The Rebuke of Adam and Eve
1626 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Adam points at Eve, Eve points at the serpent, and the first sin turns into an ordinary comedy of passing the blame.
★ 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.
Leda and the Swan
1882 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
The swan nips her hand and Leda barely reacts. Cézanne cared about the planes of the body, not the story.
★ 4.8
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
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
Le Sommeil
1866 · Petit Palais, Paris
Two women asleep and entwined, painted on private commission and therefore out of reach of the Salon and its proprieties.
★ 5.4
Neptune and Triton
1623 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Neptune drives his trident down to still the waters. It was made for a fountain, so real water once finished the sculpture.
★ 5.4
Jealousy
1907 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
A sallow green face fills the front of the picture while behind him a woman in red picks fruit beside another man. He is imagining it.
★ 5.4
Leda Atomica
1949 · Teatro-Museo Dali, Figueres
Nothing in the picture touches anything else. Dalí built it on the physics of the atom, where matter is mostly empty space.
★ 5.6
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
Woman with a Parrot
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Courbet took the nude to the Salon with her hair loose, her body relaxed, and a parrot on her hand instead of a myth.
★ 5.7
Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape
1525 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
An enchantress sits in a wood ringed by deer, dogs, owls and a stork, which may be men she has transformed. Dossi leaves it unresolved.
★ 5.7
Artillerymen (Kirchner)
1915 · Guggenheim, New York City
Naked conscripts showering in a barracks under a mounted officer, painted after the army service that broke Kirchner down.
★ 5.7
Leda and the Swan (Correggio)
1532 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
The story runs across the canvas in stages, arrival to departure. A later owner cut Leda's head out in disgust and it was repainted.
★ 5.7
Perseus with the Head of Medusa
1806 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
When Napoleon carried off the Apollo Belvedere, the Vatican put this on the empty pedestal, a modern work judged fit for the company.
★ 5.9
La Belle Rafaela
1927 · Location unknown
The odalisque rebuilt in the machine age, all gleaming curves against deep red, sensual and cold at exactly the same time.
★ 6.1
Nude in a Black Armchair
1932 · Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Georgia
The dark chair throws the body forward, all lilac and rose curves, a plant arching over the sleeper from behind.
★ 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
Mademoiselle O'Murphy
1751 · Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne
Louise O'Murphy was a teenage favorite of Louis XV, and Boucher painted her face-down across the cushions for private consumption.
★ 6.1
Young Spartans Exercising
1860 · National Gallery, London
Spartan girls taunt the boys into wrestling, and Degas made the bodies awkward rather than ideal, which is not how history painting was done.
★ 6.1
Parnassus
1497 · Louvre, Paris
The Muses dance to Apollo's lyre while Venus's cuckolded husband fumes at his forge off to the left. Painted for Isabella d'Este's study.
★ 6.1
The Menaced Assassin
1927 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A murdered woman on a divan, a calm man listening to a gramophone, and two men with a club and a net waiting outside the door.
★ 6.3
Danae
1907 · Private collection
Zeus arrives as a stream of gold coins and ornament between her thighs, and Klimt makes no attempt to be subtle about it.
★ 6.3
Reclining Nude
1917 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
African masks, Cycladic figures and Renaissance Venuses, folded into one long golden diagonal. Among the most expensive paintings ever sold.
★ 6.3
Moses and the Daughters of Jethro
1524 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Moses wades into a heap of falling nudes to drive off the shepherds, the limbs knotted almost into abstraction under a harsh light.
★ 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
Oedipus and the Sphinx
1808 · Louvre, Paris
Oedipus leans in close to answer the riddle, and a previous contestant's foot is lying at the bottom edge as a warning.
★ 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
Nude with Calla Lilies
1944 · Location unknown
An armful of calla lilies is nearly bigger than the woman kneeling behind it. Rivera came back to the flower and its sellers constantly.
★ 6.6
Sleeping Hermaphroditos
Artist unknown
Louvre, Paris
You see a sleeping woman until you walk around to the other side. Bernini added the mattress, folds and all, in 1620.
★ 6.7
Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci
1490 · Musee Conde, Chantilly
She had been dead for years when this was painted, and the asp at her throat turns her into Cleopatra.
★ 6.7
A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph
1495 · National Gallery, London
A satyr kneels and touches the dead woman with extraordinary gentleness while her dog keeps watch and wading birds stand along the shore.
★ 6.7
The Fall of the Damned
1620 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
A single unbroken avalanche of bodies falls from a bright heaven at the top into the dark, with demons pulling them down.
★ 6.7
Boy Leading a Horse
1906 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
The Rose Period cooling off into something graver and more archaic, the boy and horse built like figures off a Greek relief.
★ 6.7
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening
1944 · Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
A bee circles a pomegranate, and in the second before waking it has become two tigers and a bayonet coming at Gala's arm.
★ 6.7
Ugolino and His Sons
1867 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Ugolino bites his own knuckles while his sons starve against his legs, from the passage in Dante where he is tempted to eat them.
★ 6.8
The Models
1888 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Seurat painted this to prove the dots could handle a nude, and hung his own Grande Jatte on the studio wall behind them.
★ 6.8
Dante and Virgil (The Barque of Dante)
1822 · Louvre, Paris
Delacroix's debut, and the damned are biting the hull. Romanticism announced itself with churning water and bodies learned from Rubens.
★ 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
Jupiter and Io
1533 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Jupiter has turned himself into a grey cloud, and a dim face and hand come out of the mist to hold her.
★ 6.8
Red Nude
1917 · Private collection
The police shut down Modigliani's only solo show for indecency, and this was among the nudes that did it.
★ 6.8
Danae
1554 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Zeus arrives as a shower of gold and the old nurse scrambles to catch the coins in her apron while Danae simply reclines.
★ 6.9
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust
1932 · Tate Modern, London
Marie-Thérèse asleep beside a sculpture of her own head and a philodendron, from the year Picasso could seemingly do nothing wrong.
★ 6.9
L'Origine du Monde
1866 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Too explicit to exhibit for over a century, it stayed in private hands behind curtains and screens. No myth, no excuse, just the body.
★ 6.9
Venus and Adonis
1553 · El Prado, Madrid
Venus twists round to hold him back and he pulls away toward the hunt that will kill him. Cupid sleeps in the shade, useless.
★ 7.0
Spirit of the Dead Watching
1892 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
A girl lies face down and frightened while a hooded figure sits behind her. Gauguin said his Tahitian companion was afraid of the dark.
★ 7.1
Luxe, Calme et Volupte
1904 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The title comes from Baudelaire and the technique from Seurat, but the color is already heading somewhere neither of them went.
★ 7.1
Blue Nude II
1952 · Centre Pompidou, Paris
Matisse was too ill to stand at an easel, so he cut the figure out of painted paper and called it drawing with scissors.
★ 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
The Valpincon Bather
1808 · Louvre, Paris
A bare back seen from behind under even light, with a striped turban wound round the head. Ingres returned to this view all his life.
★ 7.2
Three Studies of Lucian Freud
1969 · Private collection
Freud sits on a wooden chair in three panels, wrenched out of shape and still unmistakably himself. Bacon painted his friend and rival.
★ 7.2
Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
1618 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Two horsemen haul two women up onto rearing horses, and the whole canvas spins into one great X of limbs and hooves.
★ 7.4
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 Nude Maja
1800 · El Prado, Madrid
Not a goddess but a real woman looking straight back, which is why the Inquisition took an interest. Goya painted a clothed version too.
★ 7.6
Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
1545 · National Gallery, London
A girl with a reptile's body offers a honeycomb and Time pulls back a curtain. The cold puzzle was probably a gift for the French king.
★ 7.6
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
Death of Sardanapalus
1827 · Louvre, Paris
The king watches from his red bed while everything he owns is killed in front of him, on his own orders, before the pyre.
★ 7.8
Nude Descending a Staircase
1912 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
A critic at the 1913 Armory Show called it an explosion in a shingle factory, and the insult followed the painting around America.
★ 8.0
La Grande Odalisque
1814 · Louvre, Paris
Ingres stretched her spine past anything anatomy allows, and critics joked she had three vertebrae too many. He was chasing line, not truth.
★ 8.0