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.
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 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
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
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
Crucifix (Giotto)
1312 · Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Where Cimabue's Christ swings in an elegant curve, Giotto's hangs straight down under his own weight, belly sagging, head on his chest.
★ 5.7
Rest during the Flight into Egypt
1423 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
A gilded low sun hangs over the road and the orange trees are heavy with fruit, an early attempt at real morning light across a landscape.
★ 5.7
The Last Judgment (Angelico)
1430 · San Marco Museum, Florence
A corridor of opened graves runs down the middle, the saved dancing into a garden on the left, the damned driven into fire on the right.
★ 5.7
Annunciation to the Shepherds
1338 · Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence
A shepherd twists onto his back and throws up a hand against the glare. One of the first real night scenes in Western art.
★ 6.1
Perseus Rescuing Andromeda
1513 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The sea-monster is part fish and part beast and thoroughly invented, and some of the onlookers on the shore have started playing music.
★ 6.1
Deposition of Christ
1434 · San Marco Museum, Florence
Fra Angelico inherited a Gothic frame begun years earlier and filled it with deep sunlit space instead of gold, which is the whole story.
★ 6.3
The Sacrifice of Isaac
1603 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Isaac is shouting under his father's hand and the ram has already arrived at the right. Caravaggio gives the scene no ceremony whatsoever.
★ 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
Madonna Enthroned
1290 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Four prophets peer from arches under the throne holding scrolls that foretell the Virgin Birth, and the throne is angled to suggest depth.
★ 6.6
Portrait of Agnolo Doni
1506 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Raphael had just arrived in Florence and studied the Mona Lisa hard, then did the same pose in clear light instead of smoke.
★ 6.7
Crucifix
1288 · Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence
The Arno flood of 1966 stripped most of the paint off it, and the ruined cross became the emblem of the whole disaster.
★ 6.8