Mona Lisa
1504 · Louvre, Paris
She was probably Lisa Gherardini, a merchant's wife, and Leonardo kept reworking her for years and never handed the portrait over.
★ 9.9
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 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
David
1504 · Galleria dell'Accademia (Florence), Florence
The marble block had been abandoned as flawed before Michelangelo took it, and he carved a boy who is watching Goliath, not beating him.
★ 9.6
The School of Athens
1511 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Plato and Aristotle argue at the center of a hall where Raphael gave the philosophers the faces of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Bramante.
★ 9.5
Pieta (Michelangelo)
1499 · Vatican Museums, Rome
The dead Christ lies across his mother's lap. Michelangelo was twenty-four, and signed the sash after hearing it credited to someone else.
★ 9.3
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
Vitruvian Man
1492 · Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Leonardo fixed Vitruvius's old problem by moving the centers, so that the navel governs the circle and the groin governs the square.
★ 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
The Tempest
1508 · Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
A soldier, a nursing woman, and lightning over the town beyond. Nobody has explained what connects them, and Giorgione died young leaving few certain works.
★ 8.6
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
Moses
1515 · San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome
The horns come from an old mistranslation of the Hebrew for rays of light. He was meant as one figure among many on a papal tomb.
★ 8.0
The Virgin and Child with St Anne
1513 · Louvre, Paris
Three generations nest into one shifting pyramid, and Leonardo kept reworking it for years without ever calling it finished.
★ 7.8
The Fall of Man
1510 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Two moments in one field: Adam and Eve reaching for the fruit, then driven out, suddenly old. The serpent has a woman's torso.
★ 7.8
Sacred and Profane Love
1514 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Two women sit at either end of a sarcophagus full of water, and it is the naked one who stands for sacred love.
★ 7.5
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
1504 · National Gallery, London
Bellini painted the brocade thread by thread and turned the official portrait from a profile on a coin into a man met face to face.
★ 7.4
Madonna of the Rocks 2
1505 · National Gallery, London
The second version, painted to settle a long quarrel with the confraternity. Everyone now has a halo and the angel has stopped pointing.
★ 7.4
The Triumph of Galetea
1511 · Villa Farnesina, Rome
Asked where he found so beautiful a model, Raphael said he worked instead from a certain idea of beauty he carried in his head.
★ 7.2
Madonna of the Harpies
1517 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The little demons carved on the pedestal were taken for harpies and gave the picture its name. Del Sarto was called the faultless painter.
★ 7.1