Why Is Old Art Considered the Best in Art
The most famous paintings of all time
A ranking of the most famous paintings—from Jan van Eyck's portrait to Gustav Klimt'due south masterpiece
Ranking the most famous paintings of all fourth dimension is a difficult task.
Painting is an ancient medium and even with the introduction of photography, film and digital technology, it still has remained a persistent mode of expression. So many paintings have been limned over dozens of millennia that only a relatively small percentage of them could be construed as "timeless classics" that have become familiar to the public—and not coincidentally produced by some of the well-nigh famous artists of all time.
Information technology leaves open the question of what mix of talent, genius and circumstance leads to the creation of a masterpiece. Perhaps the simplest answer is that you know one when you see one, whether it's at ane of NYC's many museums (The Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, MoMA and elsewhere) or at institutions in other parts of the globe.
Nosotros, of form, have our opinion of what makes the grade and we present them here in our list of the best paintings of all time.
Top famous paintings
1. Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–19
Painted betwixt 1503 and 1517, Da Vinci'southward alluring portrait has been dogged by two questions since the day it was made: Who's the bailiwick and why is she smiling? A number of theories for the erstwhile accept been proffered over the years: That she's the married woman of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo (ergo, the work's culling title, La Gioconda); that she'due south Leonardo'south mother, Caterina, conjured from Leonardo'southward adolescence memories of her; and finally, that it's a self-portrait in drag. As for that famous smiling, its enigmatic quality has driven people crazy for centuries. Any the reason, Mona Lisa'south look of preternatural at-home comports with the idealized landscape behind her, which dissolves into the distance through Leonardo'southward use of atmospheric perspective.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Dystopos
two. Johannes Vermeer, Daughter with a Pearl Earring, 1665
Johannes Vermeer'south 1665 study of a young woman is startlingly real and startlingly modern, almost equally if it were a photo. This gets into the argue over whether or not Vermeer employed a pre-photographic device chosen a camera obscura to create the paradigm. Leaving that aside, the sitter is unknown, though it's been speculated that she might have been Vermeer's maid. He portrays her looking over her shoulder, locking her eyes with the viewer as if attempting to establish an intimate connection across the centuries. Technically speaking, Daughter isn't a portrait, merely rather an case of the Dutch genre called a tronie—a headshot meant more than as still life of facial features than as an endeavour to capture a likeness.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Nat507
iii. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
Vincent Van Gogh's most popular painting, The Starry Night was created past Van Gogh at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he'd committed himself in 1889. Indeed, The Starry Night seems to reflect his turbulent land of heed at the time, as the nighttime sky comes alive with swirls and orbs of frenetically practical brush marks springing from the yin and yang of his personal demons and awe of nature.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz
four. Gustav Klimt, The Buss, 1907–1908
Opulently aureate and extravagantly patterned, The Kiss, Gustav Klimt'south fin-de-siècle portrayal of intimacy, is a mix of Symbolism and Vienna Jugendstil, the Austrian variant of Art Nouveau. Klimt depicts his subjects equally mythical figures fabricated modern by luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the moment graphic motifs. The work is a highpoint of the artist'due south Golden Stage betwixt 1899 and 1910 when he oft used gold leaf—a technique inspired by a 1903 trip to the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, where he saw the church's famed Byzantine mosaics.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Jessica Epstein
v. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1484–1486
Botticelli's The Nascency of Venus was the first total-length, non-religious nude since antiquity, and was made for Lorenzo de Medici. It's claimed that the figure of the Goddess of Honey is modeled later on ane Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, whose favors were allegedly shared past Lorenzo and his younger brother, Giuliano. Venus is seen beingness blown ashore on a behemothic clamshell by the wind gods Zephyrus and Aura as the personification of bound awaits on land with a cloak. Unsurprisingly, Venus attracted the ire of Savonarola, the Dominican monk who led a fundamentalist crackdown on the secular tastes of the Florentines. His campaign included the infamous "Blaze of the Vanities" of 1497, in which "profane" objects—cosmetics, artworks, books—were burned on a pyre. The Nascence of Venus was itself scheduled for incineration, but somehow escaped devastation. Botticelli, though, was then freaked out by the incident that he gave up painting for a while.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/arselectronica
6. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grayness and Black No. 1, 1871
Whistler's Female parent, or Arrangement in Grey and Black No. ane, as it's really titled, speaks to the artist's appetite to pursue art for fine art's sake. James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted the work in his London studio in 1871, and in it, the formality of portraiture becomes an essay in grade. Whistler'southward female parent Anna is pictured as one of several elements locked into an arrangement of right angles. Her astringent expression fits in with the rigidity of the composition, and it'southward somewhat ironic to note that despite Whistler's formalist intentions, the painting became a symbol of motherhood.
Photograph: REX/Shutterstock/Universal History Archive
7. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
One of the near meaning works produced during the Northern Renaissance, this composition is believed to be one of the get-go paintings executed in oils. A full-length double portrait, it reputedly portrays an Italian merchant and a adult female who may or may non be his bride. In 1934, the celebrated fine art historian Erwin Panofsky proposed that the painting is actually a nuptials contract. What tin be reliably said is that the piece is one of the showtime depictions of an interior using orthogonal perspective to create a sense of space that seems face-to-face with the viewer'south ain; it feels similar a painting you could pace into.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian
8. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503–1515
This fantastical triptych is mostly considered a distant forerunner to Surrealism. In truth, it's the expression of a belatedly medieval artist who believed that God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell were real. Of the three scenes depicted, the left console shows Christ presenting Eve to Adam, while the right ane features the depredations of Hell; less clear is whether the heart console depicts Sky. In Bosch'southward perfervid vision of Hell, an enormous set up of ears wielding a phallic knife attacks the damned, while a bird-beaked bug king with a chamber pot for a crown sits on its throne, devouring the doomed before promptly defecating them out again. This anarchism of symbolism has been largely impervious to interpretation, which may account for its widespread entreatment.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian
9. Georges Seurat, A Dominicus Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886
Georges Seurat's masterpiece, evoking the Paris of La Belle Epoque, is actually depicting a working-class suburban scene well outside the city'south center. Seurat oft made this milieu his subject area, which differed from the bourgeois portrayals of his Impressionist contemporaries. Seurat abjured the capture-the-moment approach of Manet, Monet and Degas, going instead for the sense of timeless permanence found in Greek sculpture. And that is exactly what y'all arrive this frieze-like processional of figures whose stillness is in keeping with Seurat's aim of creating a classical landscape in modern form.
Photo: Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago/Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
x. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
The ur-sheet of 20th-century art, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ushered in the modern era by decisively breaking with the representational tradition of Western painting, incorporating allusions to the African masks that Picasso had seen in Paris'due south ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro. Its compositional DNA as well includes El Greco'south The Vision of Saint John (1608–14), now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art. The women beingness depicted are actually prostitutes in a brothel in the creative person's native Barcelona.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz
11. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565
Bruegel's fanfare for the common human is considered i of the defining works of Western art. This composition was i of half dozen created on the theme of the seasons. The fourth dimension is probably early on September. A group of peasants on the left cut and parcel ripened wheat, while the on the correct, another group takes their midday meal. One figure is sacked out nether a tree with his pants unbuttoned. This attention to item continues throughout the painting equally a procession of ever-granular observations receding into space. It was boggling for a time when landscapes served mostly as backdrops for religious paintings.
12. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863
Manet's scene of picnicking Parisians acquired a scandal when it debuted at the Salon des Refusés, the culling exhibition made up of works rejected past the jurors of the annual Salon—the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts that set artistic standards in French republic. The nigh vociferous objections to Manet'southward work centered on the delineation of a nude woman in the company of men dressed in contemporary clothes. Based on motifs borrowed from such Renaissance greats as Raphael and Giorgione, Le Déjeuner was a derisive send up of classical figuration—an insolent brew-upwardly of modern life and painting tradition.
thirteen. Piet Mondrian, Limerick with Red Blueish and Yellow, 1930
A small painting (18 inches past xviii inches) that packs a big art-historical punch, Mondrian's work represents a radical distillation of class, colour and limerick to their bones components. Limiting his palette to the chief triad (red, yellowish and blue), plus black and white, Mondrian applied pigment in flat unmixed patches in an arrangement of squares and rectangles that anticipated Minimalism.
14. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, or The Family of Male monarch Philip IV
A painting of a painting within a painting, Velázquez masterpiece consists of different themes rolled into one: A portrait of Spain'southward royal family and retinue in Velázquez'south studio; a cocky-portrait; an nearly art-for-fine art's-sake brandish of bravura brush work; and an interior scene, offering glimpses into Velázquez'south working life. Las Meninas is likewise a treatise on the nature of seeing, as well every bit a riddle confounding viewers well-nigh what exactly they're looking at. It's the visual art equivalent of breaking the fourth wall—or in this case, the studio's far wall on which there hangs a mirror reflecting the faces of the Spanish Rex and Queen. Immediately this suggests that the royal couple is on our side of the movie plane, raising the question of where we are in human relationship to them. Meanwhile, Velázquez'southward full length rendering of himself at his easel begs the question of whether he'southward looking in a mirror to pigment the pic. In other words, are the subjects of Las Meninas (all of whom are fixing their gaze outside of the frame), looking at united states, or looking at themselves?
15. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Perhaps Picasso's best-known painting, Guernica is an antiwar cris de coeur occasioned by the 1937 bombing of the eponymous Basque city during the Castilian Civil War past German and Italian aircraft allied with Fascist leader Francisco Franco. The leftist regime that opposed him commissioned Picasso to created the painting for the Spanish Pavillion at 1937 World's Fair in Paris. When it closed, Guernica went on an international tour, before winding upwards at the Museum of Modernistic Art in New York. Picasso loaned the painting to MoMA with the stipulation that it be returned to his native Spain once democracy was restored—which information technology was in 1981, vi years later on Franco's death in 1975 (Picasso himself died two years before that.) Today, the painting is housed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
16. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Naked Maja, circa 1797–1800
Definitely comfortable in her own pare, this female nude staring unashamedly at the viewer caused quite a stir when information technology was painted, and even got Goya into hot water with the Spanish Inquisition. Among other things, information technology features one of the outset depictions of public hair in Western art. Deputed past Manuel de Godoy, Kingdom of spain'south Prime Minister, The Naked Maja was accompanied by another version with the sitter clothed. The identity of the adult female remains a mystery, though she is most idea to be Godoy's young mistress, Pepita Tudó.
17. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814
Commissioned by Napoleon's sister, Queen Caroline Murat of Naples, Grande Odalisque represented the creative person's pause with the Neo-classical mode he'd been identified with for much of his career. The work could be described as Mannerist, though it's generally thought of as a transition to Romanticism, a movement that abjured Neo-classicalism'due south precision, formality and equipoise in favor of eliciting emotional reactions from the viewer. This depiction of a concubine languidly posed on a couch is notable for her foreign proportions. Anatomically wrong, this enigmatic, uncanny effigy was greeted with jeers past critics at the time, though it somewhen became one of Ingres most indelible works.
eighteen. Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830
Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled King Charles X of French republic, Liberty Leading the People has get synonymous with the revolutionary spirit all over the world. Combining apologue with contemporary elements, the painting is a thrilling example of the Romantic style, going for the gut with its titular character brandishing the French Tricolor as members of dissimilar classes unite behind her to storm a barricade strewn with the bodies of fallen comrades. The epitome has inspired other works of art and literature, including the Statue of Liberty and Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables.
19. Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1874
The defining figure of Impressionism, Monet virtually gave the movement its proper noun with his painting of daybreak over the port of Le Havre, the creative person's hometown. Monet was known for his studies of light and color, and this canvas offers a splendid example with its flurry of castor strokes depicting the dominicus as an orangish orb breaking through a hazy blue melding of water and sky.
20. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer in a higher place the Sea of Fog, 1819
The worship of nature, or more precisely, the feeling of awe it inspired, was a signature of the Romantic style in art, and there is no better instance on that score than this image of a hiker in the mountains, pausing on a rocky outcrop to accept in his environs. His back is turned towards the viewer as if he were likewise enthralled with the landscape to turn around, simply his pose offers a kind of over-the-shoulder view that draws us into vista every bit if we were seeing information technology through his eyes.
21. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819
For sheer bear upon, information technology'due south difficult to meridian The Raft of the Medusa, in which Géricault took a contemporary news event and transformed it into a timeless icon. The backstory begins with the 1818 sinking of the French naval vessel off the coast of Africa, which left 147 sailors adrift on a hastily constructed raft. Of that number, only fifteen remained subsequently a 13-day ordeal at sea that included incidents of cannibalism amongst the desperate men. The larger-than-life-size painting, distinguished by a dramatic pyramidal limerick, captures the moment the raft's emaciated coiffure spots a rescue ship. Géricault undertook the massive sail on his ain, without anyone paying for it, and approached it much like an investigative reporter, interviewing survivors and making numerous detailed studies based on their testimony.
22. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
An iconic delineation of urban isolation, Nighthawks depicts a quarter of characters at night inside a greasy spoon with an expansive wraparound window that almost takes upwards the entire facade of the diner. Its brightly lit interior—the only source of illumination for the scene—floods the sidewalk and the surrounding buildings, which are otherwise nighttime. The restaurant's glass exterior creates a display-case issue that heightens the sense that the subjects (three customers and a counterman) are lonely together. It'due south a written report of alienation equally the figures studiously ignore each other while losing themselves in a country of reverie or exhaustion. The diner was based on a long-demolished one in Hopper'south Greenwich Village neighborhood, and some art historians accept suggested that the painting as a whole may have been inspired by Vincent van Gogh'south Café Terrace at Nighttime, which was on exhibit at a gallery Hopper frequented at same time he painted Nighthawks Also of note: The redheaded adult female on the far right is the artist's married woman Jo, who frequently modeled for him.
23. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
At the showtime of the 20th-century, Americans knew lilliputian nigh modernistic art, but all that abruptly inverse when a survey of Europe'southward leading modernists was mounted at New York City'due south 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Artery betwixt 25th and 26th Streets. The show was officially titled the "International Exhibition of Modern Art," but has simply been known as the Armory Show ever since. It was a succès de scandale of ballsy proportions, sparking an outcry from critics that landed on the front folio of newspapers. At the center of the brouhaha was this painting by Marcel Duchamp. A stylistic mixture of Cubism and Futurism, Duchamp's depiction of the titular subject field in multiple exposure evokes a move through time too as infinite, and was inspired by the photographic movement studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. The figure's planar construction drew the most ire, making the painting a lighting rod for ridicule. The New York Times'south art critic dubbed it "an explosion in a shingle factory," and The New York Evening Sun published a satirical cartoon version of Nude with the caption, "The Rude Descending a Staircase (Blitz Hour at the Subway)," in which commuters push and shove each other on their fashion onto the train. Nude was one of a handful of paintings Duchamp made before turning full time towards the conceptualist experiments (such as the Readymades and The Big Glass) for which he's known.
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Source: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/top-famous-paintings-in-art-history-ranked
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