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Grayson Perry on the Sainsbury Wing. Plus exhibition previews: ‘Devotion by Design: Altarpieces before 1500’ and ‘Forest, Rocks, Torrents’.

probably about 1505

What you need to know about Leonardo and The Virgin of the Rocks, in 30 seconds

This is an Italian term which literally means 'light-dark'. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted. Artists who are famed for the use of chiar...

Leonardo da Vinci, among others, observed that as a landscape recedes from the viewer its colours and tones alter due to the nature of the atmosphere. The pictorial equivalent of this phenomenon is called aerial or atmospheric perspective. This ef...

Sfumato is the 'smoky' quality which blurs contours so that figures emerge from a dark background by means of gradual tonal modulations without any harsh outlines. Leonardo da Vinci advised painting 'without lines' in his uncompleted treatise on p...

The Italian architect Donato Bramante was born in Urbino in about 1444. He moved to Milan shortly after 1480, where he was in the circle of artists in the court of Ludovico il Moro Sforza which included Leonardo da Vinci. After the French invasio...

Isabella (1474 - 1539) was born and educated in the court of Ferrara, where she received an education in the classics. In 1490 she married Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, and moved from one important centre of Renaissance culture to another. She was...

Launch of a website dedicated to oil paintings across UK collections, including all of the works from the National Gallery, in a partnership between the BBC and PCF.