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
Hunters in the Snow
1565 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Three hunters come home over the hill with one thin catch while villagers skate below. Bruegel painted it for a series on the months.
★ 9.4
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
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife
1434 · National Gallery, London
A couple joins hands in a Bruges bedroom, and the mirror behind them catches two visitors at the door. Van Eyck signed the wall above it.
★ 9.1
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
Melencolia I
1514 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
A winged figure sits with her compass idle among abandoned tools, and no print in history has drawn more scholarly argument.
★ 8.6
The Ambassadors
1533 · National Gallery, London
Two men pose with globes, sundials and a lute with a broken string, and a smear on the floor turns into a skull from the side.
★ 8.5
The Portinari Altarpiece
1476 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Three weathered shepherds crowd in to look at the newborn, and when the triptych reached Florence from Bruges the local painters took note.
★ 8.3
Self-Portrait (Durer)
1500 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Dürer faced himself head-on in a pose reserved for images of Christ, and wrote across the panel that he had painted it at twenty-eight.
★ 8.1
The Battle of Alexander at Issus
1529 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Tens of thousands of tiny soldiers fight under a sky that curves like the whole earth. Painted while the Ottomans were pressing on Vienna.
★ 8.1
The Triumph of Death
1562 · El Prado, Madrid
Skeletons herd the living into a coffin-trap while a king clutches his gold and two lovers play music at the corner, not yet looking up.
★ 8.0
Madonna and Child with Canon Joris van de Paele
1436 · Groeningmuseum, Bruges
Van Eyck spared the old canon nothing: the stubble, the swollen hands, the spectacles. His armored saint mirrors the whole room in miniature.
★ 7.8
The Harvesters
1565 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
One man lies flat on his back with his mouth open while the others cut wheat. Late summer, from the same series of months.
★ 7.7
Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (Self portrait?)
1433 · National Gallery, London
The wary, straight-on gaze is what a painter sees in a mirror, which is why this is probably van Eyck looking at himself.
★ 7.6
The Tower of Babel
1563 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The tower is already leaning as it goes up, and Bruegel drew the cranes and ramps in enough detail that you could nearly build it.
★ 7.5
The Peasant Wedding
1568 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Two men carry the porridge in on an unhinged door, the bagpiper eyes it hungrily, and the bride sits idle under her paper crown.
★ 7.5
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
1521 · Kunstmuseum, Basel
A corpse in a box barely wider than itself, with no hint of resurrection. Dostoevsky saw it in Basel and said it could destroy faith.
★ 7.4
Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam
1523 · National Gallery, London
Erasmus rests his hands on a book whose edge is inscribed The Labors of Hercules, his own joke about how much scholarship costs.
★ 7.4
Young Hare
1502 · Albertina, Vienna
Every whisker set down separately, and in the dark eye a studio window is reflected. Dürer signed an animal study as a finished work.
★ 7.3