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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Olympia
1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Manet took the pose from Titian's Venus of Urbino and gave it to a prostitute who looks straight back. The 1865 Salon was scandalized.
★ 8.9
Luncheon on the Grass
1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A naked woman picnics with two clothed men and looks calmly out at us. The Salon refused it, so it hung with the rejects.
★ 8.9
The Oath of the Horatii
1785 · Louvre, Paris
Three brothers salute the swords their father holds up while the women of the house collapse at the right, four years before the Revolution.
★ 8.7
The Card Players
1895 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Cézanne used local farmhands as models and painted several versions, stripping the old tavern subject down until only two men and a bottle remain.
★ 8.7
Venus de Milo
Artist unknown
100 BC · Louvre, Paris
A farmer on Melos dug her up in 1820, already armless, and scholars still argue over whether she held an apple, a mirror, or her drapery.
★ 8.7
Great Hall of the Bulls
Artist unknown
17000 BC · Lascaux, France
Painters worked here by lamplight seventeen thousand years ago. Four boys found the cave in 1940, and it was sealed again in 1963.
★ 8.6
Impression, Sunrise
1872 · Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris
A critic seized on the word in the title to mock the whole group, and the insult ended up naming the movement.
★ 8.6
Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
1416 · Musee Conde, Chantilly
Not a calendar page but Anatomical Man, ringed by zodiac signs governing the body. All three brothers died in 1416, probably of plague.
★ 8.5
Bal du Moulin de la Galette
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Sunlight comes through the trees in patches over a Montmartre dance floor, a big ambitious canvas given over entirely to a Sunday afternoon.
★ 8.5
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
A Burial at Ornans
1850 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Courbet gave an ordinary village funeral the scale reserved for kings and saints, and the critics were furious about it.
★ 8.3
The Embarkation for Cythera
1717 · Louvre, Paris
Couples linger on the shore of Venus's island at dusk, unwilling to board. Watteau gave it to the Academy, which invented a genre to fit it.
★ 8.3
The Gleaners
1857 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Three women bend for the stalks left after harvest while a full farm sits small in the distance, which unsettled the people buying paintings.
★ 8.2
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
Walking Man I
1960 · Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Everything is scraped off the bronze except forward motion. One cast briefly held the record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold.
★ 8.1
La Grande Odalisque
1814 · Louvre, Paris
Ingres stretched her spine past anything anatomy allows, and critics joked she had three vertebrae too many. He was chasing line, not truth.
★ 8.0
Whistler's Mother
1871 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Whistler called it Arrangement in Grey and Black and insisted it was about tone, not feeling. The sitter was his mother, and nobody was fooled.
★ 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
Bayeux Tapestry
Artist unknown
1077 · Musee de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, Bayeux
Seventy meters of wool telling the conquest of England like a strip cartoon. Not a tapestry at all, and probably stitched by English hands.
★ 7.9
Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss
1793 · Louvre, Paris
Cupid's wings stay up as the two bodies cross in a weightless X, cut so smooth the marble stops reading as stone.
★ 7.9
Death of Sardanapalus
1827 · Louvre, Paris
The king watches from his red bed while everything he owns is killed in front of him, on his own orders, before the pyre.
★ 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 Seated Scribe
Artist unknown
2500 BC · Louvre, Paris
His eyes are inlaid with rock crystal and copper, and unlike a pharaoh he was given a soft chest and a desk worker's belly.
★ 7.7
Self-Portrait (van Gogh)
1889 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The background ripples around his head like a current in the same blue-green as his suit, and his beard burns red against it.
★ 7.7
The Snake Charmer
1907 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A black silhouette plays a flute and the snakes come out of the leaves toward the music, in moonlight Rousseau invented entirely.
★ 7.6
Pierrot, Formerly Known as Gilles
1719 · Louvre, Paris
A clown in white satin stands alone at full length with his arms hanging useless, given the scale of a grand portrait.
★ 7.6
Et in Arcadia Ego (Poussin)
1638 · Louvre, Paris
Shepherds trace the carved words on a tomb, Even in Arcadia I am here, and Poussin lets death speak without raising its voice.
★ 7.5
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
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
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
The Magpie
1869 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A single magpie on a gate in deep snow, the shadows tinged blue and violet rather than grey. The Salon turned it down.
★ 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
L'Absinthe
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Two people sit shoulder to shoulder at a cafe table staring at nothing, pushed off to one side behind a run of empty tables.
★ 7.3
The Women of Algiers
1834 · Louvre, Paris
Delacroix saw a room like this once, on a trip to North Africa, and painted it from memory. Picasso later made fifteen variations on it.
★ 7.2
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
Coronation of Napoleon
1807 · Louvre, Paris
Napoleon has already crowned himself and is now crowning Josephine, with the pope seated behind him and reduced to a spectator.
★ 7.2
The Valpincon Bather
1808 · Louvre, Paris
A bare back seen from behind under even light, with a striped turban wound round the head. Ingres returned to this view all his life.
★ 7.2
The Battle of San Romano (Louvre)
1435 · Louvre, Paris
Broken lances lie along the receding lines of a perspective grid. Vasari said Uccello sat up all night muttering about how sweet it was.
★ 7.2
Starry Night Over the Rhone
1888 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Gaslights along the Arles quay drop long quivering reflections into the water, the Great Bear overhead, a couple walking arm in arm below.
★ 7.2
Saint Mary Magdalen with the Smoking Flame
1640 · Louvre, Paris
One oil lamp, one skull in her lap, and a flame she does not take her eyes off. Everything else is dark.
★ 7.1
The Intervention of the Sabine Women
1799 · Louvre, Paris
Hersilia throws herself between the two armies with her arms out. David painted it after the Terror, arguing for reconciliation instead of oaths.
★ 7.1
Gare Saint Lazare
1877 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Monet set his easel up inside the station and painted the steam until the roof and the city beyond it had dissolved into it.
★ 7.1
Luxe, Calme et Volupte
1904 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The title comes from Baudelaire and the technique from Seurat, but the color is already heading somewhere neither of them went.
★ 7.1
Blue Nude II
1952 · Centre Pompidou, Paris
Matisse was too ill to stand at an easel, so he cut the figure out of painted paper and called it drawing with scissors.
★ 7.1
L'Origine du Monde
1866 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Too explicit to exhibit for over a century, it stayed in private hands behind curtains and screens. No myth, no excuse, just the body.
★ 6.9
Philosopher in Meditation
1632 · Louvre, Paris
Daylight from a window, firelight from a hearth, and a great spiral staircase winding up into the dark between them.
★ 6.9
The Balcony
1868 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Three people at a green railing all looking different ways and none at each other. Berthe Morisot is the one seated and dreaming.
★ 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
Gypsy Girl
1626 · Louvre, Paris
Not a commission but a tronie, a character study made to show off. Hals catches her half-laugh before it has finished.
★ 6.8
Dante and Virgil (The Barque of Dante)
1822 · Louvre, Paris
Delacroix's debut, and the damned are biting the hull. Romanticism announced itself with churning water and bodies learned from Rubens.
★ 6.8
Rebellious Slave
1513 · Louvre, Paris
Carved for a papal tomb that kept shrinking until it was abandoned. What the bonds mean is still argued, but the strain is unmistakable.
★ 6.7
The Israelites Gathering Manna
1639 · Louvre, Paris
Poussin laid the crowd out like a relief so each gesture reads separately, one woman so hungry she nurses her own mother.
★ 6.7
Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci
1490 · Musee Conde, Chantilly
She had been dead for years when this was painted, and the asp at her throat turns her into Cleopatra.
★ 6.7
The Moneylender and His Wife
1514 · Louvre, Paris
He weighs gold on a fine balance and her eyes drift off the prayer book toward the coins. A small mirror catches the room.
★ 6.7
Bull's Head
1942 · Musee Picasso, Paris
A bicycle saddle and a set of handlebars, joined. Picasso joked that someone might one day turn it back into a bicycle.
★ 6.7
Sleeping Hermaphroditos
Artist unknown
Louvre, Paris
You see a sleeping woman until you walk around to the other side. Bernini added the mattress, folds and all, in 1620.
★ 6.7
San Sebastian
1480 · Louvre, Paris
Sebastian takes his arrows with the composure of a statue, tied to a Roman column in a field of accurately ruined antiquity.
★ 6.6
White Frost
1873 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Critics at the first Impressionist show in 1874 said it looked like palette scrapings. The furrows are streaked with blue, violet and gold.
★ 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
Christ with St. Joseph in the Carpenter's Shop
1642 · Louvre, Paris
Christ as a boy holds a candle for his father and the flame glows red through his fingers, which is the whole subject.
★ 6.5
Oedipus and the Sphinx
1808 · Louvre, Paris
Oedipus leans in close to answer the riddle, and a previous contestant's foot is lying at the bottom edge as a warning.
★ 6.5
Blue II
1961 · Centre Pompidou, Paris
Pure blue interrupted by a line of black dots and one short red bar. Miró late in life, having thrown almost everything out.
★ 6.5
Portrait of a Young Princess
1435 · Louvre, Paris
She sits in profile against a hedge of carnations with butterflies going past, a sprig of juniper on her sleeve punning on her name.
★ 6.5
The Madwoman
1823 · Musee des Beaux Arts Lyon, Lyon
One of a series Géricault painted of asylum patients for a doctor studying obsession, and he gave her the seriousness of a commissioned portrait.
★ 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
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
Ship of Fools
1500 · Louvre, Paris
A monk and a nun bawl a song over a lute while somebody vomits over the side. The boat has no rudder, which is the point.
★ 6.3
Parnassus
1497 · Louvre, Paris
The Muses dance to Apollo's lyre while Venus's cuckolded husband fumes at his forge off to the left. Painted for Isabella d'Este's study.
★ 6.1
The Fortune Teller (Caravaggio)
1595 · Louvre, Paris
She reads his palm and takes the ring off his finger while she does it, and he is too busy looking at her to notice.
★ 6.1
The Dream of Saint Joseph
1640 · Musee d'Arts Nantes, Nantes
A child-angel leans toward the sleeping old man, its small fingers glowing translucent where they pass in front of the candle flame.
★ 5.9
Christ at the Column
1476 · Louvre, Paris
Every hair, every glassy tear, every bead of blood, pushed hard against the front of the picture and made to carry feeling rather than skill.
★ 5.7