Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci
We don't need any introduction for this famous lady with the most mysterious smile. The famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci is completely out of the world! It is one of the most valuable paintings in the world. The Mona Lisa bears a strong resemblance to many Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary. The woman sits upright in a armchair with her arms folded, a sign of her reserved posture. She looks steadily and intently, which appears alive to an unusual extent, which Leonardo achieved by his method of not drawing outlines. The soft blending creates an ambiguous mood.
The painting was one of the first portraits to depict the sitter in front of an imaginary landscape, and Leonardo was one of the first painters to use aerial perspective. It is now in the Louvre Museum (Paris)
The Scream - Edvard Munch
This popular painting has attracted many people, amazed even more, and scared a few. It became one of the most iconic painting picture, seen as symbolising the anxiety of the human condition. There are four versions of this painting and a couple of them are a part of world famous art galleries and others a part of someone's private collection. He created two versions in paint and two in pastels, as well as lithography stone from which several prints survive.
The idea of The Scream came to life when the artist was walking through the city roads watching a sunset when suddenly the setting sunlight turned the clouds "A Blood Red". He sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Arthur Lubow has described The Scream as "an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time."[13] It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern humanity.
Girl with a Pearl Earring - Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer painted this iconic portrait and is a beautiful example of the denoting a style and the use of light. In 2006, the Dutch public selected it as the most beautiful painting in the Netherlands. It depicts a European girl wearing an exotic dress, an oriental turban, and an improbably large pearl earring.
The dark background of the painting contains bone black, small amounts of red ochre and indigo. The face and draperies were painted mainly using ochres, natural ultramarine, bone black, charcoal black and lead white. The pearl has been described as an illusion due to having "no contour and hook to hang it from the girl’s ear". The work is oil on canvas and is 44.5 cm (17.5 in) high and 39 cm (15 in) wide and it is signed "IVMeer".
The Starry Night - Vincent van Gogh
The Starry Night is one of the most recognized paintings in Western art. The innovative and bold use of thick brushstrokes, striking blues and yellows and the dreamy, swirling atmosphere have intrigued art lovers for decades. This is an oil painting on canvas, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.
Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of the day and under various weather conditions, including sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, and one day with rain. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains.
The one pictorial element that was definitely not visible from Van Gogh's cell is the village, which is based on a sketch F1541v made from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941.
The Kiss - Gustav Klimt
The Kiss is an oil on canvas painting with added gold leaf, silver and platinum by the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. The work is a highpoint of the artist's Golden Phase between 1899 to 1910 when he often used gold leaf. Klimt depicts his subjects as mythical figures made modern by luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the moment graphic motifs.
The painting depicts a couple embracing each other, their bodies entwined in elaborate beautiful robes decorated in a style influenced by the contemporary Art Nouveau style and the organic forms of the earlier Arts and Crafts movement. The painting now hangs in the Upper Belvedere museum in Vienna, and is considered a masterpiece of Klimt's most popular work.
Guernica - Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso is a name you just cannot keep out of discussions about art paintings. His cubist style of painting has created many wonders on the canvas. It is a large oil painting on canvas made in 1937. It is one of his best known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. The German and Italian warplanes bombed the city if Guernica, taking many innocent lives. The Government asked Picasso to create a painting about the bombings and suffering of people.
This bought the best out of Picasso and he went on to create another masterpiece art. This painting was later displayed at the World’s art Fair in Paris. In this painting, Picasso illustrates the sufferings of humans, animals and birds, caused due to heavy bombing. You will see this painting at The Sofia museum, Spain.
The Birth of Venus - Sandro Botticelli
The Birth of Venus is a painting, probably made in the mid 1480s. It depicts the goddess Venus arriving at the shore after her birth, when she had emerged from the sea fully-grown (called Venus Anadyomene and often depicted in art). The painting is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
They are among the most famous paintings in the world, and icons of the Italian Renaissance of the two, the Birth is better known than the Primavera. While there are subtleties in the painting, its main meaning is a straightforward, if individual, treatment of a traditional scene from Greek mythology, and its appeal is sensory and very accessible, hence its enormous popularity.
Whistler's Mother - James McNeill Whistler
Whistler's Mother also known as Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 was the most famous work of James McNeill Whistler. There are numerous stories, but the most popular one is that a model could not make it to the studio of the artist and his mother took the place of that model.
Whistler’s mother Anna is pictured as one of several elements locked into an arrangement of right angles. Her severe expression fits in with the rigidity of the composition, and it’s somewhat ironic to note that despite Whistler’s formalist intentions, the painting became a symbol of motherhood.
The Arnolfini Portrait - Jan van Eyck
One of the most significant works produced during the Northern Renaissance, this composition is believed to be one of the first paintings executed in oils. It is an oil painting on oak panel made in 1434, believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, presumably in their residence at the Flemish city of Bruges. It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art, because of its beauty, complex iconography, geometric orthogonal perspective, and expansion of the picture space with the use of a mirror.
Van Eyck used the technique of applying several layers of thin translucent glazes to create a painting with an intensity of both tone and colour. The glowing colours also help to highlight the realism, and to show the material wealth and opulence of Arnolfini's world.
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte - Georges Seurat
Georges Seurat’s masterpiece, evoking the Paris of La Belle Epoque, is actually depicting a working-class suburban scene well outside the city’s center. Seurat often made this milieu his subject, which differed from the bourgeois portrayals of his Impressionist contemporaries. It is a leading example of pointillist technique, executed on a large canvas. Seurat's composition includes a number of Parisians at a park on the banks of the River Seine.
Seurat's palette consisted of the usual pigments of his time such as cobalt blue, emerald green and vermilion. He also used new pigment zinc yellow for highlights in the sunlit grass in the middle of the painting but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments.