Primavera
1482 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Venus stands in an orange grove while the Graces dance and spring arrives at her right. The meadow holds hundreds of identifiable plants.
★ 9.8
Browse by time · century
15th century
1401 – 1500
Showing 112 works across all media from the 15th century
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
The Birth of Venus
1486 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Venus arrives on a scallop shell in a fall of roses, painted on canvas at a time when almost everyone still worked on panel.
★ 9.7
Pieta (Michelangelo)
1499 · Vatican Museums, Rome
The dead Christ lies across his mother's lap. Michelangelo was twenty-four, and signed the sash after hearing it credited to someone else.
★ 9.3
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife
1434 · National Gallery, London
A couple joins hands in a Bruges bedroom, and the mirror behind them catches two visitors at the door. Van Eyck signed the wall above it.
★ 9.1
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 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
Vitruvian Man
1492 · Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Leonardo fixed Vitruvius's old problem by moving the centers, so that the navel governs the circle and the groin governs the square.
★ 8.7
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
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
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
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 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 Seduction of Yusuf
1488 · Egyptian National Library, Cairo
Zulaykha shuts the last door behind Yusuf, and Bihzad turns the palace into a honeycomb of tile and stairs as taut as the story.
★ 8.2
The Lady with the Ermine
1490 · Czartoryski Museum, Krakow
Cecilia Gallerani turns as if someone has come in, and the ermine turns with her. It was her patron's emblem and a pun on her name.
★ 8.2
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
Haboku (Splashed-Ink) Landscape
1495 · Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo
A mountain, a wineshop flag and a boatman conjured from a few wet blots. Sesshu made it as a parting gift for a departing pupil.
★ 8.2
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
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
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
Saint Francis in Ecstasy
1480 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Francis steps barefoot from his hermitage into a light coming from the left, and Bellini gives him no seraph and barely any wounds.
★ 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
Madonna and Child with Canon Joris van de Paele
1436 · Groeningmuseum, Bruges
Van Eyck spared the old canon nothing: the stubble, the swollen hands, the spectacles. His armored saint mirrors the whole room in miniature.
★ 7.8
The Montefeltro Altarpiece
1474 · Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy
An ostrich egg hangs from the vault and pulls every sightline down. Federico is shown from the left because a tournament took his right eye.
★ 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
San Marco Altarpiece (Madonna and Saints)
1443 · San Marco Museum, Florence
The saints share one continuous space instead of separate compartments, and the two kneeling physicians are the name-saints of the Medici who paid.
★ 7.6
Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (Self portrait?)
1433 · National Gallery, London
The wary, straight-on gaze is what a painter sees in a mirror, which is why this is probably van Eyck looking at himself.
★ 7.6
Le Morte d'Arthur
1485 · 576 pages
Arthur pulls the sword from the stone and the finest knights come to his table, until his wife's love for Lancelot brings it down. Every Camelot since comes from Malory.
★ 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
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
The Madonna in a Church
1429 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
The Virgin is far too big for the cathedral because she stands for the Church itself, and real sunlight falls in patches across the floor.
★ 7.2
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
Ginevra de Benci
1478 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A juniper bush stands behind her as a pun on her name. The panel was later cut down at the bottom, taking her hands with it.
★ 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
Battle of San Romano
1440 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The central panel of three, with the Florentine commander charging in a gold-and-scarlet hat on a horse turned like a carousel figure.
★ 7.2