The Virgin and Child (Ugolino)
1312 · Louvre, Paris
The Child reaches up to grasp the edge of his mother's veil. Ugolino followed Duccio more closely than anyone else did.
★ 3.6
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 Guitarist
1755 · Musee d'Arts Nantes, Nantes
A young man glances up from his guitar mid-song. Greuze usually painted tearful moral lessons, and here he simply does not.
★ 4.2
The Adoration of the Magi
1813 · Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Overbeck and the Nazarenes lived almost as monks in Rome and painted deliberately like the Italians before Raphael. This is the program.
★ 4.2
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
Self-Portrait (Caillebotte)
1892 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
One of the Impressionist canvases he owned hangs on the wall behind him. Caillebotte's money and his bequest kept the movement alive.
★ 4.4
Mediterranean Landscape
1952 · Albertina, Vienna
The whole coast reduced to a few flat zones of color and some quick line. Picasso old, settled in the south, and enjoying himself.
★ 4.4
Marriage at Cana
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
A steward tastes from a bowl and a portly servant tends the jars, and the miracle goes by almost without anyone noticing.
★ 4.6
The Ascension
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Christ's fingertips cross out of the human part of the picture and blur into light, which is the whole event in one detail.
★ 4.6
Christ Appearing on the Road to Emmaus
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
Christ turns up dressed as a pilgrim with a staff and a traveler's pouch, and the two disciples still have no idea who he is.
★ 4.7
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
The Descent to Hell
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
Christ strides into the cave to pull Adam out by the hand, treading on a chained Satan as he goes.
★ 4.8
Washing of the Feet
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
Christ kneels with the basin and Peter, flustered, raises a hand to his own head. Some of the others are already loosening their sandals.
★ 4.8
The Crucifixion
1333 · Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Angels dart and grieve around the cross while the Magdalene, hair loose, kneels to embrace its foot. A leaf from a travelling altarpiece.
★ 4.8
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
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 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 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
Great Fish Market
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Hundreds of minutely painted fish, baskets and hagglers. They called him Velvet Bruegel for exactly this kind of finish.
★ 4.8
Romulus and Remus Given Shelter by Faustulus
1643 · Louvre, Paris
The shepherd carries the twins home to his wife with the she-wolf still nearby. Rome's founding myth as a foundling story.
★ 4.8
Golgotha
1900 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
Munch painted this while under treatment in a clinic, and the crucified figure hemmed in by leering faces is not hard to read.
★ 4.8
Fragment of a Crucifixion
1950 · Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Bacon used the shape of the cross as an armature for meat rather than religion, with a snarling animal fixed on top.
★ 4.8
The Sacrifice of Isaac (Chagall)
1966 · Musee National Marc Chagall, Nice
The angel comes down to stop the knife, in the deep reds and blues Chagall used for his late cycle of biblical paintings.
★ 4.8
The Carrying of the Cross (Martini)
1335 · Louvre, Paris
Christ in vivid red is hauled by a rope through the gate of a white, many-towered Jerusalem while children scamper at the edge.
★ 4.9
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
The Wedding Feast of Cana
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
Servants stoop over the great stone jars in the foreground to draw out wine that was water a moment ago.
★ 5.0
The Road to Calvary (Duccio)
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
A soldier drags Christ out through the city gate by his robe, the diagonal of the cross cutting against a bristling line of lances.
★ 5.1
Maddona with Child and Six Angels
1305 · Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia
Six angels lean in along the throne with their heads tilted, which turns a rigid Byzantine formula into something nearly intimate.
★ 5.2
The Nativity (Giotto)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
The Virgin lies on the hillside and turns to lay her son in the manger, looking at his face. No gold, just a cold blue sky.
★ 5.2
The Nativity (da Fabriano)
1423 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The Child lies on the ground giving off his own light across the straw and his mother's face. One of the first paintings lit from inside.
★ 5.2
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
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
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
Young Woman Sleeping
1654 · British Museum, London
A few sweeps of brush and brown ink, most of the paper left bare, and the whole weight of a sleeping head is there.
★ 5.2
The Birth and Triumph of Venus
1740 · Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Venus in a pearly sea with nymphs, tritons and putti all around, made entirely to delight and not at all to instruct.
★ 5.2
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
I Am Still Learning
1828 · El Prado, Madrid
An old man on two sticks, with Aun aprendo written underneath. Goya drew it in exile and failing health, near the end.
★ 5.2
Portraits at the Stock Exchange
1879 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Degas turned from dancers to financiers, catching heads bent close over documents in the crush of the Paris exchange.
★ 5.2
Breakfast
1887 · Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo
A family at breakfast, posed so stiffly in the glare that the comfortable room turns faintly airless. Every surface is built from dots.
★ 5.2
Women at the Well
1891 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Provençal women at a hilltop well above a blue bay, the dots loosening into curves and the science giving way to pleasure.
★ 5.2
Train Smoke
1900 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
One puff of steam drifts across a curving shoreline, the modern world putting a small mark on a landscape that had none.
★ 5.2
Aquis Submersus
1919 · Stadel Museum, Frankfurt
A doll-like figure by a still pool under a tower with a clock face. Ernst had been looking hard at de Chirico's empty squares.
★ 5.2
Reading the Letter
1921 · Musee Picasso, Paris
Two heavy young men press close together over a letter, and the intimacy is usually read as a memorial to Apollinaire.
★ 5.2