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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Clown with Lute
1623 · Louvre, Paris
Caught mid-strum with his cap askew and his mouth open, painted so fast the brushstrokes still seem to be moving.
★ 5.4
Family Reunion
1867 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Eleven of the painter's family on a shaded terrace near Montpellier. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War at twenty-eight.
★ 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 Descent from the Cross (Rubens at Lille)
1617 · Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille
Rubens painted this descent years after the Antwerp one, and the two together show him reworking the same falling body across a career.
★ 5.6
Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds (Louvre)
1300 · Louvre, Paris
The same story at miniature scale, squeezed into a predella panel, and Giotto loses none of the plainness that made it convincing.
★ 5.7