Cathy's Art Diary

Innovative installation at the National Gallery using virtual reality to set a painting by Veronese into context. As you may know I don’t like virtually reality exhibits but having heard a talk on this one I decided to give it a try and it is one of the best I’ve done. It placed the painting back in the chapel for which it was painted and as it would have appeared at the date it was unveiled. You felt as if you were in that space with a soundtrack of monks chanting and the ambient noise of the space. You could choose from being introduced to the work by an avatar of the curator or a dialogue between the abbot who commissioned it and a monk from the order. It only lasted about ten minutes which is probably long enough to be in a virtually created world. The experience was nicely managed by the staff with good explanations of how the head set worked and good advice to glasses wearers like me. Once in the room there was a one to one ratio of staff to punters to keep it safe. It ...

Useful and interesting online lecture from National Gallery introducing their Veronese virtual reality experience. Rebecca Gill, the curator of the exhibition and Lawrence Childs, Head of Digital Services at the gallery took us through the reasons for commissioning this work and the process by which it was made. The project aimed to put Veronese’s “The Consecration of St Nicholas” digitally back into the chapel for which it was commissioned. Gill explained the context of the picture and the story they were trying to tell. She covered its commissioning by a monastery known for its Lutheran tendencies, how it was removed in the Napoleonic wars and how the chapel had changed over the years. They then discussed the processes of scanning the chapel and how they investigated changes which needed to be made to get the space back to when the picture was unveiled in 1562. They talked about finding a suitable new frame to add digitally and how in doing that they revealed a circular window...