“Step inside the play area,” says a friendly lady brandishing a virtual-reality headset, gesturing towards a big blue diamond outlined on the floor. “Your experience is about to begin.”
Virtual Veronese is the latest “experience” at the National Gallery designed to lure in younger audiences. Previous efforts have been hit-and-miss. Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece, in 2019, was naff as hell, debasing The Virgin of the Rocks. A year later, still smarting from that debacle, the gallery invited visitors to enter midnight-blue hovering wigwams and watch screens showing high-definition details from Jan Gossaert’s 16th-century altarpiece The Adoration of the Kings. This time, at least, the painting under consideration was respected.
Now, the subject isn’t one of the collection’s superstars, but a 9ft-high altarpiece by Paolo Veronese, the precocious son of an Italian stonecutter, which, despite its size, hangs somewhat modestly, without drawing a crowd, in a corner of Room 9. Painted in 1562, it depicts the consecration of Saint Nicholas (the gift-giving model, incidentally, for Santa Claus) as a bishop of Myra, on the southern coast of modern Turkey.
Downstairs, having donned a headset after a lot of health-and-safety faff, ticket-holders contemplate a simulacrum of the painting in its original setting: a marble-clad chapel in the church of San Benedetto al Po near Mantua. A pair of candles before the picture illuminates the scene. Inside this virtual space, it’s possible to take a few steps, look up and down, swivel 360 degrees: the grand architecture, of a sort often featured in Veronese’s paintings, has been painstakingly modelled, providing an impressive sense of height, although, thanks to the artificiality of the graphics, it has an eerie, lonely quality, too. Walk too far, and a menacing mesh of neon-bright crosses appears, marking the entertainment’s limits: the metaverse says no. Not much leeway, then, for “play”.
There’s a choice of virtual guide: either the curator responsible for the “experience”, architectural historian Rebecca Gill, who, upon materialising in a red dress, discusses the “magnificent” painting in conventional terms, before unseen singers perform period music, which you’re invited to listen to “until the bells ring for Mass”; or a pair of monks played by actors in a specially written routine, also lasting around eight minutes.
I’d choose the latter: Gill’s avatar has the stiff demeanour of an air stewardess reeling off safety protocol. Perhaps fearful of accusations of cultural insensitivity, she doesn’t mention the turbans worn by two onlookers on the painting’s left, though Veronese loved “exotic” finery.
The monks’ story smacks of low-budget BBC docudrama, but it’s more involving. It’s also informative. For instance, we learn that the bald, bearded Abbot Asola, with a basso profondo uncannily like that of the gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, paid “123 gold scudi” for the altarpiece, and appears in it, too. Apparently, the painting, with its message of support for the God-given authority of the Pope (note the angel tumbling down from the top, bearing a mitre and crozier for Nicholas, who kneels in the middle, wearing a robe of emerald green), was commissioned to quell rumours of the Benedictine monastery’s heretical Lutheran sympathies. Because the set-up evokes a video game, you half-expect an enemy horde of shadowy Inquisitors to burst into the chapel. Where’s my computer-generated poniard? Now, that would be “immersive”.
Does anything need finessing? You bet: this virtual world is too fuzzy. Thus, while we get a memorable impression of the painting’s setting, details prove elusive. During my go, there were distracting glitches, too, as the abbot’s red scarf disintegrated into pixels. Still, if Virtual Veronese helps enthuse a younger audience otherwise sceptical of the Old Masters, then, surely, it’s worthwhile.
From March 7 until April 3. Details: nationalgallery.org.uk
