This small but powerful exhibition examines divine transgression through the National Gallery’s – thoroughly Catholic – collection

Ideas of right and wrong are not fixed like compass points; they shift with the times, and one generation’s “moral compass” isn’t necessarily inherited by the next. To a generation raised on a TV diet of Millionaire, Bake Off, Love Island, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Gogglebox and the venting echo chamber that is social media, the list of Seven Deadly Sins compiled by Pope Gregory the Great in 590 AD – pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth – may well sound antiquated.

So it’s courageous of the National Gallery – whose director, Gabriele Finaldi, is a practising Catholic – to open this rusty can of worms with a free exhibition devoted to “Sin” (until 3 January 2021). The creation of Dr Joost Joustra, the gallery’s Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion, this small show brings together a dozen works from the National’s holdings with a couple of loans – for the bigger picture you must turn to the accompanying book. Given the collection’s history, the concept of sin represented is thoroughly Christian. “The National Gallery is to a very large extent a Catholic collection,” Joustra admits, “but it speaks to a lot of visitors. It’s a cliché, but pictures speak louder than words.”