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 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.
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
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
1818 · Kunsthalle, Hamburg
A man stands on a summit with his back to us, looking out over fog, so that we end up looking at what he sees.
★ 8.8
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
Self-Portrait (Durer)
1500 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Dürer faced himself head-on in a pose reserved for images of Christ, and wrote across the panel that he had painted it at twenty-eight.
★ 8.1
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
The Incredulity of St. Thomas
1602 · Sanssouci, Potsdam
Thomas pushes his finger into the wound and two apostles lean in to watch, brows knotted, close enough to crowd the frame.
★ 7.6
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
The Four Apostles
1526 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Dürer gave the panels to the Nuremberg council with Luther's words inscribed below, warning the city's rulers against false prophets. His last great work.
★ 7.3
The Madonna in a Church
1429 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
The Virgin is far too big for the cathedral because she stands for the Church itself, and real sunlight falls in patches across the floor.
★ 7.2
The Night
1919 · Kunstsammlung, Dusseldorf
A family is tortured in a room too small for it, painted in Germany in 1919 with the war and the revolution just finished.
★ 7.2
Nativity
1530 · Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
All the light in the picture comes off the newborn child, and one shepherd throws up a hand against the glare.
★ 7.1
Blue Horse I
1911 · Stadtische Galerie, Munich
Marc gave his animals symbolic colors, blue for the spiritual, and looked to them for an innocence he thought people had lost.
★ 7.1
Netherlandish Proverbs
1559 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
A man bangs his head on a brick wall, another casts roses before swine, and over a hundred proverbs are acted out literally in one village.
★ 7.1
The Fall of the Damned
1620 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
A single unbroken avalanche of bodies falls from a bright heaven at the top into the dark, with demons pulling them down.
★ 6.7
Lion Hunt
1621 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Horses, lions, spears and men knotted into one turning mass, with a rider already thrown and about to be mauled.
★ 6.7
Mademoiselle O'Murphy
1751 · Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne
Louise O'Murphy was a teenage favorite of Louis XV, and Boucher painted her face-down across the cushions for private consumption.
★ 6.1
Bouquet
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
None of these flowers bloom in the same season. Bruegel assembled the bouquet from studies made across the whole year, and let petals droop.
★ 6.1
The Mocking of Christ
1505 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Blindfolded and beaten while pipers play to make a show of it. Everything Italy was perfecting at that moment, Grünewald wanted none of.
★ 6.1
The Massacre of the Innocents (Rubens 2)
1638 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Rubens came back to the subject nearly thirty years later with the same fury and a much broader, more fluent hand.
★ 6.1
Leda and the Swan (Correggio)
1532 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
The story runs across the canvas in stages, arrival to departure. A later owner cut Leda's head out in disgust and it was repainted.
★ 5.7
The Entombment (Martini)
1340 · Berlin State Museums, Berlin
One woman flings both arms over her head, others press their faces to the body. Simone drops all restraint against a sky streaked red.
★ 5.6
St. John the Evangelist on Patmos
1500 · Berlin State Museums, Berlin
The lyrical Bosch, all calm light and wide landscape, except for the small insect-demon with a human face tending a fire in the corner.
★ 5.4
Annunciation (Lippi, Munich)
1450 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Gilded hems, fluttering wings, a walled garden behind. Lippi was a friar with a worldly streak and it shows in the ornament.
★ 5.2
The Virgin Appearing to St. Bernard
1494 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Perugino taught Raphael, and the poise, the airy arcade and the soft Umbrian valley here pass almost unchanged into the pupil's work.
★ 5.2
Aquis Submersus
1919 · Stadel Museum, Frankfurt
A doll-like figure by a still pool under a tower with a clock face. Ernst had been looking hard at de Chirico's empty squares.
★ 5.2
Lamentation of Christ (Durer)
1500 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
The tiny kneeling figures in the corners are the Nuremberg family who paid for it, inserted so they could share in the grief.
★ 4.8
Great Fish Market
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Hundreds of minutely painted fish, baskets and hagglers. They called him Velvet Bruegel for exactly this kind of finish.
★ 4.8
The Adoration of the Magi
1813 · Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Overbeck and the Nazarenes lived almost as monks in Rome and painted deliberately like the Italians before Raphael. This is the program.
★ 4.2