Your Textbook Living With Art Claims That Is the Most Famous Work of Western Art in the World
The most famous paintings of all time
A ranking of the almost famous paintings—from Jan van Eyck'south portrait to Gustav Klimt'due south masterpiece
Ranking the most famous paintings of all time is a difficult task.
Painting is an ancient medium and even with the introduction of photography, film and digital applied science, it nevertheless has remained a persistent mode of expression. And then many paintings have been limned over dozens of millennia that merely a relatively small-scale pct of them could be construed as "timeless classics" that have become familiar to the public—and not coincidentally produced by some of the most 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 1 when you see one, whether it's at one of NYC'southward many museums (The Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, MoMA and elsewhere) or at institutions in other parts of the world.
Nosotros, of class, have our opinion of what makes the grade and we present them here in our list of the best paintings of all fourth dimension.
Peak famous paintings
1. Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–xix
Painted betwixt 1503 and 1517, Da Vinci's alluring portrait has been dogged by ii questions since the twenty-four hours it was made: Who's the bailiwick and why is she smiling? A number of theories for the sometime have been proffered over the years: That she's the married woman of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo (ergo, the piece of work's alternative title, La Gioconda); that she's Leonardo'due south mother, Caterina, conjured from Leonardo'southward boyhood memories of her; and finally, that it's a self-portrait in elevate. Every bit for that famous smile, its enigmatic quality has driven people crazy for centuries. Whatsoever the reason, Mona Lisa's look of preternatural at-home comports with the idealized landscape behind her, which dissolves into the distance through Leonardo's use of atmospheric perspective.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Dystopos
2. Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665
Johannes Vermeer's 1665 written report of a young woman is startlingly real and startlingly modern, nigh every bit if it were a photograph. This gets into the debate over whether or not Vermeer employed a pre-photographic device called a camera obscura to create the image. Leaving that aside, the sitter is unknown, though it's been speculated that she might have been Vermeer'south maid. He portrays her looking over her shoulder, locking her eyes with the viewer every bit if attempting to establish an intimate connexion across the centuries. Technically speaking, Daughter isn't a portrait, but rather an instance of the Dutch genre called a tronie—a headshot meant more as all the same life of facial features than as an endeavor to capture a likeness.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Nat507
three. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
Vincent Van Gogh's near popular painting, The Starry Night was created by Van Gogh at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he'd committed himself in 1889. Indeed, The Starry Dark seems to reflect his turbulent state of mind at the fourth dimension, equally the nighttime heaven comes alive with swirls and orbs of frenetically applied brush marks springing from the yin and yang of his personal demons and awe of nature.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz
iv. Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907–1908
Opulently gilded and extravagantly patterned, The Kiss, Gustav Klimt's fin-de-siècle portrayal of intimacy, is a mix of Symbolism and Vienna Jugendstil, the Austrian variant of Art Nouveau. Klimt depicts his subjects as mythical figures made modern by luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the moment graphic motifs. The work is a highpoint of the artist'south Gold Stage between 1899 and 1910 when he ofttimes used gold leafage—a technique inspired by a 1903 trip to the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italia, where he saw the church'due south famed Byzantine mosaics.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Jessica Epstein
5. Sandro Botticelli, The Nativity of Venus, 1484–1486
Botticelli'southward The Birth of Venus was the commencement full-length, not-religious nude since antiquity, and was made for Lorenzo de Medici. It's claimed that the figure of the Goddess of Love is modeled afterward ane Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, whose favors were allegedly shared past Lorenzo and his younger brother, Giuliano. Venus is seen existence blown ashore on a giant clamshell past the current of air gods Zephyrus and Aura equally the personification of spring 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 "Bonfire of the Vanities" of 1497, in which "profane" objects—cosmetics, artworks, books—were burned on a pyre. The Nativity of Venus was itself scheduled for incineration, but somehow escaped destruction. Botticelli, though, was and so freaked out by the incident that he gave upwards painting for a while.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/arselectronica
half dozen. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871
Whistler's Mother, or Organization in Gray and Black No. 1, as it's really titled, speaks to the creative person's ambition to pursue fine art for fine art'due south 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 form. Whistler's mother 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 notation that despite Whistler'south formalist intentions, the painting became a symbol of motherhood.
Photograph: King/Shutterstock/Universal History Archive
7. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
Ane of the almost significant works produced during the Northern Renaissance, this limerick is believed to exist ane of the start paintings executed in oils. A total-length double portrait, it reputedly portrays an Italian merchant and a woman who may or may not be his bride. In 1934, the celebrated fine art historian Erwin Panofsky proposed that the painting is really a wedding contract. What tin exist reliably said is that the piece is one of the get-go depictions of an interior using orthogonal perspective to create a sense of space that seems face-to-face with the viewer'southward own; information technology feels like a painting you could step into.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian
8. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503–1515
This fantastical triptych is generally considered a distant forerunner to Surrealism. In truth, it'due south the expression of a late medieval creative person who believed that God and the Devil, Sky and Hell were real. Of the three scenes depicted, the left console shows Christ presenting Eve to Adam, while the correct one features the depredations of Hell; less clear is whether the heart panel depicts Heaven. In Bosch's perfervid vision of Hell, an enormous ready of ears wielding a phallic pocketknife 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 once more. This riot of symbolism has been largely impervious to interpretation, which may business relationship for its widespread appeal.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian
nine. Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886
Georges Seurat'southward masterpiece, evoking the Paris of La Belle Epoque, is really depicting a working-class suburban scene well exterior the city's centre. Seurat often fabricated this milieu his subject, which differed from the conservative 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 you go far this frieze-like processional of figures whose stillness is in keeping with Seurat's aim of creating a classical landscape in modernistic class.
Photo: Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago/Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
x. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
The ur-canvas of 20th-century fine 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's ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro. Its compositional Deoxyribonucleic acid likewise includes El Greco's The Vision of Saint John (1608–fourteen), at present hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art. The women being depicted are actually prostitutes in a brothel in the artist's native Barcelona.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz
xi. Pieter Bruegel the Elderberry, The Harvesters, 1565
Bruegel'southward fanfare for the common man is considered one of the defining works of Western art. This composition was one of six created on the theme of the seasons. The fourth dimension is probably early on September. A group of peasants on the left cut and package ripened wheat, while the on the right, another group takes their midday meal. 1 effigy is sacked out under a tree with his pants unbuttoned. This attention to detail continues throughout the painting every bit a procession of ever-granular observations receding into space. Information technology was extraordinary for a time when landscapes served mostly as backdrops for religious paintings.
12. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur fifty'herbe, 1863
Manet'southward scene of picnicking Parisians caused a scandal when it debuted at the Salon des Refusés, the culling exhibition made upwardly of works rejected by the jurors of the almanac Salon—the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts that set artistic standards in France. The most vociferous objections to Manet's work centered on the depiction 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 cheeky transport up of classical figuration—an insolent mash-up of mod life and painting tradition.
thirteen. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Cherry Blue and Yellow, 1930
A small painting (xviii inches by 18 inches) that packs a big art-historical punch, Mondrian'southward work represents a radical distillation of form, colour and composition to their basic components. Limiting his palette to the primary triad (cerise, xanthous and blue), plus black and white, Mondrian applied paint in flat unmixed patches in an organization of squares and rectangles that anticipated Minimalism.
xiv. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, or The Family of King Philip IV
A painting of a painting inside a painting, Velázquez masterpiece consists of different themes rolled into one: A portrait of Spain's purple family and retinue in Velázquez's studio; a self-portrait; an almost art-for-art'southward-sake display of bravura brush work; and an interior scene, offer glimpses into Velázquez's working life. Las Meninas is also a treatise on the nature of seeing, besides as a riddle misreckoning viewers about what exactly they're looking at. It'due south the visual art equivalent of breaking the 4th wall—or in this case, the studio's far wall on which there hangs a mirror reflecting the faces of the Spanish King and Queen. Immediately this suggests that the majestic couple is on our side of the picture plane, raising the question of where we are in relationship to them. Meanwhile, Velázquez's full length rendering of himself at his easel begs the question of whether he'due south looking in a mirror to paint the picture. In other words, are the subjects of Las Meninas (all of whom are fixing their gaze outside of the frame), looking at usa, or looking at themselves?
15. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Perhaps Picasso's best-known painting, Guernica is an antiwar cris de coeur occasioned past the 1937 bombing of the eponymous Basque urban center during the Spanish Civil War past German and Italian aircraft centrolineal with Fascist leader Francisco Franco. The leftist government that opposed him deputed Picasso to created the painting for the Spanish Pavillion at 1937 Globe's Fair in Paris. When it closed, Guernica went on an international bout, before winding up at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso loaned the painting to MoMA with the stipulation that it exist returned to his native Spain once democracy was restored—which it was in 1981, six years after 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 comfy 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 by Manuel de Godoy, Espana's Prime Minister, The Naked Maja was accompanied by another version with the sitter clothed. The identity of the woman remains a mystery, though she is most thought to be Godoy's immature mistress, Pepita Tudó.
17. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814
Commissioned past Napoleon's sister, Queen Caroline Murat of Naples, Grande Odalisque represented the artist's break with the Neo-classical style he'd been identified with for much of his career. The work could be described equally Mannerist, though information technology's generally thought of as a transition to Romanticism, a motility that abjured Neo-classicalism's precision, formality and equipoise in favor of eliciting emotional reactions from the viewer. This depiction of a concubine languidly posed on a burrow is notable for her strange proportions. Anatomically incorrect, this enigmatic, uncanny figure was greeted with jeers by critics at the fourth dimension, though information technology eventually became ane of Ingres most indelible works.
18. Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830
Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled Male monarch Charles Ten of France, Liberty Leading the People has get synonymous with the revolutionary spirit all over the world. Combining apologue with gimmicky 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 different classes unite behind her to storm a barricade strewn with the bodies of fallen comrades. The epitome has inspired other works of fine art and literature, including the Statue of Liberty and Victor Hugo'south novel Les Misérables.
nineteen. Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1874
The defining figure of Impressionism, Monet well-nigh gave the movement its name with his painting of daybreak over the port of Le Havre, the creative person's hometown. Monet was known for his studies of low-cal and color, and this canvas offers a fantabulous example with its flurry of castor strokes depicting the sun equally an orange orb breaking through a hazy blueish melding of water and sky.
20. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above 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 meliorate example on that score than this image of a hiker in the mountains, pausing on a rocky outcrop to take in his environs. His back is turned towards the viewer as if he were too enthralled with the landscape to turn around, but his pose offers a kind of over-the-shoulder view that draws us into vista as if we were seeing it through his eyes.
21. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819
For sheer touch, it's hard to top The Raft of the Medusa, in which Géricault took a contemporary news effect 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 afloat on a hastily constructed raft. Of that number, but fifteen remained after a thirteen-day ordeal at sea that included incidents of cannibalism among the desperate men. The larger-than-life-size painting, distinguished past a dramatic pyramidal composition, captures the moment the raft's emaciated crew spots a rescue send. Géricault undertook the massive canvas on his own, without anyone paying for information technology, 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 depiction of urban isolation, Nighthawks depicts a quarter of characters at night inside a greasy spoon with an expansive wraparound window that almost takes upward the entire facade of the diner. Its brightly lit interior—the but source of illumination for the scene—floods the sidewalk and the surrounding buildings, which are otherwise dark. The restaurant's glass outside creates a display-case result that heightens the sense that the subjects (iii customers and a counterman) are alone together. It's a report of alienation every bit the figures studiously ignore each other while losing themselves in a state of reverie or burnout. The diner was based on a long-demolished one in Hopper's Greenwich Village neighborhood, and some fine art historians have suggested that the painting as a whole may have been inspired past Vincent van Gogh'south Café Terrace at Night, which was on exhibit at a gallery Hopper frequented at aforementioned time he painted Nighthawks Also of note: The redheaded adult female on the far right is the artist'due south married woman Jo, who often modeled for him.
23. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. ii, 1912
At the beginning of the 20th-century, Americans knew picayune about modern art, simply all that abruptly changed when a survey of Europe's leading modernists was mounted at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. The show was officially titled the "International Exhibition of Modern Art," merely has simply been known as the Armory Prove ever since. It was a succès de scandale of epic proportions, sparking an outcry from critics that landed on the front page of newspapers. At the heart of the brouhaha was this painting past Marcel Duchamp. A stylistic mixture of Cubism and Futurism, Duchamp's depiction of the titular field of study in multiple exposure evokes a move through time every bit well as space, and was inspired past the photographic movement studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. The figure's planar structure drew the most ire, making the painting a lighting rod for ridicule. The New York Times'southward fine art critic dubbed it "an explosion in a shingle manufacturing plant," 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 style onto the train. Nude was one of a scattering of paintings Duchamp made before turning total fourth dimension towards the conceptualist experiments (such as the Readymades and The Large Glass) for which he'south known.
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Source: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/top-famous-paintings-in-art-history-ranked
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