Britain’s greatest art gallery (I mean, actually) celebrates its 200th anniversary with the reopening of its Sainsbury Wing after a two–year refurbishment, at an estimated £25-30m cost. With it comes a rehang, and effective relaunch of the National Gallery’s entire collection, under the title “The Wonder of Art”. Let’s not be snobbish. That title may be only one step above “I ♡ Art” in terms of slightly cock-eyed populism, but if it gives the British public more of a sense of ownership – because they do own the place after all, as well as pay for it – I’ll take as much of “The Wonder of Art” as you can throw at me.
Improvements to the postmodern-neoclassical Sainsbury Wing, originally opened in 1991, lie substantially in the ground floor reception areas, which have been reconfigured into a single refreshingly expansive space. It won’t be long, I’ll wager, before they’re re-cluttered with merchandising displays and information desks, because well, that’s just what happens in museums. It’s a matter of moments before we’re ascending the light-filled staircase to the top floor, and the momentous collections of painting from the Middle Ages to Impressionism, that ensure the National’s permanent ranking among the world’s greatest art museums.
But instead of a jaw-dropping opening salvo on the development of illusionistic space in Western painting – a narrative that’s been the National’s USP since its opening, we find ourselves in a relatively small room with a curious jumble of works. Michelangelo’s unfinished Manchester Madonna and Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks hang beside portraits by Botticelli and Rogier van der Weyden, the medieval English Wilton Diptych and various other not quite stellar works, and a ponderous wall text entitled “What Painting Can Do” – our first disheartening impression that the relaunched National Gallery will be about using the paintings to illustrate the curators’ theoretical viewpoints.
We then find ourselves looking not at the formative works of the Western tradition, from Italy circa 1250, as logic dictates, but parachuted, somewhat mystifyingly, into early 15th-century Flanders, and the simultaneous development of oil painting and in-depth portraiture. This focus on the so-called Northern Renaissance, from Jan van Eck to Albrecht Dürer, continues through several rooms of mostly great works, before we turn a corner back into the Italian Middle Ages and things suddenly become clearer.
The new National Gallery’s focus on displaying paintings in their original configurations, or as close as is practically possible, has led to the creation of some large and spectacular “new” works. Several small devotional paintings, for example, have been brought back into their original positions in Jacopo di Cione’s majestically vibrant San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece (1370-71), while a large crucifix by Segna di Bonaventura hangs vertiginously overhead. The sheer scale of such works makes them impossible to accommodate in the relatively pokey opening rooms, and the effect is undoubtedly more immersive than in previous attempts to recreate the mood of this era. Yet given that the galleries have only just been refurbished at huge expense, you’d think that the opening stages of the narrative they were created to tell might have been built more strongly into the equation.
Yet once that narrative fully kicks in, the wonder of art – literally – takes over. Cleaning and more prominent positioning means that many previously overlooked works, from wall-filling altarpieces to relatively small paintings – such as Andrea del Verrocchio’s The Virgin and Child with Two Angels (1467), which I’d never even noticed before – now glow from the walls with near magical intensity.
Individual rooms focus on breakthrough developments in particular cities and regions, with the newly written texts for individual works couched in a rather nervous mixture of pedantic academicism and breathless PR speak, with occasional lapses into near sub-literate populism (surely it’s up to us to decide if Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man feels “astonishingly real”). It’s a linguistic blend that’s becoming standard in museums. But when the art is as full of “wonder” as this, who needs texts?
As we move into the main body of the museum, much of which has remained open during the refurbishment, there are subtle shifts in emphasis and regroupings of major works that bring a sense of freshness to hallowed and often immense rooms that had felt like they’d barely changed in decades. In the vast saloons of Spanish and Italian baroque painting, for example, there’s a definite sense of a sharpening and fine-tuning of the historical flow, with an illuminating new room focused on the role of Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria as collectors.
But it’s the British displays that yield the biggest surprises. If there was formerly a fatal sense of a drop in emotional temperature as we approached the well-mannered portraiture of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, an array of wonderfully infinite family portraits by Gainsborough, strongly focused on his beloved daughters, gives a real lift to our sense of the British 18th century. Quintessential British classics from the likes of Hogarth, Stubbs and Joseph Wright of Derby are given a new lease of life in the surrounding rehang.
If the National can get those slightly confused opening moments right, this could be the Gallery’s strongest iteration yet. There will be those who’ll argue that the age of diversity doesn’t need grand canonical narratives, with clear beginnings, middles and ends – but when you have a narrative as inherently grand as this one, in which so much of the art strives avowedly for grandeur, it would be pure perversity not to hit that button as hard as possible.
‘The Wonder of Art’ is open daily at the National Gallery
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