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Let's admit that some of us are occasionally uncertain about just where to focus our attention when enjoying an Italian Renaissance painting. Help is in sight—well, at least at London's National Gallery. "Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting," currently on view there, presents far more than the already satisfying feast for the eyes of some splendid paintings. Drawn primarily from the museum's own collections, this exhibition helps us understand why a Virgin or Christ figure may occasionally be less interesting than the alluring space in which its story takes place. An examination of the various architectural devices that are available to the artist turns out to be essential in fully grasping the visual dynamics of a painting.

As the scholar Amanda Lillie writes in the online catalog (itself a bold model for a museum to follow): "Buildings in paintings have too often been viewed as background or as space fillers which play a passive or at best supporting role, propping up the figures that carry the main message of the picture. By looking afresh at buildings within paintings, treating them as active protagonists, it becomes clear that they performed a series of crucial roles."

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The show's section on "Place Making" includes one of the four exquisite paintings by Sandro Botticelli depicting "Three Miracles of St. Zenobius" (c.1500); two from this group are in London, the others are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Dresden's Gemäldegalerie. The stagelike setting here is clearly meant to suggest Florence's actual architecture, since the miracles occurred in that city, yet the specific identification remains unclear. On the other hand, anyone familiar with the city will recognize, in one of the exhibition's few drawings, the location of Giorgio Vasari's "The Procession of Pope Leo X, Through the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, in 1515" (c.1558)—a preparatory work for a painting in the Palazzo Vecchio—in which the identity of the place contrasts with the anonymity of the many figures.

It might be enough to enjoy an exhibition of Italian Renaissance paintings that focuses your eye on a specific aspect of the work, in this case architecture. But I was especially struck by this show as a matrix that might well have a life beyond its London display.