Room 51

A small hinged painting and a large altarpiece ask for different kinds of looking. The Wilton Diptych could fold shut around a king’s private devotional image. Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks was made for a public religious setting. Both bring Mary and the infant Christ into carefully constructed worlds. This first Sainsbury gallery introduces several uses of painting, from prayer and storytelling to the making of a likeness. Compare a gold background with a landscape that seems to recede into the distance. The adjoining Room 51a holds Leonardo’s large drawing, the Burlington House Cartoon. Room 52 continues into the detail and illusion of fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting.