 Hi everyone, my name is Mark Hallett and welcome to the event tonight. We're just going to spend a minute or two waiting for everyone to gather together in this virtual lecture theatre as it were. And so, and then we'll start. So we'll just wait another minute or so while everyone joins us in this webinar. So if you can stay patient, that'd be wonderful. Just again for those who are just joining us, my name is Mark Hallett and we're saying that we'll wait a minute or two longer before the event proper starts. So if you can be patient, if you've already joined us and wait for your many fellow guests who are joining, we have a very large audience tonight, which is wonderful. So we want to give everyone time to join us before we begin properly. Again, a quick reminder or a quick note to say that we're waiting another few seconds before starting properly. I can still see from the numbers, participants at the bottom of my screen that we're numbers are continuing to rise. And so we'll wait until you feel that pretty much everyone has joined us who wants to, and then we can make this proper start. So again, thanks for your patience while we wait for everyone to become part of the event. Good. Well, I think I'll begin now because we want to make the most of the time that we have together as possible. So hello everyone. My name is Mark Hallett, and I'm the director of the Paul Mellon Center for studies in British art. She's based in London. I'm really delighted to welcome you to this year's Paul Mellon lectures, which all take the form of free live webinars, which are devoted to the theme of the museum and gallery today. The first of these lectures will be delivered by Dr. Gabriele Finale, the director of the National Gallery in London. But before telling you a little more about the program of lectures and introducing Gabriele himself, I thought I quickly described the format and procedures of today's event. So here's our housekeeping slide. So as it says here, the event will begin with a presentation by Gabriele, and we think it will last around 45 minutes. And then this will be followed by a brief in conversation between the two of us, but a longer section of time devoted to questions from the audience. And you as audience members can type questions using the Q&A function. Now I'd really encourage you to submit questions through the Q&A function, which I really look forward to asking Gabriele on your behalf. And during the talk itself, if a question comes to mind, please type it into the Q&A section function and we'll try and have the chance to ask Gabriele that question. This session will be recorded and made available to the public. Close captioning is available. So if you want the close captioning and feel you benefit from it, click the CC button on the screen to enable captions. And you can also keep in contact with us during the talk through using the chat function. See that people are already using that to communicate with us about where you're watching us from and communicating with us from. Now, for those of us, those of you, sorry, who don't know as well, I thought I'd mentioned the Paul Mellon lectures take their name and the philanthropist and art collector Paul Mellon, who some five decades ago set up the Paul Mellon Center for studies in British art, to support the most original and rigorous and stimulating research into the history of British art and architecture. The lectures, which are sponsored by the Center, but they're also co-organized in collaboration with our partner institution, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. These lectures were inaugurated in 1994, and since then they've been delivered by annually by distinguished historians of British art. Some of you may remember our last such series in the spring of 2019, when Tim Barringer gave a wonderful set of talks on the topic of global landscape in the Age of Empire. Later in that same year, 2019, Dr. Courtney J. Martin assumed the position of director of the Yale Center for British Art. The Mellon lectures were one of the first things that Courtney and I talked about upon her appointment. We both agreed that it would be wonderful to see them addressing the role of the museum and the gallery today. We also discussed the possibility of experimenting with a different format for the talks. Rather than asking a single scholar to give them, how about, on this occasion at least, asking a group of speakers to address our chosen theme. And even more excitingly, how about reaching out to the people who run some of the world's most distinguished museums and galleries, and asking them whether they'd be willing to discuss how their own institutions and other such institutions were responding to the challenges of the early 21st century. I'm thrilled to report that we received a remarkably warm and generous response to our invitations. And we're very quickly able to put together a brilliant lineup of six different speakers, all of whom will be bringing their vision, intelligence and imagination to bear on our central theme. That theme of the museum and the gallery today, of course, has become ever more urgent and challenging over the past two years. The world has been transformed by the impacts of the COVID pandemic, by global protests against racial injustice, by a growing awareness of the climate emergency, by an accelerating turn to online forms of interaction and experience across all aspects of our lives. How do museums and galleries respond to this rapidly changing situation? The world has experience of visiting such institutions, of exploring their collections, and of looking at works of art play in this new set of circumstances. And how do museum and gallery directors preserve and promote the historical reach of their institutions collections and exhibition programs, even as they adapt the unprecedented challenges of the contemporary moment. And other related questions will no doubt be touched upon our speakers over the coming weeks, even as they focus on the more specific stories of the organizations under their care. It'll be fascinating to hear their thoughts, and I hope you will stay with us and benefit from their insights and expertise throughout our lecture program. Now in normal times, the British leg of the Paul Melon Lectures would take place at London's National Gallery. Given our long partnership, it gives me a special pleasure to welcome the gallery's director, Dr. Gabriele Finaldi, to deliver our first lecture this year. As many of you know, Gabriele has been director of the gallery since August 2015, having previously been deputy director for collections and research, the Museum National Departamento in Madrid. Gabriele is internationally renowned not only for the many groundbreaking exhibitions he has helped create and curate over his career, and for his wide ranging scholarly publications, but also and increasingly, the authority and lucidity is brought to the role of directing the National Gallery itself. During his tenure at this gallery, and despite the kinds of challenges I've already mentioned, he's overseen a spectacular run with ambitious innovative exhibitions, including remarkable if sometimes curtail displays devoted to Artemisia Gentileschi and Titian. He's also developed a great team of curators at the gallery and promoted important new initiatives in the fields of research, online programming and contemporary art. But most importantly of all perhaps, at least to me, he has fostered a powerful sense of collegiality and collaboration and belonging across the whole institution. Even in these difficult days, the National Gallery always feels like a happy place to visit, humming with energy and interest. And the part of all those who worked there, and the part of those people visiting too. So, today, under the umbrella of our wider theme, Gabriele will talk on the topic of a gallery for the use of the public, the National Gallery at 200. Over to you, Gabriele. Thank you very much indeed, Mark. It's been a real pleasure to receive this invitation. I'm honored by the things you say, and I'm grateful for the things you say about our museum and about colleagues here at the gallery. I'm going to try and share my screen and get the talk begun. It's great pleasure to address you as the first of the speakers in this melon series. As Mark said, normally we would be hosting this at the gallery itself. Things are different this year. But I assure you that I am at the gallery. I'm in my office in Trafalgar Square on my rice and possibly just behind me. You can see the side facade of the Sainsbury. The National Gallery opened to the public in a private house in Palmao, just down the road from where I am now, on the 10th of May 1824. There was no great fanfare. Commentators, as you bothered to comment on it at all, were struck by the modesty of the gallery and compared it unfavorably to the regal grandeur of the Louvre. Our French colleagues often have a healthy auteur with regard to the National Gallery, and I had occasioned recently at the opening of our current Poussin and the Dance exhibition to quote the opinion of Monsieur Pierre Rosemberg, a distinguished president, director of the Louvre, a great expert in Poussin, and actually an excellent friend of the National Gallery who describes our museum as an excellent collection of small paintings. The opening of the building on Trafalgar Square, which you see in this first slide, a building designed by William Wilkins as a home both to the National Collection of Paintings and the Royal Academy, took place on the 9th of April 1838, 14 years after the opening in Palmao. It was a grander affair, a grand assessing in the very gangway of London as the pioneers of the gallery had wanted it to be at the geographical center of the capital of the kingdom and indeed the empire as the seated camels above the doorway in the portico slightly incongruously attest. You must look out for those on your next visit to the gallery. Since opening on Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery has welcomed more than 300 million visitors. And until we were struck by COVID and had our first COVID closure in 2020, about 6 million people were coming each year to the gallery. An astounding number, beaten only by the Louvre itself, by the British Museum here in the London, and once or twice by the combined Tates. The gallery building is the backdrop to any number of celebrations, protests, marches, demonstrations, public meetings, even riots taking place in the square. It's a most familiar London landmark. But my predecessor but one, Charles Sormer Smith, was concerned that it was not clear to people what the building actually was. So he obtained planning permission to carve on the portico freeze in elegant Roman capitals, gilded for legibility, the National Gallery. This was a very good thing to do. Although I will admit to feeling a certain frustration at being approached on the gallery portico by prospective visitors who were asking where was the entrance to the Vogue exhibition, which of course was round the corner at the National Portrait Gallery and not at the National Gallery. The National Gallery was one of the first public institutions to be called national. Technically, of course, it implies that it's owned by the state, but we don't really use that sort of language in England and it stands in stark contrast to the way national museums, state institutions are often talked about on the continent and that was certainly my experience in Spain. But it is fundamental, I think, to appreciate that the gallery was established by Parliament for the public and that national in this context must be understood as belonging to the nation. In other words, this is a gallery and a collection in the ownership of the people. The trustees of the National Gallery have since the beginning held the pictures in trust for the nation. The precise nature of these concepts is not always easy to pin down, but they reflect, and I believe in an effective manner, the thinking behind the creation of the gallery, public ownership, public use and public benefit. 200 years on, as we approach the galleries by centenary in 2024, these principles still underpin our thinking and our actions. In 1824, when the gallery opened at 100 Palmao, these were the regulations for visitors. It was open 10 till five, four days a week. Visitors were admitted gratis, six and umbrellas were to be left at the entrance. Quite a lot of that sounds familiar. Two days a week, only artists were admitted. I will come back to this point. But what I'd like to highlight is the phrase on the right of your screen, regulations for the exhibition of the collection of pictures purchased for the use of the public. The founding collection, pictures of Mr. Angustine, a financier of Russian origin, and we founder of Lloyd's Insurance, had been acquired for the use of the public. The idea that this is a collection to be used by the public provides us with a frankly exhilarating task. As the decades have passed, the task has unfolded before us and become both ever more challenging and ever more interesting. From the start to living artists had a special place in the gallery, a privileged recognition. Two days a week of the National Gallery's opening times were reserved exclusively for artists. In recent years, the relationship with practicing artists has, I think, become very creative, sometimes controversial. I just wanted to highlight a few examples. Here's Bridget Riley at the beginning of 2019. Bridget is the grandam of British abstraction, presenting messengers at the large mural in the Anberk court, which she had completed literally a few days before this photograph. And in which she very intentionally used the title that referred to a phrase implied by Constable when he was talking about fast moving low clouds moving across the sky and presaging a change in the weather. He also talks about clouds moving in lanes across the sky and Bridget is his passionate advocate of the National Gallery, a great connoisseur of its collection and indeed a former trustee. And I was very pleased to be able to welcome her to produce messengers for the National Gallery at the age of nearly 90. Anna Maria Pacheco was the gallery's associate artist in 1998, 1999, and you're seeing there one of the sculptural groups that she produced, Dark Knight of the Soul. She occupied a studio in the gallery and I think the National Gallery, I think still is one of the very few possibly the only really major historical art gallery that has a practicing artist studio in it. Anna Maria Pacheco occupied that studio as I said in the late 1990s and Dark Knight of the Soul references St. John of the Cross, his spiritual epic of course. But here you see a figure who is a sort of modern martyr hooded Sebastian hero and victim surrounded by shadowy figures of an oppressive possibly Latin American regime. Bill Viola reflected on the passions at the National Gallery in an exhibition in 2003 fusing the imagery of extreme emotion with rights of initiation and religious subject matter in which of course the National Gallery collection is very rich. Already in 2007, Yinka Shonibare in an exhibition called Scratch the Surface was exploring histories of violence and slavery behind the apparently placid appearances of some of the gallery's 18th century paintings. Zophany's Mrs. Oswald and Joshua Reynolds's Colonel Talton, for example, and even Gazebra's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews with this hunting narrative referenced here in the partridge hanging under the dome in the barry rooms. George Shaw, also associate artist at the gallery, took on Titian's erotic myths and produced an equivalent triptych to the three great late Titians, the Poesie, which we recently had occasion to exhibit here in their complete form. But in his paintings, littered with the social detritus in local woodlands, suggesting that some sort of back and all has passed, leaving a dark melancholic echo. Later this year, Cahinda Wiley, the American black artist, will be representing the tradition of the sublime in a new way in response to the paintings of Turner and Friedrich in the collection. Using black models like people taken from outside the gallery in Trafalgar Square agreeing to take them to the fjords of Norway and placing them in these extraordinary extraordinary natural settings. I was talking before about the large number of visitors who have come to the gallery, particularly in recent years, and I put together this graph to give a sense of how that visitorship has developed since the gallery's origins in the 1820s. I thought it was worth just highlighting a few of the peaks. It's noticeable that the first time the gallery was visited by more than a million people was at the time of the Great Exhibition. You'll notice that during World War One, the gallery remained open but visitor numbers dropped to quite a low level. During the Second World War, we had no figures and of course remember, I'll come back to this in a moment, the pictures were away from Trafalgar Square. And then you can see that post-war, you have this relentless rise in visitor numbers, reflecting I think not only the success of the National Gallery, but I think in general the success of museums as they adapted to ever changing circumstances greater leisure time, the challenges of playing an educational role, the growth of the tourist industry and so on. And then you'll notice, of course, on the far right, the very high visitorship that's become established since the London Olympics, where the National Gallery was quite regularly achieving close to or even above 6 million visitors. And then, of course, you have that cliff-edge drop, COVID. Who would have imagined the cataclysm in terms of the impact of a worldwide pandemic, not just, of course, on museum visiting, but on every aspect of our life? I'm focusing, of course, on the National Gallery. And here what happened was that, of course, over three successive separate lockdowns, the gallery ended up being closed for 292 days. That is completely unprecedented in our history. That's almost a year over a period lasting a little bit longer than a year. These are scenes in the National Gallery in the summer of 2018 with a large number of visitors in the gallery's central hall, where at that moment we were hanging some of the 19th century pictures and Van Gogh's chair and Van Gogh's sunflowers are very visible there. You can see there's a strong tourist presence. The National Gallery has traditionally, at least in the last decades, had approximately 65% tourist visitorship to the gallery. And this is what was happening in March 2020, just some months later, two minus two days to the first COVID lockdown. We were already seeing numbers reducing very, very dramatically, with the gallery still open. We closed in March. There's one of my colleagues putting up the sign outside the same three-wing, saying from the 18th of March, we are closed as a precaution measure to help contain the spread of coronavirus. Mark alluded to exhibitions being interrupted. I think the Titian Love Desire Death Exhibition, I referenced earlier, the late mythologies, the series of Poesie that we brought together for this exhibition, has the distinction of being possibly the only exhibition that was closed three times by COVID, a very extraordinary gathering of masterworks, but frustratingly closed, as I said, three times by those special circumstances that we've lived through. And I came in very often during the closed period. I was very keen to be here with those workers who had come in, notably the conservators, but of course our security and our engineering staff. There was no public, of course, during those 292 days, nor was there much public in central London. This is a photograph taken from the steps leading down into Trafalgar Square. You can see there are very, very few people around. And essentially, you had essentially empty buses driving around the square to their various destinations, no passengers on them. And this is Orange Street, St. Martin Street crosses it at the back of the gallery. This is the National Gallery's digital studio just behind the north galleries. And this was the scene during the second lockdown in November 2020. We're familiar with foxes in residential areas on the outskirts of town or zones two and three, but this, to my knowledge anyway, was unprecedented too. So very extraordinary circumstances that we had to live with. And all of us had the opportunity to reflect on what this has meant for us as individuals, as families, as communities, as societies, but also within the context of our cultural institutions. And I was very pleased to be able to share in a webinar with Courtney J. Martin at the Yale Center for British Art just a couple of weeks ago, some of the challenges that COVID has set us as museum institutions. But for the National Gallery in particular, there was a bit of our history that I think was really significant as we worked our way through COVID and was a huge inspiration for us. During the war years, as I said earlier, the collection was evacuated from Trafalgar Square for safekeeping. There were no paintings in the National Gallery, but as you saw from the graph I showed you just a moment ago, the gallery did not close. The gallery remained open for concerts. What you're seeing here is a photograph of people queuing up for one of the lunchtime concerts that were arranged by Kenneth Clark and organized by the pianist Myra Hess, who you see in these two photographs. She performed over 100 concerts herself, but she essentially managed the process of ensuring that every single weekday between the end of 1939 and April 1946, there was music at the gallery at lunchtime. This was a huge inspiration to us because the gallery remained during that time, even without the pictures on display. Today we'd say a cultural beacon, but a place for people to gather, for people to have cultural experiences together, and many of you will be aware that from 1942 the gallery also initiates a programme of picture of the month where a single work was brought down from the place of hiding. You can see all the pictures and shown during the daytime taken down into the basement at night for safekeeping so that people can at least see part of their collection. Now, I say this was inspirational for us because I think we at the gallery felt that it was extremely important to be there for the public, and also to be ready to open as soon as possible. Now, when we closed in mid-March, we had no idea when we would be able to open. We all thought it would be just a few weeks. In fact, some of us even announced that we'd be opening at the beginning of May. We quickly realised that that wasn't going to be possible, and it wasn't in fact until July 2020 that we were able to reopen. And what happened from the moment we closed in March of that year? We suddenly realised that we had become an exclusively online gallery. In a sense, the National Gallery as a building, the National Gallery as a collection of real works of art ceased to exist. Visitors were deprived of the possibility of visiting, and we very quickly realised that many visitors, virtual visitors now, were hungry for the experience of the gallery. There was a massive growth in interest in taking the online gallery virtual tours. People wanted to be in the gallery virtually. We also had very rapidly, like so many other institutions, to increase our online content, and at the gallery I think we were in a very strong position to do that. We essentially quadrupled the content that we were emitting from the gallery, and we were devising new formats too. This was very complicated because our audiovisual team were not here, the curators weren't here, and we were all essentially working from home. So we had to find ways in which these online broadcasts could be done without actually being in the gallery. So we had to devise some new formats. One of the formats that we devised was curators from home. Here you'll see my colleague Fran Whitlam Cooper talking about, quite appropriately, interiors from the interior of her own home. That was a format I suppose in which the curator could give, as it were, a professional view from the gallery. But also we devised another format that was called One Painting Many Voices. This I think is something very important to us, and that is that while we are custodians of the collection, we are very keen that people who are not necessarily professionals in the field should somehow take ownership of the collection and should feel free to speak about it. So that concept of One Painting Many Voices is I think a very representative online format which allowed different voices to talk about the experience of the National Gallery and the experience of National Gallery pictures. In this particular case, it was a group of children talking about a picture at the gallery, the bellows, and their experience of it in connection with a project that they previously done at school. The National Gallery was the first of the National Art Museums to open as soon as it was possible to do so. With the kind of restrictions of course that we've all got used to, mask wearing, advanced booking, and of course one way routes, lots of hand gel, even in the lifts. But I think what emerged was a real sense of societal solidarity and the gallery and other museums indeed doing what they needed to do in the circumstances. Suddenly museums seemed very precious, not a luxury but a necessity. COVID and the limitations imposed by COVID required us to think of specific itineraries, one way systems through the gallery. And rather to our surprise, we found that the public was extremely grateful for these. Traditionally the gallery has been a very porous house and essentially people have been let loose, let's put it that way, on the collection to explore as they pleased. What became very apparent is that in general, the visiting public became very grateful for these slightly more directed visits. This sort of instructional visiting of the gallery with these prescribed routes taking you through different parts of the collection and different parts as it were of the history of ours. Now, the return of course has been gradual and we needed to find ways to help build up the confidence of the returning public and also to turn to new forms of enticement, engagement and participation. So some of these we've been able to launch in the subsequent period and I want to show you an example that we've undertaken during the month of August in Trafalgar Square. We worked in place collaboration with Westminster City Council, which was very keen that cultural institutions should be able to, as it were, put out their wares or spill out into the public space. And of course this was then and still is a kind of residual reluctance on the part of the visiting public to enter cultural building. So here was an attempt to bring the gallery out onto the square and put on an open air exhibition in Trafalgar Square of the nation's favorite pictures. We knew which those favorite pictures were because we have been able to gather the data for visitors to the gallery, the gallery's website during the closure period. So this was a giant open air exhibition on the square with life-size replicas and I'm afraid we did succumb to the temptation of calling it a giant alfresco exhibition. At the same time, we were encouraging people to sketch on the square and it's always been part of the National Gallery's remit, I think, to encourage artistic activity. I think in the first instance, as we saw from the gallery's regulations from very early on, the activity of artists and to put examples before the eyes of practicing artists. But I think in more recent times to encourage creativity on the part of the public. And during the month of August with sketch on the square, you can see me lined up these easels on the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square and invited people to sit down and draw sketch paint. Do whatever they please and over the course of the month, I think about 9,000 people did participate in sketch on the square. Partly, of course, the purpose was to encourage people to come and visit. So those open air art galleries with the life-size reproductions welcomed people, invited them into the gallery building just a few yards away. You can see Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne after having a go at sketching on the square, come in and sketch in the gallery. So seeking out new forms of engagement is a challenge. I think it's a particular challenge as we move to the next stage of COVID and work our way through the restrictions. But I want to just devote a few moments to talking about a very special experience of engagement. I think rather innovative, certainly for us, which is involved this picture here. And that is the self-portrait of the 17th century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi, self-portrait as St Catherine. These are the news items that appeared when the gallery acquired this painting in the summer of 2018. It was the first work by a woman artist which had been acquired by the National Gallery for a generation. And it is still one of only about two dozen pictures by women artists in the National Collection. And inevitably that's what some of the coverage of the acquisition focused on. We decided at that point that everything to do with this painting would be played out in public in the form of an unfolding narrative. So the acquisition itself and also the conservation work. And that is the visual elimination of the losses and damages to cover those up. And I think it's important to say a little bit about the kind of general principles behind the collection, because we do have all the master paintings of the National Gallery. Those are the dulcet tones of my colleague, Larry Keith, keeper and head of conservation at the gallery. A new initiative on the part of the gallery to actually, as it were, almost in real time, to show the work that we were doing on the collection, on the picture itself. The cleaning, the retouching with Larry talking us through as the process was being undertaken. And several videos being issued over the course of the conservation period showing what was happening to the picture. Also, there was, as it were, in real time, a display of how the picture was going to be framed. Here you see it in the Roman 17th century frame that was acquired for it. And our head of framing was explaining how the choice was made together with the curator, Leticia Tromas. And then we decided to do something that was completely unprecedented for the National Gallery. And that was to take the picture immediately on tour, but to take it to very different locations from the kinds of locations where you would expect to see a picture like this, or indeed where you would expect to see a painting from the National Gallery's collection. In a programme called Artemisia Visits, over the period of March to June in 2019, the Gallery sent Artemisia's self-portrait as St Catherine to these five venues. Not a single one of them is actually an art gallery. You have the Glasgow Women's Library, Pocklington Surgery, New York, Sacred Heart Catholic Girl's School in... We'll see in just a moment. HMP sent a Majesty's Prison send and a community venue in East London. In a sense, this was really about taking the pictures to where people are and putting that sense of ownership to before taking a picture to locations where you wouldn't necessarily expect to see an old master painting and enabling people to experience it in their local areas. In each of the locations, there was a programme organised around the Lone. So, for example, in the group practice near York, there were sessions around art and health, which is a very, very important topic and has become ever more important as we've worked our way through COVID. But in Sacred Heart School in Newcastle, that's the place that I couldn't remember, you're seeing the picture appearing on stage for Morning Assembly and Leticia Treves addressing the girls in the school. And around the Lone of this picture to Sacred Heart School in Newcastle, there was a series of workshops about careers in the arts. Leticia talking about her own career as a curator, but also the driver of the truck that was driving the picture around the country, who was a woman talking about different sorts of careers in the arts. And on the right-hand side, Wood Street Library, a sort of community centre in East London, as I said before. In HMP Send, the workshops focused on overcoming trauma, where the artist's own personal story played a very, very important role in the narrative around the picture. This was a very remarkable experience, and in many ways, I think Jonathan Jones's words in The Guardian do sum up the sort of ambition and impact of Artemisia, the Artemisia Visits Programme. It's his imaginative and fitting erase of the National Gallery to send this raw, truthful picture on a lightning strike national tour, not of quietly respectable museums on the state cones where such treasures traditionally hang, but everyday places where real life happens. This is a great experiment that redeems art from its prison of rarefied irrelevance. We think that Artemisia Visits is a sort of very significant step forward in the way the gallery engages with communities across the country, and we've continued with it, this time in the Covid period, with Van Heisen's magnificent flower painting. On the right, you see the places that Van Heisen visited during the summer of 2021, when the landscape was very different. It is, of course, a programme, as I said before, about taking paintings to people, and in this case Van Heisen's flower piece visited a food bank in Lincoln. It also visited a closed-down department store in Great Yarmouth, and the tour very intentionally promoted ways in which art and culture can support well-being and reach audiences that have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19 and by the UK lockdowns. And we will be continuing with these programmes in the future. And in terms of engagement, I think the gallery has also wanted to open up to the remarkable possibilities that the digital field has opened for us. How can, it's a question that we want to answer, how can immersive and digital experiences extend the understanding of the gallery's pictures? And I want to highlight two examples in recent times. In 2019, which was the fifth centenary of Leonardo's death, we organised an immersive exhibition entitled Leonardo Experience and Masterpiece. It was really our first attempt to see how we could harness digital and what we have begun to learn more broadly about immersive experiences, how we could harness those to try and understand one of the gallery's great masterpieces better, how we could extend the experience and understanding of the picture. Now, a lot of technical work had been done on Leonardo's version of the rocks. And I'm showing you here a very remarkable piece of work which had been done very, very recently with the development of infrared technology and what's called XRF analysis. We were able to see much, much more clearly as Leonardo had been doing the underdrawing stage when he was first planning this composition. And you can see in the middle image a quite different composition from the one that he eventually painted. You see how different it is when you overlay that composition over the finished composition. It's different in scale. It's different in the way the figures relate to one another. It's different in the gestures and so on. So these were the results of the latest cutting-edge technology which had been deployed in our scientific department. And we wanted to find a way to make the public experience this. And so we decided to do this in an immersive format. This involved creating several settings in one of the exhibition spaces in the gallery. For example, recreating the gallery's own conservation studio here. That's what you see in this photograph here. You can see the theatrical roof lights on the left which at times showed rainy London weather but at other times also showed images and information about Leonardo's version of the rocks which you can also see is being projected onto a panel the same size as the original. But it also gave us the opportunity to present the work itself. So this is Leonardo's version of the rocks. But in a recreated projected setting giving you some idea, giving the visiting public some idea of what Leonardo's version of the rocks looked like when it was in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan at the beginning of the 16th century. Now we pieced together the evidence that we have for this and then projected around the painting itself to give some sense of what that setting would have been like and of course a very different setting from the way in which you see the picture normally in the gallery. At a certain point the projection stopped and at the end of the sequence the public was invited just to contemplate the picture and as it were to absorb and apply to their experience of the picture everything that they'd seen up to that moment in the various immersive experiences which they come through up to this point. In many ways this was not a perfect exhibition but I think we learned a lot from it and as we become ever more ambitious in the way that we try and engage people in relation to our works of art I think it was a very useful exercise and I certainly informed this second experience which we called sensing the unseen stepping into Gosar's adoration which happened Christmas last year which is of course a Christmas picture. The picture was hanging in room one but what happened is as a visiting member of the public you would step into the room you would take your position in one of these pods that you see on the right hand side where there'd be a screen that would enable you to see details of the painting in extraordinarily sharp detail immensely expanded in some cases to see things that's frankly in front of the picture you simply cannot see. A composed sonified landscape was produced for the visitor inside those pods and the poem was commissioned from Trisa Lola, the young artist for London on the imagined experience of King Balthazar who appears on the left hand side of the screen and these are just stills from some of the images that you're able to see inside the pods and then as the presentation came to an end once again you're able to step out look again at Gosar's painting and carry with you as it were everything that you had learned picked up or experienced in the immersive digital experience and hopefully have a much more enriched viewing of the Gosar painting now in some ways this is an easily reproducible experience and I hope that we will be able to take this program on the road, not with Gosar's original painting which in this case is too fragile to take out of the building but with a very, very high quality reproduction. I've spoken about how we've tried to enrich the notion of the National Gallery I'm sorry, I've spoken about how we've tried to enrich the notion of national in National Gallery and how we sought to extend the experience of the artwork by presenting it in very different ways by engaging with different communities in an innovative manner creating new digital and immersive experiences for the public. I'd like to devote the last part of my talk to our building and our preparations for the Gallery by Centine now as museum directors we are very conscious that we're responsible not only for the collections themselves but also for our buildings our buildings are often quite old they require a lot of attention and in a sense as much as we look after our collections and our programs we also need to look after our buildings and the Gallery has been thinking about how it intends to develop the Gallery of State this is as it were Nelson's eye view from the top of the column in Trafalgar Square down on the Gallery you can see the dome at the front of the Gallery with the Gallery lawns the main building the Wilkins building behind it on the left the Sainsbury wing and wrapping round it on the right-hand side of course the Portrait Gallery now Covid of course had very severely hit our finances we have a mixed model at the Gallery where in addition to state grant in aid we raise a lot of money ourselves and much of that money is raised really through the volume of people who come through our doors well those people had really disappeared so we've been hit very hard financially but the quiet period let's call it that has enabled us in some ways to also take a bit more care of our buildings and here at the National Gallery it's given us the possibility to develop some building projects which were already underway so that phase one that you see at upper right that's this gallery here which is called Gallery 32 the Rowsing Gallery which I want to show you in just a moment and just take a look at those two open courtyards these fall part of one project called the One Gallery Hub and the Rowsing Room project and those have come to fruition I'm very pleased to say they involve the complete refurbishment of the grandest gallery in the building the Julia and Hans Rowsing Room Room 32 which houses the Italian Baroque pictures so normally Artemisia Gentileschi would be hung here together with Caravaggio, Guido Reini, Guacino, Luca Giordano and so on and as part of this project of course the One Gallery Hub as we called it this is a facility for staff much of the gallery staff was in an outside building and I was very keen that we should be able to bring the staff all together into the main building so there's everything really is under one roof in the National Gallery and I'm very happy to say that as the staff comes back to work following the COVID closures and working at home regime they will be coming back to this facility rather than the old facility but as our bicentenary approaches it's been an opportunity for us to re-imagine and to think about how we might relaunch the National Gallery as an institution for the nation and for the world as the strategic plan is entitled I want to share just some preliminary observations with you that reflect our ongoing thinking about the gallery as we move towards our third century we've chosen to focus on four pillars one is the gallery at 200 and that is what happens in 2024 the gallery across the nation that's developing our programmes across the country across the four nations in terms of loans, collaborations shared specialisation the gallery across the world which is fundamentally about our digital reach and I think we're all seeing how much that can mean for us this very lecture which normally would have happened in the Sainsbury theatre with just a few hundred participants who are actually physically in the building of course it's happening now to an audience which involves people across several continents and the fourth pillar research for public benefit often people don't realise that the National Gallery is also a research institution I'll show you just a little bit of the kind of research that we do in relation to the Leonardo version of the rocks but we research in the area of paintings they're physical history we research the history of collecting the history of the art markets there's a very powerful group of material scientists in the gallery and all these various teams are working together for an improved understanding of the collection and of historic painting in general NG200 which is the name we're giving to the celebrations for the galleries by Centenary we're thinking along the lines of something that I hope I've tried to outline in what I've said so far your pictures, your stories a celebration which will happen in the gallery in Trafalgar Square and across the nation we're not yet ready to announce what exactly this will involve but in due course we will be making those announcements the idea of National Gallery stories will be one that threads its way through 2024 as part of the Bicentenary celebrations but also I talked about moving on to Trafalgar Square as we've had some experience of that as you've seen just a moment ago and some sort of National Gallery festival taking place on the square in front of our building NG200 also involves a cluster of transformative capital projects focusing on welcome accessibility and sustainability we're very conscious this while some things that we do at the National Gallery are world-class there are other things that leave room for improvement and we certainly want to create around the time of our Bicentenary a world-class welcome a vibrant National Gallery research centre linking up to that fourth pillar that I outlined a moment ago about research for public benefit and transformed public realm at the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square and in Jubilee Jubilee Way which is the street in between the two historic buildings and taking you through up towards Leicester Square in the northerly direction Gallery has always paid a lot of attention to the east-west axis of the way it presents itself but not so much to the north-south axis and as this area of London gets developed as a sort of art quarter with the major refurbishment also of the National Portrait Gallery I think it becomes extremely important that we play a leading role there as well we've appointed as the architects of NG200 the New York architects Annabel Seldo you may have come across her in relation to her work at the Clark at the Frick on Fifth Avenue in New York and at the San Diego Museum of contemporary art there will be much more to announce as we move towards the Bicentenary in 2024 So after 200 years of displaying our collection of organizing exhibitions acquiring new pictures sharing resources and specialisms and scholarship working with contemporary artists the challenge for ever greater engagement in the public remains a very exciting one Digital, I hope as we have seen is a new frontier with remarkable possibilities for learning and education for outreach and for international collaboration The National Gallery's pictures must become more available the stories more widely shared the sense of public ownership strengthened all pictures, your stories represents a belief as well as a commitment to the public Our building will become more welcoming and as we look to preserving the legacy we have received activating it for present generation and handing it on to the people of the future the notion of a gallery for the use of the public will, I'm sure, continue to yield for us Thank you very much, indeed Thank you very much, Gabriela That was wonderful So many things you touched on there that are relevant to this theme the theme explored in the lectures the whole so many questions to ask and in fact we've got so many questions coming in from people that I really want to try and pick up so I think we should keep our own conversation rather brief and in the spirit of your talk and your spirit of opening out the National Gallery to a broader audience to the people I think we should try and do the same in this session and see how many questions we can fit in because you've generated a good many of them I guess I did want to ask one question which is a fundamental one I guess right that people are facing in your position which is that relationship between the digital image and the experience of the digital reproduction of the work of art and the works of art themselves and about whether you see them as entirely complementary or there's a danger that in assuming that the interaction with the digital reproduction of the work of art is a perfectly good substitute for the experience of the work of art itself then people may lose the habit of or interest in going to experience those works of art in the flesh or do you see it rather as the opposite that it actually seems to wet the appetite and then provide a means through which people can more thoroughly engage with the work of art in its location at the National Gallery It's a fascinating topic Mark there's no doubt about it and it's one with some really interesting theoretical dimensions as well I think the quality of reproductions facsimiles has moved on extraordinarily in the last few years and opened up all sorts of possibilities a few years ago when the great Veronese marriage of Cana was reproduced from the picture in the Louvre and taken back to its original setting in a Palladio design refectory in Venice, well it's not the original but you're seeing it there in the setting for which it was created and you're seeing it with the lighting the Palladio had designed to fall on the picture and how Veronese had responded to it so you can see how these high quality facsimiles enrich the experience now my interest as a museum person is of course that digital should help us and reproductions and facsimiles should help us to extend that's the phrase I used to extend the experience of the original work of art I think it was very interesting over the Covid period there was huge interest in online digital content to begin with it did start to wane after a while and there was a sense in which people I think were beginning to feel a certain sort of weirdness of seeing things on the screen whether that's the telephone screen or whether that's the screen at home and an anxiety to return to real things real people, real objects, real experiences but I have to say I think I said it's a new frontier for us and I think we need to be intelligent and imaginative about how we incorporate it into the experience of the museum Thanks very much well look I feel that we should turn to our questions because I are coming in thick and fast so I'll start reading out some of these questions if I may Gabrieli it's a question that Geoffrey Brown has asked about which raises a fundamental issue about how you ensure the Artemisia painting was looked after while it was displayed in the venues I mean that anxiety I'm sure you felt as a museum director about ensuring that you care for that object and that it remains secure and looked after on its travels Yeah I gathered together the staff at the museum one morning and I said look I think we should take this out on the road and show it in places where you don't expect to find a little master picture and I was expecting a hundred objections and there are a hundred objections and they are to do with security with ensuring that the environmental conditions are right but all of these things we were able to overcome one by one in order to make this safe and secure for the work of art but also accessible for those communities where we're taking the picture so it was possible to do and you know there are practical questions that can be resolved and I was very pleased that we found the way to do that and I think what was particularly interesting was building up the programs in each place around the work of art and particularly with Van Heisen visits which is a little bit different from Artemisia visits to work with the local museums as well in generating the programs together Thank you I've got a question here from a really interesting point that Jo Randall raises she's our show has the pandemic actually been beneficial in demanding a more creative approach to sharing the galleries work with a wider audience and then following on from that will these strategies continue post COVID? So I think we've had to be quite imaginative we've had to think very carefully about audiences I think we need to deploy resources very carefully and I think all those things are good discipline but I think they also yield imaginative solutions so I hope that the kind of response from the museums which I'm generally speaking has been very very good and very imaginative and much appreciated by the public the sorts of principles that we activated at that time will continue as we work our way through the pandemic and beyond I have a question here which builds on your discussion about the immersive shows that you've overseen at the gallery from Sally Shin who's a PhD student in marketing at Yale and understanding how to use technologies to improve the frequency and quality of cultural experiences so having had your experience with those two exhibitions you mentioned how does the National Gallery review the use of AR and VR to interact with the paintings do you believe it hinders or amplifies experience and are there future plans to incorporate virtual experiences into your displays? Yeah I feel that we need to preserve a certain sort of National Gallery experience when you come here after all we are we're you know in other European languages curators are called conservator or conservateur so there's a natural tendency to be conservative in what we do after all we're looking after something that's come down to us from many centuries ago and the gallery itself is nearly 200 years old so I think we need to be very attentive to what we've inherited and the kind of experience that our forebears intended for visitors. At the same time I think we should be imaginative and use the new technologies VR or AR you know in ways which as I said before extend that experience I think the best way to do it in the first instance is through special exhibitions, special displays but also you know we're beginning to use QR codes across labels in galleries and that gives a whole host of information that you know the typical gallery label or gallery panel simply cannot provide you with so I think the possibilities are vast we need to be intelligent and sensitive about the way they use but it is a new frontier and it's fascinating. Thanks very much I have a question here from Richard Herbert who asks about how you see the conflicting overlapping responsibilities of Tate National Gallery and the V&A I suppose in relation to this issue of the National Gallery or the National Collection that you talked about earlier really does it cause unwanted competition Richard asks especially for acquisitions or does it actually stimulate creativity this is a question I would honestly say it doesn't create it doesn't create tensions we have you know we have our respective areas of specialisation, our respective areas of concern you know the Tate essentially has modern and contemporary art collection more or less comes to an end at the beginning of the 20th 20th century there's always room for discussion about whether those about whether those you know frontiers can shift and they have over time and I'm sure they will in the future but I'd also add that over the you know the Covid period there's been a huge amount of solidarity between the London museums there's been a huge amount of solidarity across the international museum community remember when we had the first lockdown many museums found themselves with work spread across the whole world which have been lent to exhibitions in different countries and just the sort of shared understanding that we had a responsibility to each other we had a shared responsibility to the collections and we had a shared responsibility towards the public I think has created a very remarkable sort of harmony between between museums and certainly you know the London museums who think of themselves as part of a broader national collection I think that is the right way to think about it and we work very closely together Thanks very much I have a question from Norwood Creech how have you proposed programs to engage our youth and addressing the inclusion of the youngest amongst us about how you see the National Gallery engaging with young audiences, visitors and so on So there are lots of ways in which this is happening of course it is at the forefront of our minds because a museum of old master paintings tends to attract an older audience and indeed our audiences certainly when you talk about UK resident audiences which are the ones that we've got at the moment you're looking at audiences who tend to be sort of in their fifties and over they're very valuable audiences but I think that there are ways of reaching out to younger audiences to create enthusiasm and interest in the collections that's through exhibitions through the way we talk about our pictures it's the sort of additional programs that we run the way we interact with contemporary artists and actively looking for different audiences and providing different means of access to the collection and building up the audiences of the future in the past it was probably easier to build up a loyal audience now I think there's a lot of competition in terms of what's available for young people and I think we need to find an appropriate language to speak to broader audiences to do programs which are attracted to them which they feel some kind of engagement with some reason to be interested in I think that's to do with programming it's to do with who speaks about the pictures how we speak about the collections how open we are, how we collaborate It's a very interesting question that question of how we speak about the collection, about the works of art in your care what are your thoughts about how one does that too? When I was a curator years ago I joined the Mascari in 1992 as a curator in the mid-20s and already then there was a certain discomfort with the only vice emerging from the gallery being the sort of professional curatorial voice or the professional historical voice already then we were exploring this idea of the gallery being a place where lots of people can have a voice different specializations of course but also to have their own stories and their own interpretations and I think the challenge has been to find the formats where many voices can speak about the National Gallery and I just showed one of them in the talk which was this thing called One Picture Many Voices where you essentially take your camera and take your microphone and go and ask people what their experience of the National Gallery is or a particular picture in the National Gallery is what it means and why it has some significance for them and then share it more widely and invite people to participate through social media through having their own voice heard as well Thanks It's a very interesting question here from Victoria Walsh who thanks you for your talk and says post COVID what is the most compelling or persuasive argument that the National Gallery can make to government and to the public to secure support and sustain funding What are the most compelling arguments? Well I'd like to say we're post COVID already I'm not sure we are we need to see where this is heading we're certainly open and I hope we can stay open I think that the cultural sector and the museums are an absolutely essential part of the fibre of our lives I don't think they can be thought of as a luxury as a pastime or leisure they are about sharing human experience they're about community building they're about placemaking they are about things which are important to all of us our society is more than just having a job making money and being part of the political process it's about making citizens who have a rich experience and who are able to have a sense of where we might be going and I think museums are in a privileged place to enable those sorts of conversations and those sorts of experiences to happen on a more practical level why do people come to our country very often they come to see our museums and our historic sites that's a very important bit of the visitor economy of this country and we certainly need our visitors to return thanks very much there's a question here from Joey Roy who would be very interesting to explain how this works for the National Gallery Joey Roy asks do you have any future plans to collect paintings or artefacts related to the current pandemic and it would be interesting to talk a bit about how that might work or doesn't work in your case the gallery collects very little this is a very small collection perhaps not everyone in the audience knows this the gallery only has 2,400 works in the collection that's it and we generally acquire maybe one or two or three works of art every year so we add very very sparingly to the collection I think in terms of the particular question that's been asked it's very much about how you speak about the collection how you can find ways to devise language around the existing collection to address the kinds of big social questions that you have now whether that's pictures to do with human empathy or whether it's specific subjects to do with family and caring one of the pictures that I was always drawn to during that pandemic closure period when I was coming in a lot was Jacopo Bassane's Good Samaritan there's a picture where particularly as we're thinking of health officials and health professionals across the country really going enormously out of their way to help the population and to see them through the pandemic it's an image which took on a new significance but it's a historic image in the gallery and it's been here for decades so it's new ways of looking at things which inform our contemporary experience There's maybe a couple more questions to finish with because I know you had quite an intense run of them one after another but it's a testament to the interest that you generated there's a question from Anthony Carr here who was really fascinated by your history of the National Gallery and by the artist's only days that you talked about he'd love to hear a bit more about these artist's only days and I presume no thought of reproducing those today but it'd be interesting to hear more about them Yes, I'd like to know more about them myself so certainly in the early period there were these two days that were reserved for artists and I'm presuming that the public didn't visit during those days it was very much for professionals some museums of course also have traditionally copyist days when copies are allowed in the galleries to make copies of when the public is actually present and even now there are moments when artists can come in to work in the in front of the gallery's pictures so I suppose what I was really trying to say in the course of the lecture was this the National Gallery is not a collection of old pictures on the wall it's very much a collection that is constantly interacting with artists either because they are inspired by what they see or because they're being hosted here or because it's an exhibition of work by Architopia or just like the other night we did something called Unexpected View where curators were in public conversation with artists, I was in conversation about Turner with Anthony Gormley for example and you realise that thanks to the artists we could see the collection through their eyes and I think often that's a very kind of revealing way to look at the National Gallery's collection great well I mean there are more questions but I feel maybe as time is we are drawing to the end of our allocated time there's one last question which is an interesting one from Margaret Spillin and she asked it at 5.41 so I feel that she's been waiting a long time to hear the answers she talks about her first visit to the National Gallery happening in 1974 and remembers having to pay admission in position of Heath's government she notes and then when she returned later in that actual same year the admission charges have been abolished by the current labour government I guess the question here is in the history of the National Gallery's thinking about charging people to see art and I guess the implied second question would be does that remain a possibility given the financial challenges that you talked about the question has focused on that very brief moment when there were charges of the gallery but otherwise the gallery practically uninterruptedly has been free and gratis since 1824 right up to today and it's a very distinctive part of the way the National Museums fit into the kind of fibre of national life in this country and it's very important because it means that she was able to visit as a young person and has continued to do it same as me I first came to the gallery with my mother when I was about 7 years old and I've continued visiting ever since so it's part of my life not just part of my professional life and I was very interested when I was in Spain working at the Prado the director there at the time the girl Sugasa used to say of the Prado that traditionally you visited the Prado twice in your life once with your parents and once with your kids and that was this and that was this that's not the case with our museums it's a very important portion of people who are frequent visitors for whom coming to the National Gallery is an extremely important part of their life it's part of the fabric of their life and I think the gallery being free is a very important part of that you know we're constantly looking for ways to remove barriers to enable the pictures to be shared with people and people to feel that they can of the pictures or the antiquities or the dexterous past whatever it might be in the different museums and I think free entry is a very important part of that I mean as things stand it's not a debated issue none of the main political parties are talking about changing that we in museums generally speaking are very very favourable and certainly here at the National Gallery we are very very committed to retaining free entry to the gallery thanks very much that's been so interesting everyone and so generous both in terms of your talk but also in terms of your responses to all of these questions on our chat function we're having a lot of very warm comments of thanks to you and a couple that are really striking and that chime in with a number of the other comments we're getting through one from Barbara Carrera has written saying that as one of your overseas virtual visitors accessing the National Gallery collections and its resources online please keep your courses, lectures, curators corner series coming it's been crucial I think to a number of the people watching tonight that sense of being able to have contact with you and your activities through those online activities and also yeah and many thanks for someone says Bethany Comptonkin says this was such a fascinating and insightful lecture the comments are coming in so thick and fast they're becoming quite hard to read Gabrielle says speeding in front of my eyes but I'd like to echo all those thanks it was all those things and again you just demonstrated in your talk about why you've been doing such an amazing job at the gallery and why the gallery is thriving even under these very very difficult circumstances so thanks very much for your first contribution to the series I just wanted to say to everyone that our next Mella lecture is taking place on the 3rd of November so a couple of weeks time now and it's going to be given by Gabrielle's counterpart in the US, Kaywin Feldman who's director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington so it'll be really interesting to hear from Kaywin and to hear her perspectives on the museum and the gallery today but in the meantime I'd just like to thank everyone at the PMC who has helped put on this webinar thank all of you for attending this event to urge you to return regularly not only actually for our Mella lectures but for all our online events we're maybe not we're working in tandem with the National Gallery in many ways or in parallel in trying to provide a really vibrant online service and resource for people interested in the history in our case of course of British art complimenting all the work that National Gallery's done doing on European and Continental Art and World Art more generally so many thanks to you all please stay in touch, please keep watching and thanks finally once again to Gabriele for a fantastic talk thank you so much Gabriele