The Sermon on the Mount
1442 · San Marco Museum, Florence
Painted on the wall of a friar's cell at San Marco, stripped of gold and ornament so that it settles the mind rather than dazzles.
★ 4.4
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.
St. John the Evangelist
1469 · The Frick Collection, New York City
John stands lost in his book, wrapped in red cloth massed like masonry. One wing of an altarpiece now scattered across five cities.
★ 4.4
Communion of the Apostles
1452 · San Marco Museum, Florence
Christ stands to place the host on each tongue exactly as a priest does at Mass, in a bare cell-like room with stools.
★ 4.7
Herod's Banquet
1490 · Santa Maria Novella, Florence
The head arrives on a platter inside a serene sunlit loggia full of well-dressed Florentines, many of them the family who paid.
★ 4.7
Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist
1495 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Late Botticelli, with the early lightness gone tense. He had fallen under Savonarola's spell and his religious pictures never relaxed again.
★ 4.7
Banquet of Herod
1435 · Church of Saints Stephen and Lawrence, Castiglione Olona
The feast on the left, the severed head delivered on the right, both staged in a colonnade built with Masaccio's new perspective.
★ 4.8
The Visitation (Ghirlandaio)
1491 · Louvre, Paris
Elizabeth sinks down and clasps the pregnant Mary. Ghirlandaio ran the busiest workshop in Florence, and a boy named Michelangelo apprenticed there.
★ 4.8
Portrait of Dante
1495 · Private collection
Dante had been dead nearly two centuries, so this is not a likeness but a verdict, struck in profile like a coin.
★ 4.8
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
Madonna and Child (Perugino)
1500 · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
The oval face, the lowered eyes, the Umbrian distance melting into air. Raphael took all of it and then went past it.
★ 4.8
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
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
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 Last Supper (de Juanes)
1562 · El Prado, Madrid
Every apostle is named in gold and Judas sits apart with a darkened halo, which makes the panel a teaching aid as much as a picture.
★ 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
Temptation of Adam and Eve
1428 · Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
Serene, elegant nudes about to ruin everything. It faces Masaccio's Expulsion across the same chapel, calm before the Fall against anguish after.
★ 5.2
Annunciation (Lippi, Munich)
1450 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Gilded hems, fluttering wings, a walled garden behind. Lippi was a friar with a worldly streak and it shows in the ornament.
★ 5.2
The Calvary
1465 · Louvre, Paris
Only the Virgin and Saint John below the cross, and a river winding past a walled town. Early Bellini, carrying feeling in the light.
★ 5.2
The Last Supper (Ghirlandaio)
1480 · Cenacolo di Ognissanti, Florence
Painted on a refectory wall so the monks dined at the end of the same table. Leonardo would blow the arrangement apart a few years later.
★ 5.2
The Virgin Appearing to St. Bernard
1494 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Perugino taught Raphael, and the poise, the airy arcade and the soft Umbrian valley here pass almost unchanged into the pupil's work.
★ 5.2
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
Annunciation (del Sarto)
1512 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Gabriel kneels at the right and points across at a Virgin drawing back in surprise, with a stretch of classical ruin between them.
★ 5.2
The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with Saint Francis
1520 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Joseph reaches up to pull down dates from a palm while Saint Francis kneels at the side, added for the chapel that ordered it.
★ 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
Summer
1563 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
A cucumber nose, a peach cheek, a garlic-clove ear, and Arcimboldo's own name woven into the collar of plaited straw.
★ 5.2
Autumn
1572 · Louvre, Paris
A head of pears and pomegranates crowned with grapes, sitting in a split wooden barrel bound with willow hoops. The season of the wine harvest.
★ 5.2
Spring
1573 · Louvre, Paris
Rosebud lips, a lily for a nose, and hair made of tulips and peonies. The freshest and most delicate of the four seasons.
★ 5.2
Christ Blessing (The Savior of the World)
1600 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Two fingers raised in a gesture reaching back to Byzantium, one hand on a crystal orb, the face long and sorrowful and unmistakably his.
★ 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
Christ Carrying the Cross (Lotto)
1526 · Louvre, Paris
Lotto crops the Passion down to one tear-streaked head at the surface, with soldiers' hands coming in from the edges of the frame.
★ 5.4
St. Jerome
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Not the desert hermit but the Doctor of the Church, in cardinal's red with one long hand resting on his own translation of the Bible.
★ 5.4
Calvary (Antwerp Crucifixion)
1475 · Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Antonello carried the Netherlandish oil technique south to Venice, and Giovanni Bellini responded with a Crucifixion almost identical to this one.
★ 5.4
Deposition of Christ (Bronzino)
1545 · Musee des Beaux Arts et d'Archeologie Besancon, Besancon
Where his teacher Pontormo made the subject swirl with anxiety, Bronzino polishes it: jewel-bright blues and pinks, grief made elegant.
★ 5.4
The Holy Family with a Lamb
1507 · El Prado, Madrid
The Child sits astride a lamb, which is the sacrifice, and Raphael took the interlocking group straight out of Leonardo.
★ 5.6