- The Birth of Venus
The Italian Renaissance saw an awakening of interest in the beauty and dignity of the human form, Greco-Roman influences, and humanism – all of which are on display in Botticelli’s radiant masterpiece.
- The Mona Lisa
It wasn’t always “the most famous painting in the world” – Leonardo’s masterpiece earned that title after Baedeker tourist guides marketed it as such in the late 1800s and its infamous theft from the Louvre in 1911.
- The Nightwatch
A masterclass in light, shadow, action, and Dutch Golden Age society, Rembrandt’s masterpiece is currently undergoing a massive restoration effort, “Project Nightwatch,” at the Rijksmuseum.
- Girl with a Pearl Earring
One of the few portraits that can give the Mona Lisa a run for her money, Vermeer’s Girl was the subject of a lavishly-filmed but history-bending 2003 film with Scarlett Johansson and was chosen by Dutch voters as the most beautiful painting in the country in 2006.
- The Rokeby Venus
A very different nude Venus than Botticelli’s, gazing at herself while the audience gazes at her backside, Velazquez’s interplay of male and female gaze became even more infamous in 1914 when the suffragette Mary Richardson slashed the painting in protest of male lewdness and inequality.
- Marie Antoinette with a Rose
The infamous French queen contracted the most famous female painters of the era, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, to paint her portrait – a snapshot of Versailles sensibility just before the guillotine came crashing down.
- The Third of May 1808
The godfather of countless paintings protesting the brutality of war atrocities that have followed over the past two centuries-plus, Goya’s work contrasts a literally larger-than-life Christ-like figure and fearful civilians with Napoleon’s merciless, geometrically-exact, almost mechanical firing squad.
- Liberty Leading the People
Yet another great French painting dealing with yet another French revolution (that of 1830, not the more famous 1789 one), Delacroix’s bloody symbolic allegory has become symbolically synonymous with the very idea of revolution itself.
- Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
Decades of realism and a Salon-centric status quo was shattered by Manet’s pastoral masterpiece, shocking audiences with a non-allegorical “naked lunch” of contemporary sitters and precluding the Impressionist earthquake that was to come.
- Impression, soleil levant
The Impressionist revolution saw many of its most celebrated paintings flow from the paintbrush of Monet, with this canvas a perfect example of how Impressionists captured the fleeting nature of light, color, and existence.
- Bal du moulin de la Galette
One of the most glorious encapsulations of the Belle Époque, the smaller version of Renoir’s exuberant canvas (also painted by Renoir) sold in a legendary 1990 auction at Sotheby’s New York for $78 million, one of the highest prices ever at the time.
- Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte
One of the most famous French paintings not in France, Seurat’s Pointillist masterpiece is the crown jewel of the Art Institute of Chicago, where visitors still puzzle over its myriad mysterious characters.
- The Starry Night
van Gogh’s 1889 masterwork shows the view from his asylum window overlooking Saint-Rémy-de-Provence below, depicting it all in celestial swirls and brilliant whirls of color, which give insight into the ideals of one of the most tortured geniuses of all time.
- The Scream
One artist who can challenge van Gogh’s “tortured artist” title is Munch, whose Scream has become as equal parts iconic and ubiquitous, all the more so as it was the subject of not one but two art thefts in 1994 and 2004.
- The Kiss
The most famous piece of Klimt’s Gold Period, this glittering crown jewel in the Belvedere’s collection continues to spark debate about one of the relationships between one of the most iconic couples in Western art.
- Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel
French, Russian, Belarusian, and Jewish, Chagall blended his background’s influences nearly as beautifully as his legendary color combinations, with this 1913 painting a testament to the artist’s life-affirming humanity in the face of the tragedies about to tear across Europe.
- Autumnal Cannibalism
Surrealism often explored an intersection of psychology and political commentary, and nowhere more so than in this work by Dali, often seen as a commentary on the society-cannibalizing nightmare of the Spanish Civil War.
- Guernica
As great as Dali’s painting is, the most famous work decrying the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and impending Second World War is Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece, depicting the 1937 attack on the village of Guernica – one of the first bombing missions by the Nazi Luftwaffe.
- The Two Fridas
Arguably the most impactful Latin American and feminist painter of all time, Frida Kahlo’s double self-portrait is part Surrealist self-psychoanalysis and part exploration of her Mexican heritage and European artistic influences.
- Marilyn Diptych
The intersection of pop art, mass production, and celebrity culture came to the fore in this 1962 piece by Andy Warhol, depicting the many faces of Marilyn Monroe in the technicolor highs and black-and-white lows of our modern obsession with fame.