The Birth of Venus
1486 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Venus arrives on a scallop shell in a fall of roses, painted on canvas at a time when almost everyone still worked on panel.
★ 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.
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 Girls of Avignon
1907 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five nude women stare out with their faces turned into masks, and Picasso kept the canvas rolled up in his studio for years.
★ 9.2
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
Olympia
1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Manet took the pose from Titian's Venus of Urbino and gave it to a prostitute who looks straight back. The 1865 Salon was scandalized.
★ 8.9
Luncheon on the Grass
1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A naked woman picnics with two clothed men and looks calmly out at us. The Salon refused it, so it hung with the rejects.
★ 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
Venus of Urbino
1538 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Titian woke Giorgione's sleeping Venus, brought her indoors, and had her look straight at us, probably to mark a wedding in Urbino.
★ 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
The Dance (Matisse)
1909 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five figures wheel in a ring against blue and green, reduced to three colors and the strain of holding hands at speed.
★ 8.5
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Masaccio)
1428 · Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
Eve throws back her head and howls while Adam hides his face, the bodies heavy and casting real shadows. Michelangelo came to study it.
★ 8.5
The Joy of Life
1906 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Nudes lounge and pipe and dance in a ring in a glade of colors nothing in nature has, a Fauve idyll from 1906.
★ 8.3
The Bathers
1906 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Cézanne worked on it for years and died before he finished, bending the trees inward so they rhyme with the bodies underneath.
★ 8.2
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
La Grande Odalisque
1814 · Louvre, Paris
Ingres stretched her spine past anything anatomy allows, and critics joked she had three vertebrae too many. He was chasing line, not truth.
★ 8.0
Nude Descending a Staircase
1912 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
A critic at the 1913 Armory Show called it an explosion in a shingle factory, and the insult followed the painting around America.
★ 8.0
Death of Sardanapalus
1827 · Louvre, Paris
The king watches from his red bed while everything he owns is killed in front of him, on his own orders, before the pyre.
★ 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
Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
1545 · National Gallery, London
A girl with a reptile's body offers a honeycomb and Time pulls back a curtain. The cold puzzle was probably a gift for the French king.
★ 7.6
The Nude Maja
1800 · El Prado, Madrid
Not a goddess but a real woman looking straight back, which is why the Inquisition took an interest. Goya painted a clothed version too.
★ 7.6
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
Discobulus (Discus Thrower)
Artist unknown
Palazzo Massimo, Rome
Myron's bronze is lost and this is a Roman marble copy, which is why a strut props the leg the original held up unaided.
★ 7.5
Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
1618 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Two horsemen haul two women up onto rearing horses, and the whole canvas spins into one great X of limbs and hooves.
★ 7.4
Three Studies of Lucian Freud
1969 · Private collection
Freud sits on a wooden chair in three panels, wrenched out of shape and still unmistakably himself. Bacon painted his friend and rival.
★ 7.2
The Valpincon Bather
1808 · Louvre, Paris
A bare back seen from behind under even light, with a striped turban wound round the head. Ingres returned to this view all his life.
★ 7.2
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
Spirit of the Dead Watching
1892 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
A girl lies face down and frightened while a hooded figure sits behind her. Gauguin said his Tahitian companion was afraid of the dark.
★ 7.1
Luxe, Calme et Volupte
1904 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The title comes from Baudelaire and the technique from Seurat, but the color is already heading somewhere neither of them went.
★ 7.1
Blue Nude II
1952 · Centre Pompidou, Paris
Matisse was too ill to stand at an easel, so he cut the figure out of painted paper and called it drawing with scissors.
★ 7.1
Venus and Adonis
1553 · El Prado, Madrid
Venus twists round to hold him back and he pulls away toward the hunt that will kill him. Cupid sleeps in the shade, useless.
★ 7.0
L'Origine du Monde
1866 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Too explicit to exhibit for over a century, it stayed in private hands behind curtains and screens. No myth, no excuse, just the body.
★ 6.9
Danae
1554 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Zeus arrives as a shower of gold and the old nurse scrambles to catch the coins in her apron while Danae simply reclines.
★ 6.9
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust
1932 · Tate Modern, London
Marie-Thérèse asleep beside a sculpture of her own head and a philodendron, from the year Picasso could seemingly do nothing wrong.
★ 6.9
Adam and Eve (Durer)
1504 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Cat, mouse, rabbit, ox and elk stand for the temperaments held in balance, and the cat is about to pounce.
★ 6.8
Jupiter and Io
1533 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Jupiter has turned himself into a grey cloud, and a dim face and hand come out of the mist to hold her.
★ 6.8
Red Nude
1917 · Private collection
The police shut down Modigliani's only solo show for indecency, and this was among the nudes that did it.
★ 6.8
Dante and Virgil (The Barque of Dante)
1822 · Louvre, Paris
Delacroix's debut, and the damned are biting the hull. Romanticism announced itself with churning water and bodies learned from Rubens.
★ 6.8