The Garden of Earthly Delights
1505 · El Prado, Madrid
Three panels run from Eden to hell, with a whole naked humanity climbing into giant fruit in between. Nobody has settled what it means.
★ 10.0
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.
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
Guernica
1937 · Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, all in grey. Picasso painted it in weeks after German bombers leveled a Basque town.
★ 9.9
Las Meninas
1656 · El Prado, Madrid
The Infanta and her maids fill the room, but Velázquez has put himself at his easel and the king and queen in a mirror behind.
★ 9.8
Primavera
1482 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Venus stands in an orange grove while the Graces dance and spring arrives at her right. The meadow holds hundreds of identifiable plants.
★ 9.8
The Ghent Altarpiece (Adoration of the Mystic Lamb)
1432 · St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent
Saints and pilgrims stream toward a bleeding Lamb across a dozen hinged panels. One of them was stolen in 1934 and has never been found.
★ 9.8
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 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
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
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
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
Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
1926 · Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
★ 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
Hunters in the Snow
1565 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Three hunters come home over the hill with one thin catch while villagers skate below. Bruegel painted it for a series on the months.
★ 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
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
Isenheim Altarpiece
1516 · Unterlinden Museum, Colmar
Christ's body hangs green and pocked with sores, painted for a hospital whose patients saw their own ravaged flesh.
★ 9.3
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
View of Delft
1660 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
Vermeer painted his own city from across the harbor, almost his only townscape. Proust called it the most beautiful painting in the world.
★ 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
The Scream
1893 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
Munch said an infinite scream was passing through nature, and put two figures on the bridge behind who walk on without noticing.
★ 9.2
The Night Watch
1642 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A militia company surges out of the shadow with a dog barking and a girl glowing among the men. Varnish, not night, made it dark.
★ 9.2
The Fighting Temeraire
1839 · National Gallery, London
A steam tug hauls a Trafalgar warship off to be broken up. Turner refused to sell the picture and left it to the nation.
★ 9.1
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife
1434 · National Gallery, London
A couple joins hands in a Bruges bedroom, and the mirror behind them catches two visitors at the door. Van Eyck signed the wall above it.
★ 9.1
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere
1882 · Courtauld Gallery, London
Manet worked from a real barmaid named Suzon and put her reflection in the wrong place, which people have been arguing about ever since.
★ 9.1
The Descent from the Cross (van der Weyden)
1435 · El Prado, Madrid
The fainting Virgin curves in an exact echo of her dead son, the stroke that made van der Weyden the most copied painter in the north.
★ 9.1
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
The Calling of St. Matthew
1600 · San Luigi dei Francsei, Rome
Light follows Christ's pointing hand across a dim counting-room to Matthew, who gestures at himself in disbelief. The picture made Caravaggio famous overnight.
★ 9.0
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
Ishtar Gate
Artist unknown
575 BC · Pergamon Museum, Berlin
Bulls and dragons stride across glazed brick in deep blue, raised for Nebuchadnezzar around 575 BC and rebuilt from the original bricks in Berlin.
★ 9.0
The Holy Trinity
1427 · Santa Maria Novella, Florence
The earliest surviving painting built on a single vanishing point, worked out on a wall of Santa Maria Novella with Brunelleschi's help.
★ 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
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 Trinity
1425 · Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, Sergiyev Posad
Three angels bend into a closed circle around a single cup. In 2024 the icon left the Tretyakov for a monastery, over conservators' objections.
★ 8.9
The Hay Wain
1821 · National Gallery, London
England ignored it, but the Paris Salon awarded it a gold medal in 1824 and sent Delacroix back to rework his own canvases.
★ 8.9
The Kiss (Klimt)
1908 · Galerie Belvedere, Vienna
Two lovers kneel wrapped in a single gold robe, rectangles patterning his side of it and circles hers, on a meadow of flowers.
★ 8.9
Bacchus and Ariadne
1523 · National Gallery, London
Bacchus leaps from his chariot toward Ariadne while Theseus's ship slips off the horizon, painted for a duke's private chamber in Ferrara.
★ 8.9