Self-Portrait (Durer)
1500 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Dürer faced himself head-on in a pose reserved for images of Christ, and wrote across the panel that he had painted it at twenty-eight.
★ 8.1
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 Battle of Alexander at Issus
1529 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Tens of thousands of tiny soldiers fight under a sky that curves like the whole earth. Painted while the Ottomans were pressing on Vienna.
★ 8.1
Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
1618 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Two horsemen haul two women up onto rearing horses, and the whole canvas spins into one great X of limbs and hooves.
★ 7.4
The Four Apostles
1526 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Dürer gave the panels to the Nuremberg council with Luther's words inscribed below, warning the city's rulers against false prophets. His last great work.
★ 7.3
The Fall of the Damned
1620 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
A single unbroken avalanche of bodies falls from a bright heaven at the top into the dark, with demons pulling them down.
★ 6.7
Lion Hunt
1621 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Horses, lions, spears and men knotted into one turning mass, with a rider already thrown and about to be mauled.
★ 6.7
Bouquet
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
None of these flowers bloom in the same season. Bruegel assembled the bouquet from studies made across the whole year, and let petals droop.
★ 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
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
Lamentation of Christ (Durer)
1500 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
The tiny kneeling figures in the corners are the Nuremberg family who paid for it, inserted so they could share in the grief.
★ 4.8
Great Fish Market
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Hundreds of minutely painted fish, baskets and hagglers. They called him Velvet Bruegel for exactly this kind of finish.
★ 4.8