Empire

Painting · Nicolas Poussin

Poussin's Et in Arcadia ego (c. 1638) is the great meditation of Baroque classicism: shepherds in an idyllic Arcadia reading a tomb's inscription, death present even in paradise.Crosses Baroque × Pain

Sculpture · Roman copy after Leochares

The Apollo Belvedere (Roman copy of a Greek bronze, in the Vatican) was for centuries the ideal of classical male beauty, the touchstone Winckelmann built Neoclassical taste around.Crosses Sculpture ×

Painting · Parmigianino

Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck (1535) is a defining work of Mannerism, its elongated proportions and cool elegance a deliberate departure from High Renaissance balance.Crosses Mannerism × P

Painting · El Greco

El Greco's View of Toledo (c. 1600) is one of the only pure landscapes of the Spanish Renaissance and a peak of Mannerism, the city seen under a storm-charged, almost visionary sky.Crosses Mannerism ×

Painting · Johannes Vermeer

Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) is the most famous of the Dutch Golden Age tronies, a study in light, gaze, and the single luminous pearl.Crosses Baroque × Painting × 1600s. Reference.

Painting · Limbourg Brothers

The Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1412-1416), the January calendar page shown here, is the supreme surviving Gothic illuminated manuscript.Crosses International Gothic × Painting × Christiani

Painting · John Duncan

John Duncan's The Riders of the Sidhe (1911) is a central work of the Celtic Revival, the fairy host of Irish and Scottish myth riding in procession.Crosses Symbolism × Painting × Celtic Mythology, a

Painting · Jean-Francois Millet

Millet's The Gleaners (1857) is a landmark of Realism, three peasant women stooping over a harvested field given the gravity of a history painting.Crosses Realism × Painting × 1850s, opening the Reali

Painting · Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889) is the defining work of Post-Impressionism, the night sky over Saint-Rémy turned into turbulence and light.Crosses Post-Impressionism × Painting × 1880s, opening the

Painting · Jacques-Louis David

David's The Death of Socrates (1787) is a manifesto of Neoclassicism: the philosopher reaches for the hemlock mid-argument, still teaching as he dies.Crosses Neoclassicism × Painting × Socrates, an ar

Painting · Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli's Primavera (c. 1480) is one of the most studied paintings of the Italian Renaissance, an allegory of spring peopled by Venus, Mercury, the Three Graces, Flora and Zephyrus.Crosses Renaissa

Painting · Titian

Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1523) is a high point of the Venetian Renaissance, the god leaping from his chariot toward Ariadne in a blaze of ultramarine.Crosses Renaissance × Painting × Greek Mythol

Painting · Eugene Delacroix

Delacroix's Medea about to Kill her Children (1838) brings the Greek tragedy into full Romantic register, the sorceress half in shadow at the moment before the act.Crosses Romanticism × Painting × Gre

Sculpture · Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne (1625) is the defining Baroque sculpture, marble caught at the instant Daphne turns to laurel to escape the god.Crosses Baroque × Sculpture × Greek Mythology. Reference.

Sculpture · Hellenistic Greek (Vatican)

The Laocoon group (Hellenistic, in the Vatican since 1506) is one of the most influential sculptures in Western art, the Trojan priest and his sons crushed by sea serpents.Crosses Sculpture × Greek My

Painting · Peter Nicolai Arbo

Arbo's Asgardsreien (1872) is the great Romantic painting of the Norse Wild Hunt, Odin and the host of the dead riding across the night sky.Crosses Romanticism × Painting × Norse Mythology, and connec

Painting · Elihu Vedder

Vedder's The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863) is a key American Symbolist work, a lone figure pressing his ear to the lips of the half-buried Egyptian sphinx for an answer that will not come.Crosses Sy

Woodblock print · Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Kuniyoshi's triptych (c. 1844) is one of the masterworks of ukiyo-e, the sorceress Takiyasha summoning a giant skeleton from a scroll of spells.Crosses Ukiyo-e × Japanese Mythology, bringing a non-Eur

Painting · Raja Ravi Varma

Raja Ravi Varma's Goddess Saraswati (1896) is a cornerstone of modern Indian painting, fusing European academic technique with Hindu sacred iconography and putting the gods into mass-reproducible imag

Painting · Viktor Vasnetsov

Vasnetsov's Bogatyrs (1898) is the defining image of Russian and Slavic folk-epic, the three heroes of the byliny rendered at monumental scale.Crosses Romanticism × Painting × Slavic Mythology, a cros