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
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.
Liberty Leading the People
1830 · Louvre, Paris
Liberty carries the tricolor over the barricade with a boy waving pistols beside her, painted within months of the revolution it shows.
★ 9.4
The Third of May 1808
1814 · El Prado, Madrid
A lantern lights a man in a white shirt throwing his arms wide before the firing squad. Goya painted it six years later.
★ 9.4
The Death of Marat
1793 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
David was Marat's friend and political ally, and he laid the murdered man out in his bath with the gravity of a religious lamentation.
★ 9.0
Raft of the Medusa
1819 · Louvre, Paris
Survivors of a real shipwreck pile toward a speck of sail on the horizon. Géricault studied corpses and asylum patients before he began.
★ 9.0
The Surrender of Breda
1635 · El Prado, Madrid
The Spanish general stops the defeated Dutchman from kneeling and lays a hand on his shoulder. Spaniards still call the picture The Lances.
★ 8.8
The Oath of the Horatii
1785 · Louvre, Paris
Three brothers salute the swords their father holds up while the women of the house collapse at the right, four years before the Revolution.
★ 8.7
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
Bayeux Tapestry
Artist unknown
1077 · Musee de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, Bayeux
Seventy meters of wool telling the conquest of England like a strip cartoon. Not a tapestry at all, and probably stitched by English hands.
★ 7.9
The Death of Socrates
1787 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Socrates reaches for the hemlock without looking at it, still arguing with his other hand while his students fall apart around him.
★ 7.4
Washington Crossing the Delaware
1851 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Almost every detail is wrong, including the flag and the boat, and Leutze painted it in Germany seventy-five years after the fact.
★ 7.2
Watson and the Shark
1778 · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
Brook Watson really did lose a leg to a shark in Havana harbor, and Copley put a Black sailor at the top of the rescue.
★ 7.2
Coronation of Napoleon
1807 · Louvre, Paris
Napoleon has already crowned himself and is now crowning Josephine, with the pope seated behind him and reduced to a spectator.
★ 7.2
The Battle of San Romano (Louvre)
1435 · Louvre, Paris
Broken lances lie along the receding lines of a perspective grid. Vasari said Uccello sat up all night muttering about how sweet it was.
★ 7.2
Battle of San Romano
1440 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The central panel of three, with the Florentine commander charging in a gold-and-scarlet hat on a horse turned like a carousel figure.
★ 7.2
The Dream of Constantine
1465 · San Francesco Church (Arezzo), Arezzo
An angel drops steeply from the corner and its light is the only light in the tent. One of the first true night scenes in painting.
★ 7.2
The Declaration of Independence
1819 · Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
Trumbull knew many of the men and painted their faces from life, which is why this version ended up on the two-dollar bill.
★ 6.8
The Charnel House
1945 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Bodies lie heaped and bound under a kitchen table, in grey. Picasso left it unfinished, painted after the camps were opened.
★ 6.5
Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre
1844 · British Museum, London
One vast skeleton pushes through a torn bamboo blind, where the convention had always been crowds of small phantoms. Three sheets wide.
★ 6.5
Young Spartans Exercising
1860 · National Gallery, London
Spartan girls taunt the boys into wrestling, and Degas made the bodies awkward rather than ideal, which is not how history painting was done.
★ 6.1
Dempsey and Firpo
1924 · Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Firpo has just punched Dempsey clean out of the ring and into the laps of the reporters. Bellows painted the exact instant.
★ 6.1
The Justice of the Emperor Otto
1475 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
The widow grips a red-hot iron bar unharmed to prove her husband was innocent after he had already been beheaded. Painted for a courtroom.
★ 5.7
George Washington at Princeton
1779 · Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
Washington leans on a cannon with captured flags at his feet. Peale knew him and served in the war, so this is the man.
★ 5.2
The Sinking of the Titanic
1913 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), Saint Louis
Beckmann painted the disaster a year after it happened, borrowing Géricault's raft, and it now reads as a rehearsal for the war.
★ 4.8