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
Browse by time · decade
1610s
1610 – 1619
Showing 132 works across all media from the 1610s
Hamlet · 1616
The Tempest
1611 · 259 pages
Prospero raises a storm to strand the men who stole his dukedom on an island where a spirit and a monster obey him. What he does with that power reads as Shakespeare's farewell.
★ 8.6
The Descent from the Cross (Rubens at Antwerp)
1614 · Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Christ's body slides down one long diagonal onto a white shroud. It still stands on the altar in Antwerp Cathedral that Rubens painted it for.
★ 8.5
View of Toledo
1610 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
El Greco moved the cathedral tower off its real site for the sake of the composition and lit the whole city with a green storm.
★ 8.4
Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings
1617 · Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The emperor hands a book to a Sufi and ignores the kings waiting below, one of them James I, copied from an English portrait.
★ 7.9
Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
1618 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Two horsemen haul two women up onto rearing horses, and the whole canvas spins into one great X of limbs and hooves.
★ 7.4
Hamlet · 1616
The Elevation of the Cross
1611 · Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Rubens had just come back from Italy with Caravaggio's light and Michelangelo's anatomy, and announced himself with this straining diagonal.
★ 7.2
The Massacre of the Innocents (Rubens 1)
1612 · Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Herod's soldiers and the mothers of Bethlehem lock into one knot of muscle. Overlooked for centuries, it sold in 2002 for a record price.
★ 7.2
Old Woman Frying Eggs
1618 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Eggs are visibly cooking in the pan as you watch. Velázquez painted this in Seville when he was barely nineteen years old.
★ 6.9
The Alchemist
1610 · 530 pages
Plague empties London, a master flees, and his butler turns the house into a con shop, selling the philosopher's stone to every greedy fool who knocks. Jonson built the swindle like clockwork.
★ 6.1
The Descent from the Cross (Rubens at Lille)
1617 · Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille
Rubens painted this descent years after the Antwerp one, and the two together show him reworking the same falling body across a career.
★ 5.6
Don Quixote · 1615
As You Like It · 1616
The flow'ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.
All's Well that Ends Well · 1616
Hamlet · 1616
The Tempest · 1616
Vespro della Beate Vergine
1610
Monteverdi sent it to the Pope hoping for a better job, and it mixes plainchant with writing that would have sounded like theater inside a church.
★ 3.9
It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.
The Dialogue of the Dogs · 1613
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
As You Like It · 1616
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven.
All's Well that Ends Well · 1616
How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds Makes deeds ill done!
The Life and Death of King John · 1616
★ 3.5