Moroni's religious pictures are less distinctive. This is somewhat ironic since he was in Trent during the early 1550s when the second phase of the Council of Trent was convened and the town was the centre of the Catholic world. Indeed the Council Fathers commissioned him to paint an altarpiece for the church where they met, Santa Maria Maggiore. It shows the Madonna and Child in Glory with the Doctors of the Church, but despite being in the very place where Catholic doctrine was being formulated, Moroni appears to have been unmoved by the momentousness of events and instead borrowed heavily on an earlier composition by his teacher Moretto. The result was a stilted and formulaic clustering of stock figures which for all its grace notes has none of the narrative exhilaration or fervour of, for example, Titian's Assumption, painted more than 30 years earlier. The six altarpieces in the exhibition show that Moroni had little gift for invention.

A far more effective religious work is A Gentleman in Adoration before the Baptism of Christ, c.1555-60, which, despite the old-fashioned insertion of the patron into a religious setting has real devotional intimacy precisely because the patron is a portrait rather than an abstraction. The composition here is a curious one in which the young man has stumbled upon the Biblical scene and has fallen to prayer behind a broken marble wall like some pious voyeur. It conforms to emerging Counter-Reformation strictures and in particular Ignatius of Loyola's idea of "mental prayer", an imaginative sympathy with Christ to intensify the religious experience.

Moroni was clearly more at home with the temporal than the spiritual. The physical proximity of his sitters seemed to free him. Despite the repeated poses and props the portraits seemingly place the viewer in the presence not of paintings but of the people themselves.

The National Gallery, meanwhile, is disinterring a very different painter — the Norwegian Romantic Peder Balke (1804-1887). Balke's career was short-lived and unsuccessful, so he turned instead to politics and building property for the poor. He was one of very few people to travel to the far north and his pictures of the arctic wilderness of the North Cape are extraordinary, capturing the essence of storms, snow and wildness and turning the place into a Wagnerian dreamscape. His paintings, late survivors of the Sturm und Drang sensibility, show a thrilling primordial land lying unsuspected off the edges of civilisation.

Although he had a formal artistic education, studied with the leading Norwegian landscapist Johan Christian Dahl and, from trips to Dresden, knew the work of Caspar David Friedrich, his own work is unique. The pictures are small in scale, restricted in palette, atmospheric rather than geographical and often improvised in the way they are painted (he used his fingers as well as brushes to apply the paint). Both the man and his art are fascinating oddities.