Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
1603 · 406 pages
Hamlet's father appears as a ghost and demands revenge, and the prince spends the play failing to take it. Four centuries of readers have found their own divided minds in his hesitation.
★ 9.9
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17th century
1601 – 1700
Showing 702 works across all media from the 17th century
Las Meninas
1656 · El Prado, Madrid
The Infanta and her maids fill the room, but Velázquez has put himself at his easel and the king and queen in a mirror behind.
★ 9.8
The Holy Bible (King James Version)
Various
1611 · 1728 pages
God makes the world, loses the people in it, and spends the rest of the book getting them back. The English of this translation is the English later writers have had to answer.
★ 9.8
King Lear
1607 · 316 pages
An old king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters how much they love him, and the truthful one says least. Shakespeare wrote nothing bleaker, and the last scene is unbearable.
★ 9.8
Don Quixote
1605 · 940 pages
An old man reads himself mad on chivalry, names himself a knight, and rides out with a farmer for a squire. Four hundred years on the book is still hilarious and still heartbreaking.
★ 9.7
Paradise Lost
1667 · 591 pages
Satan rebels in heaven, loses, and comes for the first two people. Milton meant to justify God and produced a devil so magnificent he nearly walks off with the greatest poem in English.
★ 9.5
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
1652 · Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
Bernini staged the saint's own account of her vision as theater, lit from a window he hid above and watched by marble spectators in boxes.
★ 9.4
Macbeth
1606 · 223 pages
Witches promise a soldier the crown, and he and his wife murder their way to it. Shakespeare's shortest tragedy moves like a nightmare, and the guilt arrives before the blood dries.
★ 9.4
View of Delft
1660 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
Vermeer painted his own city from across the harbor, almost his only townscape. Proust called it the most beautiful painting in the world.
★ 9.3
The Night Watch
1642 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A militia company surges out of the shadow with a dog barking and a girl glowing among the men. Varnish, not night, made it dark.
★ 9.2
Apollo and Daphne
1624 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Bernini was in his mid-twenties when he cut this, catching Daphne at the moment bark closes over her thigh and leaves push from her fingers.
★ 9.1
Othello
1603 · 314 pages
Iago tells the audience exactly how he will destroy his general, then does it with a handkerchief and patient lying. His reasons never explain it, and watching Othello believe him is agony.
★ 9.0
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 Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
1632 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
Rembrandt was twenty-five and new in Amsterdam when the surgeons' guild hired him, and he built every head in the room around one lifted tendon.
★ 8.8
The Surrender of Breda
1635 · El Prado, Madrid
The Spanish general stops the defeated Dutchman from kneeling and lays a hand on his shoulder. Spaniards still call the picture The Lances.
★ 8.8
Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1650 · Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
Velázquez caught every wary line in the pope's face, and Innocent reportedly said it was troppo vero, too true. Francis Bacon reworked it for years.
★ 8.8