26 June – 27 July 2008
Stages and Scenes: Creating Architectural Illusion is the culmination of the first year of the new MA programme Curating the Art Museum, offered by The Courtauld Institute of Art. This exhibition, curated by the eight students on the programme, centres on the rise of the theatre as a spectacular display of wealth and power, which reached its height in 18th-century Europe.
Artists used their mastery of perspective and Baroque ornament to extend the limits of the stage. The exhibition, which was on show at The Courtauld Gallery from 26 June to 27 July 2008, included prints, drawings, paintings and early books and investigated the links between theatre, architecture and art in these flamboyant times and illustrate how creative approaches to the stage reached remarkable levels of invention and excess.
