Winged Victory of Samothrace
Artist unknown
190 BC · Louvre, Paris
Nike lands on a warship's prow, wings still open, sea wind pressing the marble drapery flat against her striding body.
★ 9.6
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.
Mask of Tutankhamun
Artist unknown
1323 BC · Grand Egyptian Museum, Giza
Eleven kilograms of gold inlaid with lapis and carnelian, lifted by Howard Carter from the innermost of three coffins in 1925.
★ 9.6
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
Terracotta Army
Artist unknown
210 BC · Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi'an
Thousands of life-size clay soldiers in battle formation, no two faces alike, guarding an emperor's tomb since 210 BC.
★ 9.6
Fountain
1917
Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt to an exhibition he was helping to judge, and the committee rejected it.
★ 9.5
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
1652 · Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
Bernini staged the saint's own account of her vision as theater, lit from a window he hid above and watched by marble spectators in boxes.
★ 9.4
Parthenon Sculptures (Elgin Marbles)
440 BC · British Museum, London
The goddesses of the east pediment wear drapery so wet it clings. Elgin took the marbles to London in 1801 and Greece wants them back.
★ 9.4
Bust of Nefertiti
1345 BC · Neues Museum, Berlin
One eye is inlaid and the other left blank, which suggests the bust was a master model kept in the sculptor's workshop at Amarna.
★ 9.4
The Thinker
1904 · Musee Rodin, Paris
Rodin first made this figure as Dante brooding over the Gates of Hell, then enlarged him and set him thinking alone on a rock.
★ 9.3
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
Apollo and Daphne
1624 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini was in his mid-twenties when he cut this, catching Daphne at the moment bark closes over her thigh and leaves push from her fingers.
★ 9.1
David
1440 · Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
A naked boy in boots and a laurel hat rests one foot on Goliath's head, the first freestanding bronze nude since antiquity.
★ 8.9
The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal
Artist unknown
645 BC · British Museum, London
The king kills lions released into an arena to prove he can protect his people, and the dying animals are carved with startling tenderness.
★ 8.7
Venus de Milo
Artist unknown
100 BC · Louvre, Paris
A farmer on Melos dug her up in 1820, already armless, and scholars still argue over whether she held an apple, a mirror, or her drapery.
★ 8.7
Laocoon and His Sons
Artist unknown
Vatican Museums, Rome
Pliny ranked it above every other work of art, and when it came out of a Roman vineyard in 1506 Michelangelo hurried over to look.
★ 8.7
Gates of Paradise
1452 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Florence), Florence
Ghiberti gave twenty-seven years to these doors, and the name comes from Michelangelo, who is supposed to have said they were fit for paradise.
★ 8.6
Bird in Space
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York
American customs taxed it as industrial metal until Brancusi v. United States in 1928 forced the law to recognize abstract sculpture as art.
★ 8.6
David (Bernini)
1624 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini put the viewer where Goliath must be standing, so the sling is being wound up to throw straight past your head.
★ 8.4
Venus of Willendorf
Artist unknown
25000 BC · Naturhistorisches Museum (Vienna), Vienna
Eleven centimeters of limestone from beside the Danube, once tinted red, with a woven cap covering the whole head and no face at all.
★ 8.1
Walking Man I
1960 · Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Everything is scraped off the bronze except forward motion. One cast briefly held the record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold.
★ 8.1