Twelve paintings, from a Last Supper painted by Veronese in Venice in 1573 to Dana Schutz's Open Casket, shown in New York in 2017, were refused, censored, taken down or marked for destruction because of what they showed.
Those who objected included a church court, a tsar, an archbishop, critics and fellow artists. The painters answered in their own ways, from quietly changing a title to repainting a whole mural in another country.
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How These Were Chosen
Bad reviews were not enough to make this list. Someone with power over the painting had to act against it: a court summons the painter, a jury turns the canvas away, an official has it taken down, or a crowd demands that it be destroyed.
Over four centuries, what shocked people moved from what a church would accept to what a museum could show. The rule of choice: the reaction came when the work was first made or shown, not decades later, and each artist appears once.
12. Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (1573)
The picture is laid out like a stage more than forty feet wide. A long table runs across it under three great arches, and a staircase at each end leads down toward the viewer. Dozens of guests, servants and onlookers fill the space.
Look closer and the details surprise. A man is picking his teeth with a fork. Not far from him, Saint Peter carves a lamb, a jester holds a parrot, and a servant in the foreground has a bloody nose. On the right-hand staircase, two soldiers in German dress eat and drink.
All of this was meant to be the Last Supper. Paolo Veronese made it in 1573 for the refectory, or dining hall, of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, a convent of Dominican friars. That summer, on Saturday, July 18, he was called to explain it.
The summons came from the Holy Office of Venice, the church court that policed Catholic belief. Its judges went through the crowd figure by figure and asked what jesters, drunks, Germans and dwarfs were doing at the Last Supper.
The Germans worried them most, because Germany was where Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation had broken with Rome. The judges reminded Veronese that heresy had spread there.
Veronese defended himself as a painter. Painters, he said, take the same license as poets and madmen, free to fill a scene with figures of their own. The servant with the nosebleed had simply been hurt in some accident, he explained, and a rich host might well keep guards.
He also pointed to Michelangelo's Last Judgment, the fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome crowded with nude figures. The judges replied that the dead rise naked at the end of time, so a Last Judgment needs no clothes. They gave him three months to change the picture at his own expense.
Rather than repaint, Veronese changed the title. In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 5, the tax collector Levi gives a great banquet for Jesus in his house, and a rich man's feast has room for servants, guards and a noisy crowd.
An inscription at the foot of the two staircases now names that great feast and cites the chapter.
At a Glance
Artist: Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari, 1528 to 1588)
Made: 1573
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 560 × 1309 cm (220 × 515 in)
Where to see it: Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
11. Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin (about 1601 to 1606)
Only a thin halo shows that the dead woman on this plain table is the Virgin Mary. Her head is tipped back, one arm drops over the edge, and a vast red cloth, like a theater curtain, hangs above the mourners who crowd around her with bowed heads.
Caravaggio painted it as an altarpiece for a church in Rome. His patron waited more than four years for it, and when it finally arrived, the clergy turned it away.