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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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