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
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.
Luncheon of the Boating Party
1881 · Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
Fourteen of Renoir's friends linger over the wreckage of lunch above the Seine, his future wife among them, cooing at a dog on the table.
★ 8.8
Supper at Emmaus
1601 · National Gallery, London
One disciple grips his chair to stand and the other throws his arms wide, while a fruit basket teeters off the edge toward us.
★ 8.0
The Last Supper (Tintoretto)
1594 · Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
The table runs off on a steep diagonal into a smoky hall where servants clear plates and the lamp smoke thickens into angels.
★ 7.6
The Last Supper (Bouts)
1468 · St. Peter's Church, Leuven
Not the betrayal but the blessing of the bread, staged in a Flemish hall on one of the earliest correct vanishing points in the north.
★ 7.3
The Potato Eaters
1885 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Van Gogh made the faces deliberately coarse and the browns deliberately muddy, wanting it clear that these people had dug the meal themselves.
★ 7.2
Freedom From Want
1943 · Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge
Rockwell painted it as one of the Four Freedoms Roosevelt named, and it has been parodied more than almost any American picture.
★ 6.7
The Sacrament of the Last Supper
1955 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The room is a twelve-sided glass chamber and a torso hovers over the table. Dalí called this sort of thing nuclear mysticism.
★ 6.5
The Beaneater
1580 · Galleria Colonna, Rome
A peasant looks up from his beans as though caught, spoon halfway to his mouth. Painted decades before Caravaggio's followers made a career of this.
★ 6.3
The Last Supper (Ghirlandaio)
1480 · Cenacolo di Ognissanti, Florence
Painted on a refectory wall so the monks dined at the end of the same table. Leonardo would blow the arrangement apart a few years later.
★ 5.2
Breakfast
1887 · Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo
A family at breakfast, posed so stiffly in the glare that the comfortable room turns faintly airless. Every surface is built from dots.
★ 5.2
The Last Supper (de Juanes)
1562 · El Prado, Madrid
Every apostle is named in gold and Judas sits apart with a darkened halo, which makes the panel a teaching aid as much as a picture.
★ 4.8
Communion of the Apostles
1452 · San Marco Museum, Florence
Christ stands to place the host on each tongue exactly as a priest does at Mass, in a bare cell-like room with stools.
★ 4.7
The Last Supper (Bouveret)
1896 · Private collection
The light in the darkened room seems to be coming off Christ himself, painted when religious art had largely gone out of fashion.
★ 4.0