Apollo and Daphne
1525 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Dossi swapped Apollo's ancient lyre for a modern viol, and Daphne is already sprouting into laurel in the far distance.
★ 4.8
The Art canon
Sourced and hung.
Every work chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
The Deposition
1602 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Rubens worked this out in Rome while studying Caravaggio, a rehearsal for the great Descent he would paint back home in Antwerp.
★ 4.8
Hercules and Lichas
1802 · Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome
Hercules, poisoned and raving, grabs the boy by the hair and one leg and throws him. Canova almost never carved anything this violent.
★ 5.2
Conversion on the Way to Damascus
1601 · Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome
The horse and the groom take up most of the canvas and neither notices anything. The miracle happens entirely inside the man on the ground.
★ 5.4
Saint Jerome Writing
1606 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Jerome reaches across the table for the inkpot with a skull holding down his papers. Scholarship as physical labor, in a single hard light.
★ 5.7
The Beaneater
1580 · Galleria Colonna, Rome
A peasant looks up from his beans as though caught, spoon halfway to his mouth. Painted decades before Caravaggio's followers made a career of this.
★ 6.3
Et in Arcadia Ego (Guercino)
1622 · Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
Two shepherds stop at a skull on a plinth and read the words carved there. Guercino used the motto first, decades before Poussin.
★ 6.5
Danae
1531 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Cupid pulls back the sheet while two putti sharpen their arrows on a whetstone at the foot of the bed. Painted for the Duke of Mantua.
★ 6.6
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
1593 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Fruit already spotting toward rot, painted with the same attention as the boy holding it. An early statement of what Caravaggio intended.
★ 6.6
Narcissus
1599 · Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
Narcissus and his reflection close into a circle around a band of black water, and nothing else exists in the picture.
★ 6.8
Flight into Egypt (A. Carracci)
1604 · Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
The holy family is tiny and the landscape does everything, which is the arrangement Poussin and Claude would build whole careers on.
★ 7.1
The Triumph of Galetea
1511 · Villa Farnesina, Rome
Asked where he found so beautiful a model, Raphael said he worked instead from a certain idea of beauty he carried in his head.
★ 7.2
Sacred and Profane Love
1514 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Two women sit at either end of a sarcophagus full of water, and it is the naked one who stands for sacred love.
★ 7.5
Discobulus (Discus Thrower)
Artist unknown
Palazzo Massimo, Rome
Myron's bronze is lost and this is a Roman marble copy, which is why a strut props the leg the original held up unaided.
★ 7.5
The Fall of Man
1510 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Two moments in one field: Adam and Eve reaching for the fruit, then driven out, suddenly old. The serpent has a woman's torso.
★ 7.8
Crucifixion of St. Peter
1601 · Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome
Three laborers strain to lever the cross upright with Peter nailed to it upside down. No crowd, no glory, just heavy work in the dark.
★ 7.8
The Entombment (Caravaggio)
1603 · Vatican Museums, Rome
The corner of the stone slab juts out of the picture so the body looks about to be laid down in the room with you.
★ 7.8
Moses
1515 · San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome
The horns come from an old mistranslation of the Hebrew for rays of light. He was meant as one figure among many on a papal tomb.
★ 8.0
The Conversion of Saint Paul
1601 · Palazzo Odescalchi Balbi, Rome
Caravaggio's first attempt at the subject, turned down by the patron, before he threw out the angels and left one man, one horse and the light.
★ 8.4
David (Bernini)
1624 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini put the viewer where Goliath must be standing, so the sling is being wound up to throw straight past your head.
★ 8.4
The Transfiguration
1520 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Raphael left it unfinished when he died in 1520, and it was hung above his body while he lay in state.
★ 8.4
Laocoon and His Sons
Artist unknown
Vatican Museums, Rome
Pliny ranked it above every other work of art, and when it came out of a Roman vineyard in 1506 Michelangelo hurried over to look.
★ 8.7
Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1650 · Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
Velázquez caught every wary line in the pope's face, and Innocent reportedly said it was troppo vero, too true. Francis Bacon reworked it for years.
★ 8.8
The Last Judgment (Michelangelo)
1541 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Bartholomew holds his own flayed skin, and the sagging face on it is Michelangelo's. The nudes offended enough critics that drapery was added later.
★ 8.9
The Calling of St. Matthew
1600 · San Luigi dei Francsei, Rome
Light follows Christ's pointing hand across a dim counting-room to Matthew, who gestures at himself in disbelief. The picture made Caravaggio famous overnight.
★ 9.0
Apollo and Daphne
1624 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini was in his mid-twenties when he cut this, catching Daphne at the moment bark closes over her thigh and leaves push from her fingers.
★ 9.1
Pieta (Michelangelo)
1499 · Vatican Museums, Rome
The dead Christ lies across his mother's lap. Michelangelo was twenty-four, and signed the sash after hearing it credited to someone else.
★ 9.3
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
1652 · Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
Bernini staged the saint's own account of her vision as theater, lit from a window he hid above and watched by marble spectators in boxes.
★ 9.4
The School of Athens
1511 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Plato and Aristotle argue at the center of a hall where Raphael gave the philosophers the faces of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Bramante.
★ 9.5
Creation of Adam
1512 · Vatican Museums, Rome
God surges out of a red cloak full of angels, and Michelangelo leaves the fingers not quite touching. The gap does the work.
★ 9.7