Between 1509 and 1511 Raphael painted a single wall in a small library on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace in Rome. The picture, known as the School of Athens, gathers around fifty philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers under a colossal vaulted hall. Several of them are portraits of Raphael's contemporaries. The picture is the visual definition of High Renaissance Rome and a private joke between three of the greatest artists of the period.

Vermeer painted the Girl with a Pearl Earring around 1665 without a title and without a recorded sitter. The picture disappeared for two centuries, was bought at a Hague estate sale in 1881 for two guilders, and is now the most reproduced face in Western art. How it survived, how it acquired a story, and what the 2018 Mauritshuis lab studies revealed about the pearl that isn't a pearl.

A small Flemish panel, painted around 1513, shows an elderly woman in a horned headdress holding a half-opened rose. She has a flat nose, a protruding jaw, and skin that has thickened across her brow and chin. The painting has had four lives — Flemish moralising portrait, Leonardo grotesque exercise, John Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland Duchess, and finally medical diagnosis. The case of a painting that turned out to be a medical record.

Most viewers know Botticelli through one painting — Primavera, the green-floor allegory of spring that became the screensaver of Renaissance art. But Botticelli painted for thirty more years after Primavera. The Birth of Venus extended the project. The Mystic Nativity (1500) inverted it. The Calumny of Apelles (1495-99) abandoned it. The painter who finished his career was almost unrecognisable from the painter who began it, and the gap is the story.

The melting watches in Dalí's 1931 painting did not come from nowhere. They came from a Catalan shoreline, from a piece of Camembert cheese left on a table, from Mannerist elongation, from Bosch's morphing bodies, from Fuseli's dream as subject, and from Böcklin's silent atmosphere. The literal landscape, the cheese, the four precursors, and what Dalí added that nobody before him had said.

The 1865 Paris Salon hung Manet's Olympia high enough that visitors had to look up to see it, and they did, in numbers large enough to require a guard. The painting was not scandalous because it showed a nude — half the Salon showed nudes. It was scandalous because of a specific set of decisions Manet had made about how the nude was painted, who she was, and what she was looking at. The mechanism, step by step.

Guernica is the most famous anti-war painting of the twentieth century — but it is also a specific argument, built piece by piece out of a visual grammar Goya invented in 1814. The bull, the horse, the lit lamp, the screaming mother, the broken sword. What each part of Guernica says, and the line of paintings that taught Picasso how to say it.

Michelangelo spent his twenties dissecting cadavers by candlelight in a Florentine monastery. The bodies he was looking at became, fifteen years later, the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He always said he was a sculptor, never a painter. The paintings prove him right.

Before Goya, European painters showed war as triumph. After Goya, they could no longer pretend. The Third of May 1808 ended the heroic battle picture and invented the painting of senseless violence — a tradition that runs through Manet, Picasso, and every photograph of war we have made since.

On the back wall of Las Meninas there is a small mirror, and inside the mirror are two heads — the king and queen of Spain. They should not be there. The painting has been arguing about why they are for three hundred and seventy years.

A young woman in a blue and yellow turban, in three-quarter view against a black ground, turning toward the painter with her mouth half-open as if she has been called for. No story, no setting, no narrative. Reading the small Dutch picture that has become one of the four or five most reproduced paintings in the world.

A severed head, mouth open in a scream, eyes wide, snakes alive in the hair, blood spilling from the neck — painted on a wooden shield in 1597 by a twenty-six-year-old Caravaggio. Reading the painting that took an ancient story and turned it into a face caught at the moment of its own death.

A naked woman stands on a scallop shell, blown ashore by two flying wind gods, while a maid waits with a flowered cloak. Reading the painting that put a pagan goddess back on the wall of a Christian house in 1485.

There is not one Sunflowers painting. There are seven, painted in two intense bursts over fourteen months in Arles. They were a decoration for a house that was supposed to hold a school of painters and never did.

A young woman in a yellow bodice and blue apron pours milk from a brown jug into a low earthenware bowl. The window is on her left, the bread is on the table, and the wall behind her is doing more work than almost anything else in seventeenth-century painting. A reading of Vermeer's Milkmaid.

Mary Cassatt painted The Child's Bath in 1893, the year she had returned from a long study of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris. The painting is small — about four feet tall — and the subject is the oldest one in domestic life. A woman holds a child on her lap, washes one of the child's feet in a basin, and looks down. Nothing happens. That is the point. What makes the picture remarkable is everything it refuses. There is no story, no allegory, no Madonna pose lifted from Re

Edouard Manet painted A Bar at the Folies-Bergere in 1882, the year before he died. He was 50 and already ill with the locomotor ataxia that would kill him at 51. He had a small studio set up at the Folies-Bergere cabaret in Paris and a model, Suzon, who actually worked behind one of the bars there. He posed her in his studio with a marble counter, bottles, and a mirror, and built the whole composition from those props. The result is one of the most quietly impossible paintin

Johannes Vermeer painted The Astronomer in 1668. It is one of only two paintings he signed and dated with the year, one of only two male portraits he ever produced, and the only one of his known interiors where the subject is reading a book. Vermeer painted thirty-six pictures in his lifetime. He gave very few of them to men. This is one. A scholar in a long blue-and-gold robe leans over a table. His right hand reaches forward and rests on a celestial globe; his left holds th

Caspar David Friedrich finished The Monk by the Sea in 1810 and showed it at the Berlin Academy that autumn. It was unlike any landscape painting Europe had ever seen. A flat shore. A flat sea. A flat sky that fills two-thirds of the canvas. One tiny figure of a Capuchin monk standing on the dune, looking out. No frame within the frame, no foreground tree, no Claudian arrangement of distance, no ruin, no storm. Just three horizontal bands and a man. Visitors complained. The p

Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son between 1819 and 1823, in oil applied directly to the plaster wall of the dining room of his house outside Madrid. He was in his seventies, deaf for thirty years, recovering from a near-fatal illness, and living alone in a country property called the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man. He did not sign the painting. He did not title it. He did not intend it to be seen. Saturn is one of fourteen pictures Goya painted on