Building the Picture, National Gallery

Sometimes we can forget that our great museums are not just tourist attractions but also hives of scholarship – and that this bedrock of work is what creates their exhibitions.

So it is with Building the Picture, a brilliant show forged by a research partnership between the National Gallery and the University of York. Rather than concentrating on the people and classical mythology of the Renaissance, the paintings here show how architecture became part of the pictorial language of the time. Doors and portals became frames within frames. Piazzas became theatres, inhabited by saints and senators.

Sometimes, in the period, buildings were foreshortened and lengthened for dramatic effect and rendered in ochre and red. Paintings such as Duccio’s The Healing of the Man born Blind from Maestà Predella and Sandro Botticelli’s  Four Scenes from the Early Life of Saint Zenobius show the virtuosi framing of space.

One of the innovations often cited as a driver of the Renaissance is the use of perspective and vanishing points – a process that this exhibition casts light upon.  But the show isn’t about technique, or about proportional mathematics principles such as the Golden Section. Its focus is how painters were driven to depict the imposing, complex beauty of the architecture around them, just as the great Renaissance theoreticians Alberti and Vasari considered architecture to be the mother art.

The National Gallery is expecting a glut of visits from architects and urban planners, and interestingly expects a great deal of interest from the computer games industry in what it calls ‘the ancestor of the virtual worlds’. It’s another way, too, to use the Gallery’s inventory as part of a theme, in the style of lovely shows like last summer’s Music in the Paintings of Vermeer.

You can still go to the best preserved Renaissance towns and cities (Florence, of course, but also Lucca and Verona) and feel that you’re walking into one of these paintings. Don't have the fare to go that far? Well, as you leave the National Gallery and walk into Trafalgar Square – itself an exemplar of Classical proportion – you’ll also feel part of the picture.