Lamentation of Christ (Durer)
1500 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
The tiny kneeling figures in the corners are the Nuremberg family who paid for it, inserted so they could share in the grief.
★ 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 Annunciation (David)
1506 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
This is only the angel. Mary received the message on a companion panel, and the two now hang together as a pair.
★ 4.8
The Card Players (van Leyden)
1517 · Wilton House, Wiltshire, England
Coins and cards on the table and a great deal of sidelong glancing. Somebody is being cheated, and the intrigue may not be financial.
★ 4.8
Portrait of a Man, Aged 93
1521 · Albertina, Vienna
An inscription gives his age as ninety-three. Dürer drew him in Antwerp and used the head soon after for a Saint Jerome.
★ 4.8
Ecce Homo (Matsys)
1526 · Palazzo Ducale, Venice
Christ stands with his eyes lowered while the faces around him are twisted into snarls. Matsys made ugliness do the moral work.
★ 4.8
The Resurrection
1518 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Christ rises with his banner while an unearthly dawn detonates behind him in bands of orange and scarlet over black crags.
★ 4.9
Allegory of Gluttony and Lust
1500 · Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
A man rides a wine barrel while swimmers chase a floating pie. It was sawn off the bottom of the Ship of Fools.
★ 5.2
The Little Owl
1506 · Albertina, Vienna
Owls carried centuries of symbolism in the north, but Dürer's is mostly just an owl, looking back at you with its talons over a ledge.
★ 5.2
Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand
1508 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Thousands are clubbed and thrown off cliffs, and Dürer paints himself walking calmly through the middle of it holding a banner with his name.
★ 5.2
The Milkmaid (van Leyden)
1510 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A milkmaid, a herdsman and two cows, and almost nothing happening. One of the first prints to take peasants as a subject worth the burin.
★ 5.2
The Parable of the Sower
1557 · Timken Museum of Art, San Diego
You take in the whole river valley before you notice the sower at the bottom corner, or Christ preaching from a boat behind him.
★ 5.2
Christ Taking Leave of His Mother
1520 · National Gallery, London
The episode appears in no Gospel at all, and Altdorfer nearly buries the figures under a forest of enormous trees and luminous sky.
★ 5.2
St. John the Evangelist on Patmos
1500 · Berlin State Museums, Berlin
The lyrical Bosch, all calm light and wide landscape, except for the small insect-demon with a human face tending a fire in the corner.
★ 5.4
Cutting the Stone
1494 · El Prado, Madrid
A quack in a funnel hat cuts the stone of madness out of a man's head, and what comes out is a flower.
★ 5.7
The Judgment of Paris
1527 · Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Paris turns up as a German knight in plate armor and the three goddesses wear nothing but jewels and improbable hats.
★ 5.7
The Justice of the Emperor Otto
1475 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
The widow grips a red-hot iron bar unharmed to prove her husband was innocent after he had already been beheaded. Painted for a courtroom.
★ 5.7
Portrait of a Man (Memling)
1470 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Memling put his sitters in front of open countryside instead of a dark ground, an idea that traveled to Italy and came back changed.
★ 5.9
Death and the Miser
1500 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Death comes through the door while an angel points to the crucifix and a demon offers one more bag of gold. The man has not chosen.
★ 5.9
The Mocking of Christ
1505 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Blindfolded and beaten while pipers play to make a show of it. Everything Italy was perfecting at that moment, Grünewald wanted none of.
★ 6.1
Three Ages of Woman and Death
1510 · Kunstmuseum, Basel
A single thread of gauze links the baby, the beauty, the crone and Death holding an hourglass. Baldung was Dürer's pupil, with darker interests.
★ 6.1
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (David)
1510 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The Virgin offers the Child a bunch of grapes, which stand for the wine of his death, in an exactly observed Flemish wood.
★ 6.1
The Adoration of the Kings
1564 · National Gallery, London
Bruegel gives the holy figures plain faces and surrounds them with gawkers and whisperers, which makes reverence hard to come by.
★ 6.3
Ship of Fools
1500 · Louvre, Paris
A monk and a nun bawl a song over a lute while somebody vomits over the side. The boat has no rudder, which is the point.
★ 6.3
The Ugly Duchess
1513 · National Gallery, London
Satire on old age aping youth, in a headdress two generations out of date. Tenniel used her for the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland.
★ 6.5
The Fall of Man
1480 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The serpent stands upright against the tree with a near-human face, and every leaf in the garden is catalogued one by one.
★ 6.5
Triptych of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist
1479 · Memling Museum, Bruges
In the middle panel the Child slips a ring onto Saint Catherine's finger, and on the right wing the Apocalypse breaks over Patmos.
★ 6.5
The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things
1490 · El Prado, Madrid
The whole panel is a giant eye, with Christ in the pupil and the words Beware, beware, God sees. It was made for a tabletop.
★ 6.5
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell
1533 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Cold competence and nothing else. Holbein painted him as a near-pendant to Thomas More, whom Cromwell helped send to the scaffold.
★ 6.5
Festival of the Rose Garlands
1506 · Narodni Galerie, Prague
Dürer painted it in Venice to prove a German could beat the Venetians at color, and wrote on it that it took five months.
★ 6.6
St. Luke Drawing the Virgin
1440 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Luke was the patron saint of painters, and van der Weyden ran the Brussels painters' guild, so this is a tribute to the trade.
★ 6.7
The Moneylender and His Wife
1514 · Louvre, Paris
He weighs gold on a fine balance and her eyes drift off the prayer book toward the coins. A small mirror catches the room.
★ 6.7
Children's Games
1560 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Around two hundred children playing some eighty different games, no adults anywhere, and no particular place for the eye to start.
★ 6.7
Haymaking
1566 · Prague Castle, Prague
June or July from the same series of months, with rakes over shoulders and a girl carrying baskets of cherries toward us.
★ 6.7
Martin Luther
1532 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Cranach was Luther's friend and godfather to his children, and his workshop turned out this face by the score for Protestant Germany.
★ 6.7
Christ Carrying the Cross (Bosch)
1516 · Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent), Ghent
A crush of leering faces fills every inch, and Christ moves through the middle of it with his eyes shut.
★ 6.8
Adam and Eve (Durer)
1504 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Cat, mouse, rabbit, ox and elk stand for the temperaments held in balance, and the cat is about to pounce.
★ 6.8
Praying Hands
1508 · Albertina, Vienna
A study for an altarpiece that later burned, so the drawing has outlived the painting it was made to serve.
★ 6.8
Virgin and Child
1452 · Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
The Virgin is said to be the king's dead mistress, painted with a shaved forehead and one breast bared, ringed by red cherubim.
★ 6.9
Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments
1450 · Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
All seven sacraments happen at once inside one Gothic church, with the Crucifixion looming over the nave to show where they get their power.
★ 7.0
The Blind Leading the Blind
1568 · Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
Six blind men go down one after another, and Bruegel painted their clouded eyes accurately enough for doctors to diagnose the conditions.
★ 7.0