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
Browse by time · decade
1600s
1600 – 1609
Showing 126 works across all media from the 1600s
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
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
The Calling of St. Matthew
1600 · San Luigi dei Francsei, Rome
Light follows Christ's pointing hand across a dim counting-room to Matthew, who gestures at himself in disbelief. The picture made Caravaggio famous overnight.
★ 9.0
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
Beheading of St. John the Baptist
1608 · Co-Cathedral of St. John, Valletta
The only canvas Caravaggio ever signed, and he signed it in the blood running from the saint's throat, for the knights of Malta.
★ 8.4
The Conversion of Saint Paul
1601 · Palazzo Odescalchi Balbi, Rome
Caravaggio's first attempt at the subject, turned down by the patron, before he threw out the angels and left one man, one horse and the light.
★ 8.4
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
Supper at Emmaus
1601 · National Gallery, London
One disciple grips his chair to stand and the other throws his arms wide, while a fruit basket teeters off the edge toward us.
★ 8.0
Crucifixion of St. Peter
1601 · Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome
Three laborers strain to lever the cross upright with Peter nailed to it upside down. No crowd, no glory, just heavy work in the dark.
★ 7.8
The Entombment (Caravaggio)
1603 · Vatican Museums, Rome
The corner of the stone slab juts out of the picture so the body looks about to be laid down in the room with you.
★ 7.8
The Incredulity of St. Thomas
1602 · Sanssouci, Potsdam
Thomas pushes his finger into the wound and two apostles lean in to watch, brows knotted, close enough to crowd the frame.
★ 7.6
L'Orfeo
1607
The first performance was in a room at the Mantuan court for a few dozen listeners, and the printed score names every instrument required.
★ 7.3
As You Like It
1600 · 320 pages
Banished from court, Rosalind hides in the Forest of Arden in men's clothes and coaches the man she loves in how to court her. She talks rings around everyone in Shakespeare.
★ 7.2
Shakespeare's Sonnets · 1609
Flight into Egypt (A. Carracci)
1604 · Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
The holy family is tiny and the landscape does everything, which is the arrangement Poussin and Claude would build whole careers on.
★ 7.1
The Sacrifice of Isaac
1603 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Isaac is shouting under his father's hand and the ram has already arrived at the right. Caravaggio gives the scene no ceremony whatsoever.
★ 6.3
Agony in the Garden (El Greco)
1605 · Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
The sleeping apostles are sealed inside a bubble of rock while soldiers wind toward Christ in the distance, all lit by cold moonlight.
★ 6.3
Bouquet
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
None of these flowers bloom in the same season. Bruegel assembled the bouquet from studies made across the whole year, and let petals droop.
★ 6.1
Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters
1608 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Hundreds of tiny figures skating, sledging and falling over on one frozen river. Avercamp was deaf and mute and known as the mute of Kampen.
★ 6.1
Saint Jerome Writing
1606 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Jerome reaches across the table for the inkpot with a skull holding down his papers. Scholarship as physical labor, in a single hard light.
★ 5.7
Ecce Homo (Caravaggio)
1605 · Palazzo Rosso, Genoa
Three figures in a shallow dark box, and Caravaggio puts you where the crowd stood, having to decide what to do with him.
★ 5.7
Purification of the Temple
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
El Greco split the canvas down the middle: the traders tumbling out on the left, the disciples watching calmly on the right.
★ 5.7
Pericles, Prince of Tyre · 1608
Conversion on the Way to Damascus
1601 · Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome
The horse and the groom take up most of the canvas and neither notices anything. The miracle happens entirely inside the man on the ground.
★ 5.4
St. Jerome
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Not the desert hermit but the Doctor of the Church, in cardinal's red with one long hand resting on his own translation of the Bible.
★ 5.4
I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
Shakespeare's Sonnets · 1609
Christ Blessing (The Savior of the World)
1600 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Two fingers raised in a gesture reaching back to Byzantium, one hand on a crystal orb, the face long and sorrowful and unmistakably his.
★ 5.2
The Deposition
1602 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Rubens worked this out in Rome while studying Caravaggio, a rehearsal for the great Descent he would paint back home in Antwerp.
★ 4.8
Great Fish Market
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Hundreds of minutely painted fish, baskets and hagglers. They called him Velvet Bruegel for exactly this kind of finish.
★ 4.8
The Merry Wives of Windsor · 1602
Is it sin to rush into the secret house of death Ere death dare come to us?
Antony and Cleopatra · 1607
Twelfth Night, Or What You Will · 1602
I am giddy; expectation whirls me round. Th' imaginary relish is so sweet That it enchants my sense.
Troilus and Cressida · 1603
True happinesse Consists not in the multitude of friends, But in the worth, and choice.
Cynthia's Revels, or The Fountain of Self-Love · 1600