Essays
1580 · 1283 pages
Montaigne wrote short pieces on friendship, fear, sleep, and his kidney stones, and invented the essay doing it. As company on the page he remains unmatched in four centuries.
★ 9.3
Browse by time · decade
1580s
1580 – 1589
Showing 52 works across all media from the 1580s
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
1586 · Church of Santo Tome, Toledo, Ohio
Two saints lower a nobleman into his grave while his soul slips through a tear in the sky. The mourners are El Greco's own neighbors.
★ 8.7
The Beaneater
1580 · Galleria Colonna, Rome
A peasant looks up from his beans as though caught, spoon halfway to his mouth. Painted decades before Caravaggio's followers made a career of this.
★ 6.3
Christ Carrying the Cross (El Greco)
1580 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
El Greco stripped out the crowd and the road and left the face and the embraced wood, a formula he repeated many times for Toledo.
★ 6.1
Proverbs (Heywood) · 1580
The Lamentation
1582 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The body pushed close to the viewer and lit in sharp pools. The Carracci taught a generation to weld grandeur to direct feeling.
★ 4.4