Cave or rock art

Finest Works of World Art

Leonardo da Vinci
Mona Lisa
1503-1506
Oil on wood
77 x 53 cm (30 x 20 7/8 in.)
Louvre, Paris

There has never been an artist who was more fittingly, and without qualification, described as a genius. Like Shakespeare, Leonardo came from an insignificant background and rose to universal acclaim. Yet the works that we have salvaged remain the most dazzlingly poetic pictures ever created. The Mona Lisa has the innocent disadvantage of being too famous. It can only be seen behind thick glass in a heaving crowd of awe-struck sightseers. It has been reproduced in every conceivable medium; it remains intact in its magic, forever defying the human insistence on comprehending. It is a work that we can only gaze at in silence

Michelangelo
The Creation of Adam
Fresco
Detail from The Sistine Chapel ceiling

Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet. He was one of the founders of the High Renaissance and, in his later years, In October 1494, Michelangelo transferred to Bologna and was awarded the cornmission for three marble figures to complete the tomb of St. Dominic in S. Domenico Maggiore, begun by the recently deceased Niccoló dell' Arca. By June 1496 he was in Rome and here established his reputation with two marble statues, the drunken Bacchus (c 1496-7; Florence, Bargello) for a private patron and the Pietá for St. Peter's (1498-9). The latter is generally considered to be the masterpiece of his early years, deeply poignant, exquisitely beautiful and more highly finished than his later works were to be. In creating a harmonious pyramidal group from the problematic combination of the figure of a full-grown man lying dead across the lap of his mother, Whether in painting, sculpture or architecture, Michelangelo's influence has been immense. Although he restricted himself to the nude in painting, his expressive use of the idealized human form had a tremendous impact on contemporaries and future generations. He was the first artist to be the subject of two biographies in his lifetime - those of Condivi and Vasari - with the latter doing much to promote the view of Michelangelo as the consummation of a progression towards artistic perfection that had begun with Giotto.

Venus de Milo
Unknown
Parian marble, h 2.02 m (6 1/2 ft)
Found at Milo
130-120 BC
Musee du Louvre, Paris

van Eyck, Jan
The betrothal of the Arnolfini
1434
Oil on wood
81.8 x 59.7 cm (32 1/4 x 23 1/2 in.)
National Gallery, London

Van Eyck's art reached perhaps its greatest triumph in the painting of portraits. One of his most famous portraits is ["The betrothal of the Arnolfini"], which represents an Italian merchant, Giovanni Arnolfini, who had come to the Netherlands on business, with his bride Jeanne de Chenany

Jan van Eyck was the greatest artist of the early Netherlands school. He held high positions throughout his career, including court painter and diplomat in Bruges. So outstanding was his skill as an oil painter that the invention of the medium was at one time attributed to him by means of vision and symbolism, Jan van Eyck temporarily did away with the division between secular and religious works of art. All nature is sacramentalized by the sheer intensity of his gaze

Sandro Botticelli c. 1445-1510
(Vlessandro di Mariano Filipepi)
The birth of Venus c. 1485
Tempera on canvas
172.5 x 278.5 cm (67 7/8 x 109 5/8 in.)
Uffizi, Florence

Italian painter. Botticelli was Florentine and extremely successful at the peak of his career, with a highly individual and graceful style founded on the rhythmic capabilities of outline. With the emergence of the High Renaissance style at the turn of the 16th century, he fell out of fashion, Without doubt the High Renaissance style obscured his achievement and, despite his earlier success, he had no followers of any merit. His most important pupil was the son of his own master, Filippino Lippi

Among the Florentine artists of the second half of the fifteenth century who strove for a solution to this question was the painter Sandro Botticelli (1446-1510). One of his most famous pictures represents not a Christian legend but a classical myth - the Birth of Venus