Saint Jerome Writing
1606 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Jerome reaches across the table for the inkpot with a skull holding down his papers. Scholarship as physical labor, in a single hard light.
★ 5.7
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.
Pyramid of Skulls
1901 · Private collection
Four skulls stacked on a tabletop and lit straight on. Cézanne kept coming back to the skull in his last years, never this frontally.
★ 5.9
Vanitas Still Life
1630 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
A toppled glass, a lamp still smoking, a watch and a skull, all painted in browns and greys so the light does the work.
★ 6.1
Et in Arcadia Ego (Guercino)
1622 · Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
Two shepherds stop at a skull on a plinth and read the words carved there. Guercino used the motto first, decades before Poussin.
★ 6.5
Saint Mary Magdalen with the Smoking Flame
1640 · Louvre, Paris
One oil lamp, one skull in her lap, and a flame she does not take her eyes off. Everything else is dark.
★ 7.1
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills
1935 · Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn), Brooklyn
O'Keeffe collected sun-bleached bones off the desert and hung this one in the sky over the hills, with a single white hollyhock beside it.
★ 7.2