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The National Gallery offers its first exhibition designed for mobile phones, allowing people to experience in incredible detail a 16th-century Dutch masterpiece telling the story of Jesus’ birth.
Jan Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings was the focus of an immersive exhibit at the London gallery which opened last December, but was forced to close after a week due to the Covid lockdown.
Hardly anyone got to see it, which is one of the reasons it was reimagined as the National Gallery’s first experience for mobile phone users.
The exhibition and online version were created as part of the gallery’s innovation program. Emma McFarland, who runs the program, said the mobile experience was an experience.
“Our goal through the innovation program is to create engaging and meaningful experiences that engage a new and more diverse audience with the collection in different ways, placing our visitors at the heart of the design process.”
The painting is traditionally more of a Christmas experience than an Easter experience, showing kings, courtiers, shepherds, animals and angels all arriving to worship the infant Christ who sits on his mother’s lap in a ruined palace and in ruins.
The mobile experience will allow people to zoom in on the details. It will feature six poems in the voice of Balthasar, the black king pictured to Mary’s left, with his gift of myrrh and wearing a red robe lined with lynx fur and fabulous boots with leather so fine you can see his toes.
The poems were written and voiced by poet Theresa Lola, former London Youth Laureate.
As with the original exhibition, the goal, according to the gallery, was to bring together sound, images, poetry and interaction “to explore themes of rupture, transformation and renewal” through the perspective of Balthasar.
The painting is one of the great works of the Nordic Renaissance produced by Gossaert between around 1510 and 1515. It has been in the gallery’s collection since 1911, sold by the widow of the Ninth Earl of Carlisle for less than market value. It remains one of the gallery’s most popular Christmas cards.
The immersive exhibit, Sensing the Unseen: Step into Gossaert’s Adoration, which was due to close in December, has been postponed from May 17 to June 13.
The mobile edition will go live on Friday on the National Gallery’s website.
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