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 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.
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
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
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 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
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
St. John the Evangelist on Patmos
1500 · Berlin State Museums, Berlin
The lyrical Bosch, all calm light and wide landscape, except for the small insect-demon with a human face tending a fire in the corner.
★ 5.4
The Entombment (Martini)
1340 · Berlin State Museums, Berlin
One woman flings both arms over her head, others press their faces to the body. Simone drops all restraint against a sky streaked red.
★ 5.6
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
The Massacre of the Innocents (Rubens 2)
1638 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Rubens came back to the subject nearly thirty years later with the same fury and a much broader, more fluent hand.
★ 6.1
The Mocking of Christ
1505 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Blindfolded and beaten while pipers play to make a show of it. Everything Italy was perfecting at that moment, Grünewald wanted none of.
★ 6.1
Bouquet
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
None of these flowers bloom in the same season. Bruegel assembled the bouquet from studies made across the whole year, and let petals droop.
★ 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
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
Lion Hunt
1621 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Horses, lions, spears and men knotted into one turning mass, with a rider already thrown and about to be mauled.
★ 6.7
Netherlandish Proverbs
1559 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
A man bangs his head on a brick wall, another casts roses before swine, and over a hundred proverbs are acted out literally in one village.
★ 7.1
Nativity
1530 · Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
All the light in the picture comes off the newborn child, and one shepherd throws up a hand against the glare.
★ 7.1
Blue Horse I
1911 · Stadtische Galerie, Munich
Marc gave his animals symbolic colors, blue for the spiritual, and looked to them for an innocence he thought people had lost.
★ 7.1
The Madonna in a Church
1429 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
The Virgin is far too big for the cathedral because she stands for the Church itself, and real sunlight falls in patches across the floor.
★ 7.2
The Night
1919 · Kunstsammlung, Dusseldorf
A family is tortured in a room too small for it, painted in Germany in 1919 with the war and the revolution just finished.
★ 7.2