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 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.
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 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
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 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
Book of Kells
Artist unknown
800 · Trinity College Library, Dublin
The monogram of Christ swells until it fills the page, and among the spirals hide cats, mice, an otter with a fish, and a moth.
★ 8.8
The Tribute Money
1428 · Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
Three moments run in a single frame: the tax demanded, Peter pulling the coin from a fish, and Peter paying up at the right.
★ 8.7
The Descent from the Cross (Rubens at Antwerp)
1614 · Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Christ's body slides down one long diagonal onto a white shroud. It still stands on the altar in Antwerp Cathedral that Rubens painted it for.
★ 8.5
The Transfiguration
1520 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Raphael left it unfinished when he died in 1520, and it was hung above his body while he lay in state.
★ 8.4
Lamentation
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Two mourners sit with their backs turned to pull us in, and the angels overhead double over. Giotto frescoed it in the Arena Chapel at Padua.
★ 8.3
The Wedding at Cana (Veronese)
1563 · Louvre, Paris
A hundred and thirty guests feast while Christ works his first miracle almost unnoticed at the table. Napoleon's troops took it to Paris in 1797.
★ 8.2
Christ Pantocrator (Sinai)
Artist unknown
560 · Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai
Cover one half of the face, then the other, and two expressions emerge, merciful and severe. Sinai was too remote for the iconoclasts to reach.
★ 8.2
Supper at Emmaus
1601 · National Gallery, London
One disciple grips his chair to stand and the other throws his arms wide, while a fruit basket teeters off the edge toward us.
★ 8.0
The Deposition from the Cross
1528 · Santa Felicita, Florence
No cross, no ground, no sky, just a spiral of mourners in acid pink and sea-green. Florentine Mannerism starts here.
★ 8.0
The Entombment (Caravaggio)
1603 · Vatican Museums, Rome
The corner of the stone slab juts out of the picture so the body looks about to be laid down in the room with you.
★ 7.8
The Crucifixion of Christ
1565 · Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice
Twelve meters of wall where the whole business of execution goes on at once, one thief still being hauled upright at the side.
★ 7.8
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
The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Torches and spears bristle against the sky, and at the still center Judas wraps Christ in his yellow cloak and meets his eye.
★ 7.6
The Last Supper (Tintoretto)
1594 · Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
The table runs off on a steep diagonal into a smoky hall where servants clear plates and the lamp smoke thickens into angels.
★ 7.6
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
1521 · Kunstmuseum, Basel
A corpse in a box barely wider than itself, with no hint of resurrection. Dostoevsky saw it in Basel and said it could destroy faith.
★ 7.4
The Last Supper (Bouts)
1468 · St. Peter's Church, Leuven
Not the betrayal but the blessing of the bread, staged in a Flemish hall on one of the earliest correct vanishing points in the north.
★ 7.3
Christ Crucified
1632 · El Prado, Madrid
No crowd, no landscape, nothing but the body against black, with the hair fallen forward to half-cover the face. Made for private prayer.
★ 7.3
White Crucifixion
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Christ wears a Jewish prayer shawl while a synagogue burns and refugees flee by boat. Chagall painted it in 1938, watching what was coming.
★ 7.2
The Elevation of the Cross
1611 · Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Rubens had just come back from Italy with Caravaggio's light and Michelangelo's anatomy, and announced himself with this straining diagonal.
★ 7.2
Yellow Christ
1889 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Three Breton women in white caps kneel at a wooden cross in an autumn field, everything flattened into blocks of color like stained glass.
★ 7.2
Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments
1450 · Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
All seven sacraments happen at once inside one Gothic church, with the Crucifixion looming over the nave to show where they get their power.
★ 7.0
The Raising of Lazarus
1519 · National Gallery, London
Lazarus heaves upright still wrapped in his shroud while the crowd recoils from the smell. Michelangelo supplied drawings to help beat Raphael.
★ 6.9
The Deposition (Michelangelo)
1553 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Florence), Florence
Michelangelo carved it for his own tomb, gave Nicodemus his own face, then took a hammer to it and broke off Christ's leg.
★ 6.9
Crucifix
1288 · Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence
The Arno flood of 1966 stripped most of the paint off it, and the ruined cross became the emblem of the whole disaster.
★ 6.8
Agony in the Garden (Mantegna)
1460 · National Gallery, London
Mantegna carved the rock like an engraver while Judas already leads the soldiers down the road. His brother-in-law Bellini painted the same scene, softer.
★ 6.8
Christ Carrying the Cross (Bosch)
1516 · Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent), Ghent
A crush of leering faces fills every inch, and Christ moves through the middle of it with his eyes shut.
★ 6.8
The Crucifixion
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
This is the largest scene on the back of the Maesta, the Virgin fainting on one side and the crowd arguing on the other.
★ 6.6
Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata
1300 · Louvre, Paris
Golden rays come off a winged crucified figure in the sky and strike Francis in the hands, feet and side. Giotto signed this one.
★ 6.5
The Coronation of the Virgin
1430 · Louvre, Paris
Christ crowns his mother at the top of a flight of steps that recede convincingly into depth, which is the new thing here.
★ 6.5
The Trinity
1579 · El Prado, Madrid
God the Father holds his dead son across his knees, the body marble-pale against blue and acid yellow. El Greco's first Spanish commission.
★ 6.5
The Sacrament of the Last Supper
1955 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The room is a twelve-sided glass chamber and a torso hovers over the table. Dalí called this sort of thing nuclear mysticism.
★ 6.5
The Crucifixion (Mantegna)
1459 · Louvre, Paris
Soldiers throw dice for Christ's robe on a paved Golgotha. This panel was sawn off an altarpiece by Napoleon's looters and never returned.
★ 6.3
Deposition of Christ
1434 · San Marco Museum, Florence
Fra Angelico inherited a Gothic frame begun years earlier and filled it with deep sunlit space instead of gold, which is the whole story.
★ 6.3
Agony in the Garden (El Greco)
1605 · Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
The sleeping apostles are sealed inside a bubble of rock while soldiers wind toward Christ in the distance, all lit by cold moonlight.
★ 6.3
Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary
1517 · El Prado, Madrid
Christ turns back toward his mother as she swoons, and legend has it the painting was nearly lost in a shipwreck on its way to Palermo.
★ 6.3