The Garden of Earthly Delights
1505 · El Prado, Madrid
Three panels run from Eden to hell, with a whole naked humanity climbing into giant fruit in between. Nobody has settled what it means.
★ 10.0
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 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
The Last Supper (da Vinci)
1495 · Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Christ has just said one of them will betray him, and the shock rolls down the table. Leonardo's experimental paint began flaking in his lifetime.
★ 9.7
Creation of Adam
1512 · Vatican Museums, Rome
God surges out of a red cloak full of angels, and Michelangelo leaves the fingers not quite touching. The gap does the work.
★ 9.7
Isenheim Altarpiece
1516 · Unterlinden Museum, Colmar
Christ's body hangs green and pocked with sores, painted for a hospital whose patients saw their own ravaged flesh.
★ 9.3
The Descent from the Cross (van der Weyden)
1435 · El Prado, Madrid
The fainting Virgin curves in an exact echo of her dead son, the stroke that made van der Weyden the most copied painter in the north.
★ 9.1
The Calling of St. Matthew
1600 · San Luigi dei Francsei, Rome
Light follows Christ's pointing hand across a dim counting-room to Matthew, who gestures at himself in disbelief. The picture made Caravaggio famous overnight.
★ 9.0
The Holy Trinity
1427 · Santa Maria Novella, Florence
The earliest surviving painting built on a single vanishing point, worked out on a wall of Santa Maria Novella with Brunelleschi's help.
★ 9.0
The Trinity
1425 · Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, Sergiyev Posad
Three angels bend into a closed circle around a single cup. In 2024 the icon left the Tretyakov for a monastery, over conservators' objections.
★ 8.9
The Last Judgment (Michelangelo)
1541 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Bartholomew holds his own flayed skin, and the sagging face on it is Michelangelo's. The nudes offended enough critics that drapery was added later.
★ 8.9
Judith Slaying Holofernes
1620 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Judith and her maid hold Holofernes down together and work the blade through his throat. Artemisia painted it a decade after her rape trial.
★ 8.8
Maesta (Duccio)
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
When Duccio finished it in 1311 the whole of Siena walked it to the cathedral in procession, with the bells going the entire way.
★ 8.8
The Tribute Money
1428 · Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
Three moments run in a single frame: the tax demanded, Peter pulling the coin from a fish, and Peter paying up at the right.
★ 8.7
Sistine Madonna
1512 · Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Two bored cherubs lean on the frame at the bottom, and they floated free of the altarpiece long ago onto everything else.
★ 8.7
Return of the Prodigal Son
1669 · Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The son kneels with his shorn head against his father's chest and the old man's hands come down on his back. Rembrandt painted it near death.
★ 8.7
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Masaccio)
1428 · Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
Eve throws back her head and howls while Adam hides his face, the bodies heavy and casting real shadows. Michelangelo came to study it.
★ 8.5
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 Transfiguration
1520 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Raphael left it unfinished when he died in 1520, and it was hung above his body while he lay in state.
★ 8.4
The Assumption of the Virgin
1518 · Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice
Titian was barely thirty when Venice saw this go up over the Frari altar, the Virgin swept into a storm of red and blue.
★ 8.4
Bodhisattva Padmapani
Artist unknown
478 · Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra
The bodhisattva lowers his eyes with a blue lotus in his hand, painted into living rock at Ajanta and lost to the jungle for centuries.
★ 8.4