of color in the period. And so we want people to get up close. But also because these are pictures that really appeal to our emotional engagements. By hanging them low, we enable a more direct engagement with the protagonists in these pictures, and to empathize with them. Another question raised by the pictures is their original location. We don't know where they were intended to be hung, although it was somewhere in the palace in Toledo. However, Titian painted them with the light falling from opposite directions. In Diana and Actaeon, the light falls from the left, and in Diana and Callisto, the light falls from the right. Usually, Titian was quite mindful of the location to which his pictures were sent, and where they were going to hang. So one assumes that this is intentional. So what this might indicate is that, actually, they were in a very large room with a window on either side. But it's unclear. This is the way that makes sense. And with the beautiful natural light we have coming into the gallery, it's a good point. As morning and night transform the mood of the rooms in our homes, lighting conditions influence our impression of a gallery's display. Let's stop a lighting design specialist. When we're in a gallery, we may forget that the way we experience light is artificially controlled, but a day like this actually feels very natural. It's still a sort of a magic trick, or not? Well, that's the sort of art of it that we need to kind of balance the rooms, because we have lots of different factors to take into account for the visitor experience. The ambition for the gallery was for it to feel daylight, completely daylight. And for these works to be seen in daylight as they would have been, these Venetian works. However, of course, we've got to control the daylight because in British weather, we go from one extreme to the other. At the moment, we're in very, very bright sunlight, which is lovely, but actually creates far too much exposure on the works. So we have to control that so we can be coming down from 6,000 lux, which is a really high level, to something which is deemed to be an appropriate exposure for works of art that are on foils. And then with artificial light, we need to kind of blend in so that there is artificial light, but it shouldn't be seen as being, oh, this is a dramatic spotlight. The impression is that it's daylight. And in this gallery, we've been really testing the colour temperatures so that that blends very well with the daylight. So you're never seeing a contrast between the peak level of daylight and then on a winter's afternoon, it all feels quite blended between the daylight and the artificial light. This is all controlled by a sensor on the paintings themselves that then talks to the louvers, which are on the roof. And then that also talks to the artificial lighting. So between that, it is a choreography, really, an incremental and very carefully judged dance between the artificial light and the daylight. Creating a space to enjoy art is an art in itself. Many people work hard behind the scenes to make the paintings shine on the walls, to make the best use of the natural and artificial light, to make a museum room an exciting and inspiring place. Walk with me through the National Gallery. We're heading to the newly refurbished Room 29. Savour the moment when your foot is on the doorstep. Before your eyes, the floor defines a space and calls you in. The barrel vaulting guides your steps through layers of history. Each painting opens up a view onto another world. As you move forward, you can feel a flutter of excitement, a rush of emotions coming your way. And all of a sudden you feel tears running down your red eyes. Your heart is broken, as if a sharp blade has cut through it. Or you feel joy filling up your soul, as if you ran into someone who you thought was lost forever. And every time you walk through this room, you feel moved, touched. Closer to these familiar, never seen before, paintings. Their stories become your story. And you become part of the National Gallery.