Painting brought alive by creative schoolchildren

Pupils from all year groups have been studying a painting by Veronese from the London gallery.

The picture is about the family of Darius, who was emperor of Persia, begging for their lives in front of Alexander the Great, who had conquered them.

Some of the children wrote stories and created paintings about a monkey in the picture, while others used green screen technology to make themselves ‘appear’ in the artwork. They then took photographs and made a comic strip recounting the story.

Another project centred around the construction - using rubbish - of a Greek column, around which pupils posed and took photographs of themselves begging for their lives.

The school was then treated to an end-of-year exhibition of the artwork created, an album of which has been sent to the National Gallery as an entry in its annual competition for primary schools.