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
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.
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
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
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Dali)
1946 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Elephants on impossibly long insect legs carry obelisks and naked women across the plain while the saint holds up a makeshift cross.
★ 6.3
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
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
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
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
1555 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Two pale legs disappear into the sea in the corner while the ploughman keeps ploughing. Auden wrote a poem about exactly that indifference.
★ 7.1
The Elevation of the Cross
1611 · Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Rubens had just come back from Italy with Caravaggio's light and Michelangelo's anatomy, and announced himself with this straining diagonal.
★ 7.2
The Last Supper (Bouts)
1468 · St. Peter's Church, Leuven
Not the betrayal but the blessing of the bread, staged in a Flemish hall on one of the earliest correct vanishing points in the north.
★ 7.3
Madonna and Child with Canon Joris van de Paele
1436 · Groeningmuseum, Bruges
Van Eyck spared the old canon nothing: the stubble, the swollen hands, the spectacles. His armored saint mirrors the whole room in miniature.
★ 7.8
The Descent from the Cross (Rubens at Antwerp)
1614 · Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Christ's body slides down one long diagonal onto a white shroud. It still stands on the altar in Antwerp Cathedral that Rubens painted it for.
★ 8.5
The Death of Marat
1793 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
David was Marat's friend and political ally, and he laid the murdered man out in his bath with the gravity of a religious lamentation.
★ 9.0
The Ghent Altarpiece (Adoration of the Mystic Lamb)
1432 · St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent
Saints and pilgrims stream toward a bleeding Lamb across a dozen hinged panels. One of them was stolen in 1934 and has never been found.
★ 9.8