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 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.
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
Maesta (Duccio)
1311 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Siena), Siena
When Duccio finished it in 1311 the whole of Siena walked it to the cathedral in procession, with the bells going the entire way.
★ 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
The Assumption of the Virgin
1518 · Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice
Titian was barely thirty when Venice saw this go up over the Frari altar, the Virgin swept into a storm of red and blue.
★ 8.4
Death of the Virgin
1606 · Louvre, Paris
The Virgin lies barefoot and swollen like any corpse. The church that ordered it refused delivery, and Rubens told his duke to buy it.
★ 8.4
Annunciation (Martini)
1333 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Gabriel's greeting runs toward Mary in raised gold letters and she twists away from it, her thumb still caught in her book.
★ 8.2
Annunciation (Fra Angelico, Florence)
1445 · San Marco Museum, Florence
Fra Angelico frescoed it at the top of the dormitory stairs, so the friars met it every time they climbed to their cells.
★ 8.0
Madonna of the Rocks
1485 · Louvre, Paris
Leonardo painted this cave twice after falling out with the patrons. This is the earlier version, the one that stayed in France.
★ 8.0
Madonna and Child with Canon Joris van de Paele
1436 · Groeningmuseum, Bruges
Van Eyck spared the old canon nothing: the stubble, the swollen hands, the spectacles. His armored saint mirrors the whole room in miniature.
★ 7.8
The Virgin and Child with St Anne
1513 · Louvre, Paris
Three generations nest into one shifting pyramid, and Leonardo kept reworking it for years without ever calling it finished.
★ 7.8
The Montefeltro Altarpiece
1474 · Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy
An ostrich egg hangs from the vault and pulls every sightline down. Federico is shown from the left because a tournament took his right eye.
★ 7.8
Annunciation (Fra Angelico, Madrid)
1428 · El Prado, Madrid
Gabriel bows to Mary under the loggia while Adam and Eve are driven out of the garden at the left, the sin this undoes.
★ 7.6
Ognissanti Madonna
1310 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Where Cimabue and Duccio floated their Madonnas on gold, Giotto gave his weight, a real throne, and a body that presses through the cloth.
★ 7.6
San Marco Altarpiece (Madonna and Saints)
1443 · San Marco Museum, Florence
The saints share one continuous space instead of separate compartments, and the two kneeling physicians are the name-saints of the Medici who paid.
★ 7.6
The Newborn Child
1650 · Musee des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, Rennes
No halo, no manger, just a candle shielded by a hand and a swaddled baby, and it still reads as a nativity.
★ 7.4
Madonna of the Rocks 2
1505 · National Gallery, London
The second version, painted to settle a long quarrel with the confraternity. Everyone now has a halo and the angel has stopped pointing.
★ 7.4
Virgin Annunciate
1476 · Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo
No angel, no dove, no lily. Mary looks up from her book straight at us, because we are standing where Gabriel ought to be.
★ 7.3
Maesta (Cimabue)
1280 · Louvre, Paris
Six angels stack up the sides of the throne against gold. Cimabue taught Giotto, and the throne here is just beginning to recede into space.
★ 7.3
Rucellai Madonna
1285 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Four and a half meters tall, the largest panel painted in its century, with six angels kneeling to steady a throne that seems to float.
★ 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
Annunciation (da Vinci)
1475 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
An early work, and Mary's right arm reaches further than an arm can. Gabriel's wings were studied from a real bird.
★ 7.2
Madonna of the Harpies
1517 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The little demons carved on the pedestal were taken for harpies and gave the picture its name. Del Sarto was called the faultless painter.
★ 7.1
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
Flight into Egypt (A. Carracci)
1604 · Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
The holy family is tiny and the landscape does everything, which is the arrangement Poussin and Claude would build whole careers on.
★ 7.1
Madonna and Child (Duccio)
1300 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Christ reaches up to push his mother's veil aside. Scorch marks on the original frame record centuries of candles set before it.
★ 6.8
Madonna
1894 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
Munch gave the Madonna a red halo, closed eyes and parted lips, and made desire and death the same subject.
★ 6.8
Festival of the Rose Garlands
1506 · Narodni Galerie, Prague
Dürer painted it in Venice to prove a German could beat the Venetians at color, and wrote on it that it took five months.
★ 6.6
Madonna Enthroned
1290 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Four prophets peer from arches under the throne holding scrolls that foretell the Virgin Birth, and the throne is angled to suggest depth.
★ 6.6
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 Coronation of the Virgin
1641 · El Prado, Madrid
Father and Son lower the crown together while the group curves into a soft heart shape. Painted for the Spanish queen's private oratory.
★ 6.3
The Barbadori Altarpiece
1437 · Louvre, Paris
The angels crowd in like inquisitive children. One of the first paintings to put the Virgin and saints in a single shared space.
★ 6.3
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (David)
1510 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The Virgin offers the Child a bunch of grapes, which stand for the wine of his death, in an exactly observed Flemish wood.
★ 6.1
Rest during the Flight into Egypt
1423 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
A gilded low sun hangs over the road and the orange trees are heavy with fruit, an early attempt at real morning light across a landscape.
★ 5.7
Christ Taking Leave of His Mother
1520 · National Gallery, London
The episode appears in no Gospel at all, and Altdorfer nearly buries the figures under a forest of enormous trees and luminous sky.
★ 5.2
Maddona with Child and Six Angels
1305 · Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia
Six angels lean in along the throne with their heads tilted, which turns a rigid Byzantine formula into something nearly intimate.
★ 5.2
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
Annunciation (del Sarto)
1512 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Gabriel kneels at the right and points across at a Virgin drawing back in surprise, with a stretch of classical ruin between them.
★ 5.2
The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with Saint Francis
1520 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Joseph reaches up to pull down dates from a palm while Saint Francis kneels at the side, added for the chapel that ordered it.
★ 5.2
The Visitation (Ghirlandaio)
1491 · Louvre, Paris
Elizabeth sinks down and clasps the pregnant Mary. Ghirlandaio ran the busiest workshop in Florence, and a boy named Michelangelo apprenticed there.
★ 4.8
Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist
1495 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Late Botticelli, with the early lightness gone tense. He had fallen under Savonarola's spell and his religious pictures never relaxed again.
★ 4.7