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
Browse by time · decade
1660s
1660 – 1669
Showing 85 works across all media from the 1660s
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
Return of the Prodigal Son
1669 · Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The son kneels with his shorn head against his father's chest and the old man's hands come down on his back. Rembrandt painted it near death.
★ 8.7
Girl with a Pearl Earring
1665 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
Not a portrait of anyone in particular but a tronie, a study of a type, which somehow made her the most looked-at girl in art.
★ 8.6
The Milkmaid (Vermeer)
1660 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A kitchen maid pours a thin stream of milk in ordinary daylight, given the weight and stillness usually reserved for saints.
★ 8.5
The Art of Painting (The Artist's Studio)
1668 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Vermeer never sold this one. The model poses as Clio, muse of history, with a great map of the Netherlands filling the wall behind.
★ 8.3
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1665)
1665 · Kenwood House, London
The old painter holds his brushes and palette, and behind him two large arcs are drawn on the wall that nobody has explained.
★ 7.7
Woman Holding a Balance
1665 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The scales in her hand are empty and perfectly level, and the painting on the wall behind her is a Last Judgment.
★ 7.4
Pensees
1669 · 333 pages
You are already betting on whether God exists, Pascal says, since refusing to choose is a choice. Around that wager sit fragments on why no one can sit alone in a room.
★ 7.4
Ethics
1667 · 208 pages
Spinoza proves, in numbered propositions, that God and nature are one substance and that everything follows from it as necessarily as a theorem. Freedom is understanding that necessity, not escaping it.
★ 7.4
Young Woman with a Water Jug
1662 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
One hand on the pitcher, one on the window latch, and morning light coming through onto a white cap. Nothing happens, perfectly.
★ 7.2
Don Juan and Other Plays
1665 · 392 pages
Don Juan seduces, dodges his creditors, and believes in nothing, while his servant argues feebly for God and a stone statue accepts an invitation to dinner. Moliere never wrote anything more dangerous.
★ 7.1
Paradise Lost · 1667
Officer and a Laughing Girl
1660 · The Frick Collection, New York City
The officer's hat and back loom enormous in the foreground while the girl sits small and bright beyond, which is exactly how the eye works.
★ 7.1
The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays
1666 · 400 pages
Alceste cannot tell a lie and is destroying himself over a woman who lives on flattery. Tartuffe, the fake holy man eating his host's house, is hypocrisy caught whole and played for laughs.
★ 7.0
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
1669 · 352 pages
Nine years of Restoration London set down every night in shorthand. Pepys watched the Great Fire from a boat and he was as frank about his own adulteries as about the plague.
★ 7.0
Pensees · 1662
Feast of St. Nicholas
1665 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
One child hugs her presents while a boy howls because his shoe held nothing but a birch rod, and the grandmother beckons with a secret.
★ 6.8
St. Francis Standing
1660 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
No landscape, no story, just a man in patched brown wool holding a skull and one shaft of light finding him in the dark.
★ 6.3
The Merry Family
1668 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The parents sing and drink and a toddler is handed a pipe. A note in the picture reads: as the old sing, so the young pipe.
★ 6.3
The Miser and Other Plays
1668 · 304 pages
Harpagon keeps a cash box buried in his garden, intends to marry his son's beloved himself, and gives his daughter to whoever asks no dowry. Moliere made him Europe's byword for greed.
★ 6.0
Pains of love be sweeter far Than all other pleasures are.
Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr · 1669
Tales of the Floating World · 1661
Of all human follies there's none could be greater Than trying to render our fellow-men better.
The Misanthrope · 1666
Paradise Lost · 1667
One should look long and carefully at oneself Before one considers judging others.
The Misanthrope · 1666