Famous Renaissance Paintings
The most famous Renaissance paintings include the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Birth of Venus, The Creation of Adam and The School of Athens. Here are fourteen from Italy and from the north, and what made each one a landmark.
The Renaissance ran from the 1400s into the 1500s, when European artists rediscovered perspective, realism and the human body. These are the paintings that defined it.
The quick tour
The Last Supper, detail by detail, the detail hiding at that table
The Arnolfini Portrait, detail by detail, the mirror, the dog, and the question everyone asks
Inside Monet house at Giverny, room by room, including his own bedroom
For the parts museums leave out
Three worth opening next:
Lady with an Ermine, detail by detail, why she is holding that animal
Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, which of the two women is which
The Ambassadors, detail by detail, the object at the bottom that only works from one side
Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci (around 1503)
The painting that defines the Renaissance, by Leonardo.
Leonardo built her face with sfumato, smoky transitions with no hard lines, so her expression seems to shift. She was a quiet portrait for centuries. The 1911 theft from the Louvre turned her into the most famous face on earth.
The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci (1495 to 1498)
The most reproduced religious scene ever painted, and one of the most fragile.
Leonardo worked on dry plaster instead of wet, so the paint began to flake in his own lifetime. It has been rescued again and again, the last restoration taking 21 years. The hidden details are the real story, in Leonardo's secret in The Last Supper.
The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli (around 1485)
The goddess on a shell, and one of the first large nudes since antiquity, by Botticelli.
It is painted in tempera on canvas, sealed with a layer of egg yolk that kept it fresh. It survived Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, when Florentine monks burned art they judged sinful. It hangs in the Uffizi.
Primavera, Sandro Botticelli (around 1482)
A garden of gods and graces that scholars still cannot fully explain.
Botanists have identified more than 190 plant species in it, most of them accurate to the season. Some read it as a wedding gift, some as a philosophical allegory of love. The debate has run for a century.
The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo (around 1512)
The near touch between God and man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted in fresco.
Michelangelo covered the ceiling in about four years, standing on scaffolding, not lying on his back as the myth says. Since 1990 doctors have argued that the red shape around God matches a cross section of the human brain.
The School of Athens, Raphael (1509 to 1511)
The grandest group portrait of the ancient mind, by Raphael.
Raphael painted the Greek philosophers as portraits of his own rivals. Plato has Leonardo's face, Heraclitus has Michelangelo's, and Raphael slipped his own face into the far right edge.
The Sistine Madonna, Raphael (1512)
A vision of the Madonna in the clouds, famous today for its footnote.
The two bored little angels leaning on the frame at the bottom were almost an afterthought. They have since been copied onto more mugs, cards and posters than the Madonna above them.
The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck (1434)
The most studied double portrait of the northern Renaissance, and a showcase for oil painting.
A convex mirror on the back wall reflects two figures standing where we stand, and above it van Eyck signed the wall, Jan van Eyck was here, 1434. The full decoding is in the Arnolfini Portrait.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch (around 1500)
A three panel journey from Eden to a nightmare hell, painted in the Netherlands.
It is packed with monsters, machines and tiny jokes that take hours to read. In 2014 a student transcribed the musical notes Bosch painted on the backside of a damned figure, and people have played the tune ever since.
Venus of Urbino, Titian (1538)
A reclining nude so direct it shocked viewers for centuries.
Titian laid his goddess on a bed, staring straight at the viewer. Mark Twain later called it the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses. It hangs in the Uffizi.
The Last Judgment, Michelangelo (1541)
The wall of the Sistine Chapel where the dead rise and fall.
The mass of nude bodies sparked a censorship campaign, and a painter was later hired to add fig leaves and drapery. Michelangelo took revenge on one critic by painting his face on Minos, a donkey eared judge of hell.
The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger (1533)
Two rich young men surrounded by symbols of learning, and one hidden warning.
The smeared grey shape across the floor is a skull, painted in stretched perspective so it only snaps into focus when you view the panel from the side. It is a reminder that death waits behind all the wealth on show.
The Annunciation, Leonardo da Vinci (around 1472)
An early Leonardo, painted when he was barely twenty.
Mary's right arm looks too long and her hand sits oddly on the book. It was almost certainly deliberate, drawn to look correct to a viewer standing to the right, where the panel first hung. It is in the Uffizi.
The Tempest, Giorgione (around 1508)
A soldier, a nursing mother and a coming storm, and no one knows why.
Five centuries on, no one has agreed what The Tempest shows. X rays make it stranger still. Under the soldier, Giorgione first painted a second nude woman, then changed his mind.
Where they hang
Many hang in Italy and the Vatican. In London the Arnolfini Portrait is at the National Gallery, alongside Holbein's Ambassadors.
Renaissance paintings, the questions that come up
What are the most famous Renaissance paintings? The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Creation of Adam, The Birth of Venus and The School of Athens.
When was the Renaissance? Roughly the 1400s to the early 1500s in Italy, a little later in northern Europe.
What made Renaissance painting new? Linear perspective, realistic bodies, oil paint in the north, and subjects drawn from antiquity as well as the Bible.
Who are the big four of the Italian Renaissance? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and, a step behind, Botticelli and Titian.
Where can you see them? Mostly the Uffizi in Florence, the Vatican, the Louvre and the National Gallery in London.
Why these still matter
The Renaissance is where painting learned to imitate life.
Perspective, anatomy and oil paint were sharpened here, and every artist who came after, from Rembrandt to Picasso, built on what these fourteen worked out first.
If the Renaissance pulls you in, keep going: