I happily passed an hour or two in this exhibition reacquainting myself with old favourites from the National Gallery’s collection, as well as considering works that perhaps previously I had overlooked. But charging seven pounds for a full-price ticket feels inappropriate to me: while it does contain more than 30 loans from other British collections, including Holbein’s spellbinding miniature of Anne of Cleves from the V&A, Strange Beauty is predominantly a reshuffle of the permanent collection – and usually it is possible to admire, say, Holbein’s The Ambassadors for free.

Moreover, it is only a couple of years since a major show about the Northern Renaissance at the Queen’s Gallery in 2012, while there have been recent exhibitions in London devoted to Dürer (at the British Museum in 2002), Holbein (Tate Britain, 2006), and Cranach (the Royal Academy, 2008).

In addition, there isn’t much of a narrative to Strange Beauty, aside from the idea that the popularity of particular schools of art can wax and wane from era to era. Though this is interesting – I was fascinated to read, for instance, that 19th-century viewers of the famous (Netherlandish, not German) Arnolfini Portrait, on display in the first gallery, were amused by the stiffness of the figures as well as the bizarre appearance of their clothes – it is hardly sensational or groundbreaking.

The threadbare concept behind the exhibition is writ large in its final room, which does not contain any artworks at all. Instead, visitors encounter toe-curling questions emblazoned on the walls such as “Is ugliness more authentic than beauty?” and “Can art be both inventive and true to nature?” These heavy-handed if well-meaning questions brought me out in a cold sweat, as though I were about to sit an exam – which is not a feeling that ordinarily I would like to pay to experience.