The Garden of Earthly Delights
1505 · El Prado, Madrid
Three panels run from Eden to hell, with a whole naked humanity climbing into giant fruit in between. Nobody has settled what it means.
★ 10.0
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 Ghent Altarpiece (Adoration of the Mystic Lamb)
1432 · St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent
Saints and pilgrims stream toward a bleeding Lamb across a dozen hinged panels. One of them was stolen in 1934 and has never been found.
★ 9.8
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
Creation of Adam
1512 · Vatican Museums, Rome
God surges out of a red cloak full of angels, and Michelangelo leaves the fingers not quite touching. The gap does the work.
★ 9.7
David
1504 · Galleria dell'Accademia (Florence), Florence
The marble block had been abandoned as flawed before Michelangelo took it, and he carved a boy who is watching Goliath, not beating him.
★ 9.6
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 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
David
1440 · Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
A naked boy in boots and a laurel hat rests one foot on Goliath's head, the first freestanding bronze nude since antiquity.
★ 8.9
The Trinity
1425 · Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, Sergiyev Posad
Three angels bend into a closed circle around a single cup. In 2024 the icon left the Tretyakov for a monastery, over conservators' objections.
★ 8.9
The Last Judgment (Michelangelo)
1541 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Bartholomew holds his own flayed skin, and the sagging face on it is Michelangelo's. The nudes offended enough critics that drapery was added later.
★ 8.9
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
Judith Slaying Holofernes
1620 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Judith and her maid hold Holofernes down together and work the blade through his throat. Artemisia painted it a decade after her rape trial.
★ 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
Return of the Prodigal Son
1669 · Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The son kneels with his shorn head against his father's chest and the old man's hands come down on his back. Rembrandt painted it near death.
★ 8.7
Gates of Paradise
1452 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Florence), Florence
Ghiberti gave twenty-seven years to these doors, and the name comes from Michelangelo, who is supposed to have said they were fit for paradise.
★ 8.6
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Masaccio)
1428 · Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
Eve throws back her head and howls while Adam hides his face, the bodies heavy and casting real shadows. Michelangelo came to study it.
★ 8.5
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
Beheading of St. John the Baptist
1608 · Co-Cathedral of St. John, Valletta
The only canvas Caravaggio ever signed, and he signed it in the blood running from the saint's throat, for the knights of Malta.
★ 8.4
The Conversion of Saint Paul
1601 · Palazzo Odescalchi Balbi, Rome
Caravaggio's first attempt at the subject, turned down by the patron, before he threw out the angels and left one man, one horse and the light.
★ 8.4
David (Bernini)
1624 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini put the viewer where Goliath must be standing, so the sling is being wound up to throw straight past your head.
★ 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 Portinari Altarpiece
1476 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Three weathered shepherds crowd in to look at the newborn, and when the triptych reached Florence from Bruges the local painters took note.
★ 8.3
The Flagellation of Christ
1460 · Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino
Christ is scourged in the middle distance while three men talk in the foreground, indifferent. Nobody has settled who they are or why.
★ 8.2
The Resurrection (Francesca)
1460 · Museo Civico, Sansepolcro
The trees behind Christ turn from bare to leafing across the panel. In 1944 a British officer held his guns rather than shell the town.
★ 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
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
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
Adoration of the Magi
1423 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The kings arrive with a retinue of horses, hounds and a leopard, every surface tooled in gold for one of Florence's richest families.
★ 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
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 Fall of Man
1510 · Vatican Museums, Rome
Two moments in one field: Adam and Eve reaching for the fruit, then driven out, suddenly old. The serpent has a woman's torso.
★ 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
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 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
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 Tower of Babel
1563 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The tower is already leaning as it goes up, and Bruegel drew the cranes and ramps in enough detail that you could nearly build it.
★ 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
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
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
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
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 Massacre of the Innocents (Rubens 1)
1612 · Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Herod's soldiers and the mothers of Bethlehem lock into one knot of muscle. Overlooked for centuries, it sold in 2002 for a record price.
★ 7.2
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
1633 · Stolen
Rembrandt's only seascape, and one disciple is being sick over the side. Stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990 and never recovered.
★ 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
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
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
Adoration of the Magi (Botticelli)
1478 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The three kings are Medici, and the young man in the saffron cloak at the right, looking straight out at us, is Botticelli.
★ 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 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
Sacrifice of Isaac
1634 · Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
An angel grabs Abraham's wrist and the knife is still falling through the air, his hand clamped over the boy's face.
★ 6.7
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
The Fall of Man
1480 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The serpent stands upright against the tree with a near-human face, and every leaf in the garden is catalogued one by one.
★ 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
The Sacrifice of Isaac
1603 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Isaac is shouting under his father's hand and the ram has already arrived at the right. Caravaggio gives the scene no ceremony whatsoever.
★ 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
Adoration of the Magi (Giotto)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Giotto had watched Halley's Comet in 1301 and painted the Star of Bethlehem as a comet, apparently the first artist to do it.
★ 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
The Adoration of the Kings
1564 · National Gallery, London
Bruegel gives the holy figures plain faces and surrounds them with gawkers and whisperers, which makes reverence hard to come by.
★ 6.3
Christ Carrying the Cross (El Greco)
1580 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
El Greco stripped out the crowd and the road and left the face and the embraced wood, a formula he repeated many times for Toledo.
★ 6.1
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
Christ Entering Jerusalem (Giotto)
1305 · Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Boys climb the trees to break off palm branches while the procession moves along a stage-like ledge under deep blue. Padua, around 1305.
★ 6.1
The Road to Calvary (Tiepolo)
1740 · Sant'Alvise, Venice
Even the Passion gets Tiepolo's airy color and snapping banners, the whole shoving procession swept upward toward Golgotha as theater.
★ 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