The National Gallery, with the support of StoryFutures, is to bring a sixteenth-century altarpiece back to the chapel for which it was created, for the first time in over 200 years, through a new digital experience.

Virtual Veronese was commissioned as part of the Gallery’s partnership with StoryFutures.

StoryFutures is led by Royal Holloway, University of London and is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Creative Industries Clusters Programme. Funded by the government’s industrial strategy challenge fund and based in the ‘Gateway Cluster’ immediately to the west of London, it is focused on delivering game changing Research and Development projects.

Visitors to the Gallery will experience Paolo Veronese’s painting The Consecration of Saint Nicholas as it would have been seen in its original Italian church setting in 1562 by using virtual reality headsets. Virtual Veronese, which creates a 3D model of the chapel, began as a research and development project looking at how the Gallery can share research with a wider audience by using immersive technologies to explore new ways of telling its stories.

Veronese’s The Consecration of Saint Nicholas was commissioned in 1561 as an altarpiece to hang in San Benedetto al Po, the abbey church of one of the largest and most important Benedictine monasteries in Europe.

Ticketing details are yet to be announced.