Mask of Tutankhamun
Artist unknown
1323 BC · Grand Egyptian Museum, Giza
Eleven kilograms of gold inlaid with lapis and carnelian, lifted by Howard Carter from the innermost of three coffins in 1925.
★ 9.6
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.
Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1650 · Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
Velázquez caught every wary line in the pope's face, and Innocent reportedly said it was troppo vero, too true. Francis Bacon reworked it for years.
★ 8.8
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
1586 · Church of Santo Tome, Toledo, Ohio
Two saints lower a nobleman into his grave while his soul slips through a tear in the sky. The mourners are El Greco's own neighbors.
★ 8.7
Portrait of Juan de Pareja
1650 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Pareja was Velázquez's enslaved assistant, freed soon after this was painted in Rome as a warm-up before the pope sat for him.
★ 7.8
Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1953 · Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
Bacon took Velázquez's composed pope and set him screaming behind a curtain of falling paint. He never saw the original in person.
★ 7.8
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1665)
1665 · Kenwood House, London
The old painter holds his brushes and palette, and behind him two large arcs are drawn on the wall that nobody has explained.
★ 7.7
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1658)
1658 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Rembrandt painted himself enthroned like a monarch, staff across his lap, in the same year bankruptcy took his house and everything in it.
★ 7.5
The Polish Rider
1655 · The Frick Collection, New York City
A young horseman rides into the dusk armed and alert, and nobody has ever agreed who he is or where he is going.
★ 7.5
Portrait of Dr. Gachet
1890 · Private collection
The doctor who was caring for him leans his head on one hand, a sprig of foxglove on the table, the background rippling blue.
★ 7.5
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
1504 · National Gallery, London
Bellini painted the brocade thread by thread and turned the official portrait from a profile on a coin into a man met face to face.
★ 7.4
Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam
1523 · National Gallery, London
Erasmus rests his hands on a book whose edge is inscribed The Labors of Hercules, his own joke about how much scholarship costs.
★ 7.4
Laughing Cavalier
1624 · Wallace Collection, London
He is neither laughing nor a cavalier. The lace and gold thread on that sleeve were flicked on in a few confident strokes.
★ 7.4
Portrait of Louis Francois Bertin
1832 · Louvre, Paris
The newspaper magnate leans forward gripping both knees, and the picture became the face of the commercial class that ran nineteenth-century France.
★ 7.4
Bacchus
1595 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
A real Roman boy dressed up as the wine god, heavy-lidded and slightly flushed, holding out a glass while the fruit beside him bruises.
★ 7.3
An Old Man and His Grandson
1490 · Louvre, Paris
The old man's nose is swollen and ruined by disease, and the boy looks up at him without noticing it at all.
★ 7.3
Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus
1523 · Louvre, Paris
Erasmus is caught mid-sentence with the pen still moving. He sent portraits like this across Europe as a kind of intellectual calling card.
★ 7.2
Louis XIV
1701 · Louvre, Paris
At sixty-three the king still turns out one leg to show the dancer's calf he was proud of, under a cascade of ermine and fleurs-de-lis.
★ 7.2
Portrait of Sir Thomas More
1527 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Holbein arrived in England on a letter from Erasmus and painted More at the height of his power. Within a few years More was executed.
★ 7.1
Paul Revere
1768 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Copley painted the silversmith in his shirtsleeves at the bench with a teapot in his hand, which was not how gentlemen were usually shown.
★ 7.1
The Merry Drinker
1630 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
He raises his glass and talks straight at you, painted in slashing strokes laid down about as fast as the moment they catch.
★ 6.9
Boy with a Pipe
1905 · Private collection
A boy from the street in a crown of roses, painted the year Picasso's blue gloom warmed into rose.
★ 6.9
Portrait of a Man
1476 · National Gallery, London
A red cap, a parapet, and a gaze that meets yours. Antonello brought the Netherlandish portrait into Italy and killed off the profile.
★ 6.8
Narcissus
1599 · Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
Narcissus and his reflection close into a circle around a band of black water, and nothing else exists in the picture.
★ 6.8
Mars
1641 · El Prado, Madrid
Mars sits naked and deflated in a plumed helmet with his armor on the floor, looking more like a tired old soldier.
★ 6.8
Frederic Chopin
1838 · Louvre, Paris
It was half of a double portrait with George Sand listening at the piano, until somebody cut the canvas in two.
★ 6.8
Martin Luther
1532 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Cranach was Luther's friend and godfather to his children, and his workshop turned out this face by the score for Protestant Germany.
★ 6.7
Portrait of Agnolo Doni
1506 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Raphael had just arrived in Florence and studied the Mona Lisa hard, then did the same pose in clear light instead of smoke.
★ 6.7
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
1593 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Fruit already spotting toward rot, painted with the same attention as the boy holding it. An early statement of what Caravaggio intended.
★ 6.6
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell
1533 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Cold competence and nothing else. Holbein painted him as a near-pendant to Thomas More, whom Cromwell helped send to the scaffold.
★ 6.5
The Beaneater
1580 · Galleria Colonna, Rome
A peasant looks up from his beans as though caught, spoon halfway to his mouth. Painted decades before Caravaggio's followers made a career of this.
★ 6.3
Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu
1642 · National Gallery, London
Richelieu appears three times on one canvas so that a sculptor in Rome could carve a bust without ever meeting him.
★ 6.3
Portrait of a Young Man
1517 · National Gallery, London
He swivels over his shoulder to look at you, holding a block that nobody can identify, and his name has been lost entirely.
★ 6.1
Man with Crossed Arms
1900 · Guggenheim, New York City
Cézanne cared less who the man was than whether the head would hold together as structure, and the slight asymmetries keep it alive.
★ 6.1
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1629)
1629 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Rembrandt was barely in his twenties and using his own face as a laboratory for light. Dozens more would follow over forty years.
★ 6.1
Mummy Portrait of a Boy (Eutyches)
Artist unknown
130 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Painted in hot colored beeswax and bound over the face of a mummy. The strokes are still visible and the eyes startlingly present.
★ 6.1
Portrait of a Man (Memling)
1470 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Memling put his sitters in front of open countryside instead of a dark ground, an idea that traveled to Italy and came back changed.
★ 5.9
Portrait of Jean Cocteau
1917 · Private collection
Cocteau sits stiffly upright with his neck drawn long, one of the sharpest personalities in Paris turned into an elegant mask.
★ 5.4
St. Jerome
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Not the desert hermit but the Doctor of the Church, in cardinal's red with one long hand resting on his own translation of the Bible.
★ 5.4
Clown with Lute
1623 · Louvre, Paris
Caught mid-strum with his cap askew and his mouth open, painted so fast the brushstrokes still seem to be moving.
★ 5.4
Christ Blessing (The Savior of the World)
1600 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Two fingers raised in a gesture reaching back to Byzantium, one hand on a crystal orb, the face long and sorrowful and unmistakably his.
★ 5.2