Academia Aesthetics · a gallery of famous paintings, myth and the beautiful dark

Renaissance Paintings

Perspective, oil paint, anatomy and the rediscovery of antiquity: how painters in Florence, Rome, Venice and the North reinvented the picture between 1400 and 1600.

Baroque Art

From Caravaggio's spotlight to Bernini's marble ecstasies and Rembrandt's shadows: the seventeenth-century art that set out to move you.

Gothic Art

Pointed arches, stained glass and gold-ground panels, and the darker Gothic that the Romantics built on top of them.

Academic Art

Flawless flesh, gods and heroes, and invisible brushstrokes: the official art of the nineteenth century, its fall from favor and its remarkable return.

Romanticism

Shipwrecks, barricades, fog-filled valleys and nightmares: how painters between 1780 and 1850 put feeling above reason and nature above everything.

Symbolism

Islands of the dead, brooding angels and skeletal gardeners: the late nineteenth-century painters who turned away from the visible world to paint the soul.

The Pre-Raphaelites

Seven young rebels in 1848 London, a drowned Ophelia, a cursed Lady of Shalott, and the long afterglow of the most literary movement in British art.

Impressionism

How a group of rejected painters, a hostile critic and a hazy sunrise over Le Havre changed the way the world sees color.

Fallen Angels in Art

From medieval battles in heaven to Cabanel's weeping Lucifer and Stuck's glowing eyes: how artists turned the first rebel into a tragic hero.

Danse Macabre

Popes, kings, merchants and children led hand in hand to the grave by grinning dead: the medieval image that still sets the pace for how we picture mortality.

Memento Mori & Vanitas

Skulls on desks, guttering candles, jeweled skeletons and a smear across Holbein's floor: how artists for two thousand years have reminded us that we will die.

Angels & Demons in Art

From Bernini's marble angels in Rome to Cabanel's weeping Lucifer, how artists have given bodies to beings that have none.

Greek Mythology in Art

Venus rising from the sea, Icarus falling, Saturn eating his children: how painters and sculptors have retold the Greek myths for two and a half thousand years.

The Catacomb Saints

Anonymous bones from Rome, dressed in gold and gems by nuns, and sent north to stand in for the saints the Reformation had smashed.

Death in Art

Skeletons, deathbeds, martyrs and islands of the dead: how artists have looked at the one subject no one escapes.

Famous Paintings

Five centuries of the pictures the world keeps coming back to, from Leonardo's smile to Pollock's skein of paint, and why each one earned its place.

Famous Van Gogh Paintings

Ten years, some 860 oil paintings and a single unmistakable way of seeing.

Famous Monet Paintings

Sixty years of light on water, snow, stone and his own garden: Claude Monet's most famous paintings and why they matter.

Greek Statues

Marble gods, bronze athletes and the painted statues we now see as white: a guide to Greek sculpture and its long afterlife.

Caravaggio Paintings

Dirty feet, real faces and a light that cuts like a blade: how one violent painter remade European art in fifteen years.

Famous Sculptures

From Michelangelo's David to Canova's kiss, the most famous sculptures and statues in the world, and what to look for when you stand in front of them.

Goya's Black Paintings

Fourteen images an old, deaf painter made for his own walls, and never meant anyone else to see.

Famous Paintings of Women

The Mona Lisa, Ophelia, Liberty and the Lady of Shalott: the women of art history, who painted them, and who they really were.