National Gallery - Maps of paintings
Celebrating the National Gallery's 200th anniversary, data artist Tiziana Alocci presents Maps of Paintings, a prototype digital experience that brings the hidden journeys of the Gallery’s National Treasures to life.
Maps of Paintings is an experimental mapping project commissioned by the National Gallery to allow visitors to join in celebrating the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary of connecting people with paintings. This innovative project uses data to trace the fascinating movement of twelve iconic paintings from the Gallery's collection, revealing where they have travelled and the stories they carry through each location.
Maps of Paintings explores how data can deepen our understanding of artworks and invites audiences to view these pieces through an unexpected lens.
Read the full interview with Tiziana Alocci on the National Gallery’s website
National Gallery’s National Treasures
With ‘National Treasures’, more than half the UK population will be within an hour's journey of a National Gallery’s masterpiece. Maps of Paintings is inspired by John Berger's book "Ways of Seeing." This project reveals the invisible, showing ways of seeing paintings never imagined before. The project aims to focus on accessibility and how paintings and their information can be made more accessible to people.
Reflecting on the project, Alocci states, "My work with Maps of Paintings aims to make art accessible, transforming how we view these masterpieces by placing the audience at the narrative's centre. Inspired by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, the project seeks to make the unseen visible. This is about people and their personal connection to art – viewers can locate themselves within the map, seeing paintings orbit around them, merging personal experiences with the artwork's historical travels."
Read the full interview with Tiziana Alocci on the National Gallery website
A look at Diego Velasquez’s ‘The Toilet of Venus’ through Maps of Paintings
Mapping the Gallery’s Rich Archives
Tiziana has created a network map for each painting, showcasing its display locations since its acquisition. On these maps, venues are represented as nodes—their size indicates the duration of the painting's stay. Connecting lines represent journeys, with line thickness reflecting how recently the travel occurred.
Museums and galleries hold vast amounts of data on their collections, from historical provenance to scientific information about pigments and techniques. Maps of Paintings demonstrates the potential of data visualisation to unlock these archives, providing audiences with new ways to engage with art. When introduced to the National Gallery team, Alocci's prototype elicited an immediate and personal response, sparking curiosity not only about the paintings themselves but also about the connections they reveal across time and place.
Alocci envisions a future where data reveals even more hidden layers within museum collections. She remarks, "I'd love to explore archives of intangible data – scents, colours, even sounds – to uncover the connections that link science with art, and art with the everyday. Each piece holds a story that can be made accessible through data, allowing audiences to see the invisible and connect with art in a deeply personal way."
A special thanks to the National Gallery team for their outstanding collaboration on this project.
Read the full interview with Tiziana Alocci on the National Gallery website
Tiziana Alocci working on Maps of Paintings in her studio
Alocci is intrigued by the amount of data museums possess—not just historical data about paintings or sculptures, but also how this information is organised and used by both internal teams and the public. Technological advancements, particularly in mechanical reproduction, have transformed the nature, reception, and purpose of art in modern society, as Walter Benjamin discusses in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This area holds potential worth investigating. The vast amount of data presents a significant opportunity for museums and art institutions to engage viewers more actively, fostering a genuine connection between art and the public. In this way, art isn't merely there to be seen, but also to be understood and explored in novel ways.
Read the full interview with Tiziana Alocci on the National Gallery website
