World classics. Altar, palace, exhibition

Hubert and Jan van Eyck · Completed 1432

The central Ghent Altarpiece panel presents the Lamb as Christ among worshippers. The ensemble was completed in 1432 for Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut's chapel. A private donation became a large religious setting. This is the original central panel in official macrophotography after the restoration completed in 2019.

Unknown Byzantine icon painter · First third of the 12th century

Painted in Byzantium in the first third of the twelfth century, the icon was brought from Constantinople to Rus around 1130. It was repeatedly repainted over the centuries. Its present surface combines early painting with later alterations.

Andrei Rublev · Probably 1422–1427

Three angels sit at a table with a single cup. Rublev painted the icon for the Trinity Cathedral of the Trinity–Sergius monastery, probably in 1422–27. Abraham’s three visitors form the basis of this Orthodox image of the Trinity.

Giotto di Bondone · 1303–1305

Giotto told the life of Christ through a sequence of frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. Painted in 1303–05, the Lamentation shows the body on the ground, surrounded by mourners. Each has a different gesture, giving the shared event individual human responses.

Fra Angelico · About 1440–1450

The friars of San Marco encountered this fresco beside the stairs to their living quarters. Fra Angelico painted it around 1440–50, after the monastery’s rebuilding under Cosimo de’ Medici’s patronage. Gabriel announces Christ’s birth to Mary.

Leonardo da Vinci · 1495–1498

Leonardo painted the dining hall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. He worked on dry plaster, allowing him to revise the composition and develop gradual tonal changes. The fragile technique soon began to fail. The apostles respond to Christ's announcement that one of them will betray him, above the room where the monks took their meals.

Michelangelo · 1508–1512 (Sistine Chapel ceiling cycle)

This is one of the central scenes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Approaching fingers join the Creator's movement with Adam's reclining body. Michelangelo conveys the gift of life through bodily arrangement and a small gap between hands. The famous detail originally belonged to a large biblical cycle overhead.

Raphael · 1512–1513

Raphael made the altarpiece for San Sisto in Piacenza, almost certainly on a commission from Julius II. Saints Sixtus and Barbara, venerated there, accompany Mary. The two familiar angels below were added late in the painting process. In 1754 Augustus III acquired the work for Dresden after two years of negotiations.

Jan van Eyck · 1434

The man is usually identified as Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, with his wife. Their room and belongings display wealth. Two more figures appear in the convex mirror beneath the painter's conspicuous inscription. The portrait's function remains debated, so it cannot be treated as an established record of a wedding.

Sandro Botticelli · c. 1485

Venus arrives on a shell as wind carries her toward a figure holding a cloak. Despite the familiar title, the Uffizi describes her arrival on Cyprus. The welcoming figure is identified as a Hora or Grace. The ancient subject belongs to Florentine patrons' interest in classical poetry and images of beauty.

Sandro Botticelli · About 1480

Spring occupied a wall in a Florentine home. By the late fifteenth century it belonged to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici’s heirs and hung above a chest-bench. Its original patron and intended programme remain uncertain.

Leonardo da Vinci · 1503–1519

The sitter is Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo kept the painting, which later entered the French royal collection. Soft transitions known as sfumato join the face with the distant landscape. The edges of eyes and mouth remain responsive to changing visual attention.

Titian · 1538

A letter records Guidobaldo II della Rovere buying this painting directly from Titian in 1538. The Uffizi relates its imagery to marriage and domestic ritual. Roses identify Venus, while attendants handle household possessions behind her. The work later reached Florence through Vittoria della Rovere's dowry when she married into the Medici family.

Rembrandt van Rijn · 1653

A Sicilian patron commissioned Aristotle touching a bust of Homer. The philosopher wears a medallion of Alexander the Great on a gold chain. Poet, thinker and ruler invite reflection on worldly reputation and the endurance of artistic fame.

Johannes Vermeer · c. 1660

A household servant pours milk in a spare interior. Vermeer removed objects while working, including a jug rack and a basket used for warming babies and drying nappies. Similar objects appear in his estate inventory. The final arrangement concentrates attention on one ordinary task and the changing light across food, fabric and pottery.

Paul Cézanne · About 1893

Cézanne painted The Basket of Apples around 1893. Every object is recognisable, yet the table edges fail to align across the cloth. Different viewpoints coexist within one arrangement on the canvas.

Raphael · 1508–1511 (Stanza della Segnatura cycle)

Raphael painted this gathering of philosophers for a room Julius II used as a library and private office. Its decoration joined philosophy, theology, law and poetry. The ancient thinkers share architecture recalling Bramante's plans for Saint Peter's, while several have the features of artists working in Renaissance Rome.

Hans Holbein the Younger · 1533

Jean de Dinteville was in England reporting to Francis I on Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn. His friend Georges de Selve visited in 1533. Holbein placed them among instruments, books and signs of status during a period of religious upheaval. Their portrait later hung in the Great Hall of Dinteville's château at Polisy.

Diego Velázquez · 1656

Velázquez painted Infanta Margarita and her attendants in 1656, including himself beside a large canvas. Several people look towards us, while the royal couple appears in a distant mirror. A court portrait becomes a complex scene of an artist at work.

Rembrandt van Rijn · 1642

In 1642 Rembrandt painted a group portrait of an Amsterdam militia company. Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch step forward. The title The Night Watch came much later, when the darkened painting was taken for a nocturnal scene.

Chitarman · recto: dated 1627–28; verso: ca. 1530–50

Chitarman painted this image soon after Shah Jahan's accession. The emperor holds a jeweled pendant bearing his own portrait. A halo, European-derived angels, textiles, and architecture proclaim imperial authority while displaying the skills of the workshops supplying the court.

Wang Hui and assistants · datable to 1698

This belongs to twelve monumental scrolls recording Kangxi’s southern tour of 1689. Wang Hui and assistants depict the route from Jinan to Mount Tai. Maps and prints supplied information, while documented sites meet invented classical landscapes in a representation of imperial territory and authority.

Unidentified Korean painters · ca. 1790–1805

Comparison with other portraits confirms Yun Dongseom’s identity. A high-rank belt places this work in 1790 or later. It probably served a family ancestral shrine and may have been painted after his death using earlier likenesses.

Francisco Goya · 1814

Goya painted the executions in 1814, six years after the Madrid uprising against Napoleon's troops. Its companion shows the fighting of 2 May. The paintings were commissioned under the Regency and executed after Ferdinand VII returned to Madrid. Goya chose the nighttime killings on the city's outskirts, bringing the victims into the foreground.

Théodore Géricault · 1818–1819

In 1816 the Méduse ran aground while carrying a governor to Senegal as France resumed colonial control there. About 150 people were put on a raft; rescuers found only fifteen alive. Géricault interviewed survivors and gave this recent disaster the scale of history painting. The figures try to signal a distant ship.

Eugène Delacroix · 1830

Delacroix painted this response to the July Revolution of 1830 between September and December that year. Contemporary street fighters follow a personification of Liberty carrying the tricolor. Shown at the Salon in 1831, it brought a recent uprising into the scale of history painting. This photograph records its appearance after the 2023–2024 restoration.

Édouard Manet · 1863

Manet exhibited this painting at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. A nude woman sits beside men in contemporary clothes, without the familiar explanation of a mythological subject. The composition draws on revered Renaissance models. Critics objected both to the scene and to its abrupt blocks of light and dark.

Édouard Manet · 1863

Manet adapted the pose of Titian's Venus of Urbino for a contemporary courtesan. A servant brings flowers from an admirer or client. At the 1865 Salon, the recognizable social subject, large format and free handling caused a scandal. The reclining model was Victorine Meurent, who also appears in other paintings by Manet.

Gustave Caillebotte · 1877

Caillebotte painted an intersection near his Paris home. The rebuilding of the city had opened broad avenues through older neighbourhoods. Fashionably dressed pedestrians carry recently introduced collapsible umbrellas. Although he exhibited with the Impressionists, he carefully planned his perspective and the placement of people to make the encounter appear momentary.

Claude Monet · 1872

Monet painted Le Havre's harbor from a hotel window in only a few hours, according to the Marmottan Museum. The orange sun and boats were added late. Exhibited in 1874, the painting supplied the title that critics turned into the name Impressionism. Its subject was an active modern port with cranes, locks and construction work.

Georges Seurat · 1884–1886; border 1888–1889

Seurat developed this leisure scene in 1884–86 through many preparatory studies. The people on La Grande Jatte appear almost motionless. Their placement and colour relationships are carefully planned around an ordinary Sunday outing.

Vincent van Gogh · June 1889

Van Gogh painted this nocturnal landscape in several daytime sessions in June 1889, during his stay at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy. A letter to Theo describes the countryside before sunrise and an unusually bright morning star. The painted village and church were invented, bringing observation together with remembered and altered forms.

Edvard Munch · 1893

Munch connected this image with anxiety experienced during a walk above the Kristiania fjord. The figure developed from a more clearly defined man in his 1892 painting Despair. This is the National Museum's 1893 version, painted in tempera and grease crayon on cardboard. Its distorted forms helped prepare the way from Symbolism toward Expressionism.