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