Art: the National Gallery is reborn

A masterpiece is passing through Amsterdam on its way to Paris. Rembrandt crosses canals to see it. Titian’s startling painting of a man with a great quilted sleeve, often thought to be a portrait of Ariosto, is already so famous that Van Dyck is trying to buy it. But Rembrandt steals it instead, painting himself in the identical pose, more than a hundred years after Titian: one arm on a stone ledge, in opulent furs, turning towards us with the same eye-catching gaze.

For the first time – astonishingly – these two paintings are now face to face in a tiny rotunda of the National Gallery in London. Alongside, Rubens’s sultry woman in a straw hat, sunshine striking her bosom, hangs opposite Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s self-portrait in the same guise from the following century. The French artist has been to Belgium to see the Rubens, and her imitation will become insanely popular: all rosy lips and dainty teeth, Miss Congeniality in a picture hat.

In another district of this great city of art you can see Hogarth borrowing from Murillo’s celebrated self-portrait in an oval frame, one hand breaking free of both frame and illusion. Hogarth’s version includes his faithful dog, in double homage. Turner tries to outdo the French painter Claude, and the standoff is played out in a narrow corridor of golden landscapes, so close you can look back and forth between England and France without moving from the spot. Nothing comes of nothing, in art.

The National Gallery feels reborn. This is the biggest reconfiguration of its collection since the Sainsbury Wing opened in 1991, and involved all of the museum’s curators. Director Gabriele Finaldi, showing me round in advance of the launch, tells me that they never squabbled, not even when bidding for wall space in a captivating chamber of still lifes, spotlit in darkness like these little theatres of painted objects. From Zurbarán’s water cup on its silver plate to Coorte’s shining asparagus and Courbet’s conspiracy of dark apples, thick as thieves in their bowl, this gathering shows just how radical still life can be.

More than a thousand paintings are on show, and the sight of them is clearer, stronger, far more revelatory. The immense central avenue running all the way from Raphael’s Mond Crucifixion at one end to Stubbs’s Whistlejacket at the other – the length of two football pitches, almost – still stuns. But now, with so many different experiences for eye and mind in between, what strikes is the unexpected connection between the two paintings. Christ rises against blue air, Whistlejacket rears against nothing but yellow. Both are figures in pure coloured space.

We see pictures in time and place; we cannot see them otherwise. It is a commonplace that nobody ever looked at Veronese’s stupendous Wedding at Cana in the Louvre for queuing to see the Mona Lisa opposite (until she got a room of her own). The position of paintings matters, and so does the potential for solitude, peace and discovery. You have to be allowed to stumble on paintings for yourself.

This possibility is enormously increased by the rehang. Nothing prepares you for the surprise of turning a corner of the Sainsbury Wing, for instance, to find a tiny picture all alone on a wall. In Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne, the lustful god lunges at a nymph who is quite suddenly blossoming into woody branches. The encounter in the gallery is as abrupt as Apollo’s slap-bang crash into a tree.

The Sainsbury Wing, closed for almost three years, is magnificent in its grace and clarity. “We got used to seeing it constrained in only one way,” says Finaldi. The muted stone colours of the walls give a new chromatic intensity to the art (the hooves and lances in Uccello’s Battle of San Romano crisscross against a neon-pink foreground, freshly cleaned). Portraits of husbands and wives are tenderly reunited. All three masterpieces by Piero della Francesca have been brought together in a side chapel of luminous perfection.

Where these paintings came from, why they were made: the rehang gives a dramatic sense of both. The Wilton Diptych (currently in the National Gallery’s superb Siena show) will appear in the round, altar-height, so one perceives it as a portable object passing through Europe. You move from Florence to Venice through a single doorway, watching the light and colour change. In one stunning room, a cross-shaped painting of the Crucifixion hangs high above living people, as it once did in an Italian church, suspended in midair like a blessing.

A revelation, for me, was the sight of Bellini’s Doge, so infinitely famous as to be almost invisible, but now renewed by transverse sightlines. You see it way in the distance, alone, reframed through doorway after doorway. Cope and hat coalesce, silver against cobalt, suddenly forming into a wild new shape, more animal or abstraction than human being. Gentle education, as Finaldi calls the minimal wall texts, centres upon art as an act of creation, not evidence in some hectoring sociopolitical lecture (look and learn, Tate Britain). How a pastel is made – so fugitive you could blow it away; the effect of gold leaf in Renaissance art; what happens to painting when canvases and paint sets are small enough to carry in knapsacks into the landscape. All have dedicated rooms.

And further surprises await on 10 May. An entire gallery is devoted to Titian, another to Rembrandt and a third to late Monet. These are effectively solo exhibitions, very carefully condensed. I only wish the gallery believed enough in their nine paintings by Velázquez to give him a room of his own. Only imagine Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver and the Rokeby Venus no longer crowded out on Spanish walls.

The National Gallery has been criticised for the – admittedly demeaning – title of its rehang, CC Land: The Wonder of Art, named after the Chinese property developer who contributed untold millions. If only Cheung Chung-kiu would now supercharge the museum’s purchasing power. Recent acquisitions of German painters such as Max Pechstein suggest, alas, dwindled funds.

But the redisplay is superb. The gallery is telling stories of art as never before. The rivalry between Constable and Turner is fiercely staged (Finaldi says the room should be a Google landmark). The gallery of power portraits shows all that can be done with a full-length figure, from Veronese’s marvellously mobile Gentleman of the Soranzo Family, man and green robes twisting upwards in dramatic torsion, to Sargent’s Lord Ribblesdale in his riding coat and absurdly low-slung breeches, soaring 10 feet above us yokels.

To see Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, cut into four pieces by the artist, next to his scissored cafe scene, one half specially borrowed from Switzerland for this occasion, is to understand more of his revolutionary experiments. To look at Bellini next to his brother-in-law Mantegna is to perceive the equally measured clarity of both. And by the time you come to Degas, Seurat, Cézanne and Van Gogh, everything that came before – some of it still visible, down these long vistas – lives in your head. This is to see paintings through artists’ eyes as well as your own: to see art in the present tense.

Photographs: Andrew Bruce, National Gallery