LONDON.- This summer, the history of the National Gallery comes alive in Room 1. Art for the Nation introduces the first Director of the Gallery: Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865), a man described by one contemporary as the ‘Alpha and Omega’ of the Victorian art world. The exhibition shows a handful of Eastlake’s purchases of Italian Renaissance art and also demonstrates, using little-known items from the Gallery’s archive and library, the extent to which Eastlake laboured behind the scenes for the National Gallery. Eastlake was trained as painter and spent his formative years in Rome. He was in touch with many influential European thinkers and writers on the practice and theory of art, and was diligent in touring Europe to see the Old Masters at first hand. He made copies of some of them, including a painting by Titian that was later destroyed in a fire – the Death of St Peter Mart