A boat tilts on a huge wave, sailors fight the ropes, and Christ sleeps at the stern. Rembrandt painted only one seascape, in 1633, and in 1990 it was cut from its frame and stolen. It has never been found.

One subject, six movements. Follow the dogs in famous paintings from Van Eyck to Seurat and you learn to spot Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Impressionism and Pointillism at a glance.

A vanitas painting reminds the viewer that life is short. Harmen Steenwijck's table of about 1640 shows what each skull, shell, lamp and flute meant.

Caravaggio's dark, dramatic light changed European painting. Five of his works explained, from the Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the Seven Works of Mercy, each with a full article.

A god eating his child on the wall of a dining room, a severed head painted on a parade shield, skeletons tending a garden: eight paintings that have unsettled viewers for centuries, and what their painters meant by them.

Artemisia Gentileschi painted Judith Slaying Holofernes twice — first in Rome c.1612-13 at age nineteen, then in Florence c.1620-21 at age twenty-seven. The two canvases are the closest thing 17th-century European painting produced to autobiographical history-painting: Artemisia had been raped at seventeen by her father's collaborator Agostino Tassi in 1611 and testified at the trial of 1612 while painting the first Judith.

Caravaggio painted Judith Beheading Holofernes in Rome around 1599-1602, and Artemisia Gentileschi answered it years later with her own Judith. Both retell the same biblical killing, but they differ in effort, in bodies and in patron. This guide compares the two paintings side by side.

In short: for nearly two centuries, European academies ranked painting not by skill but by subject. This order was called the hierarchy of genres. History painting stood at the top, followed by portrait, everyday genre scenes, landscape, and still life at the base. The seven works below trace that ladder, from Benjamin West in 1770 to George Stubbs in 1762. A Ladder of Subjects The ranking was set down in 1667, when the critic André Félibien wrote a preface to the lectures of

Rembrandt van Rijn painted, drew, and etched roughly eighty self-portraits across his forty-year career — more than any major painter before him and almost certainly more than any since. The sequence is the most sustained autobiographical project in the history of European painting. A career-arc essay through six representative self-portraits, from the 1628 young etcher to the year of his death.

Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard, painted in Rome around 1594, is the first major European painting to use surprise as its primary subject. A handsome young man recoils as a lizard hidden among the cherries on the table sinks its teeth into his finger — and the picture's whole structure exists to make the viewer feel the bite. The 1594 commission, the iconography, the early Caravaggio boys, and how the picture announced the visual grammar of the entire Baroque.

A crowd scene is a painting built from many small stories at once. Dutch and Flemish masters such as Bruegel, Teniers and Jan Steen composed them so the eye always finds a path.

El Greco, Zurbaran, Murillo and Ribera defined a century of Spanish painting. Ten works show how they turned deep shadow into faith, poverty, and stillness.

For five centuries red was the costliest pigment a painter could buy. Six portraits, from van Eyck to Sargent, show how one colour signalled faith, wealth, and command.

Painting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was an apprenticed trade, and women were largely barred from the workshop training that made apprenticeship possible. Eight women did the work anyway. Their paintings survive, hang in major collections, and have been recovered into the canon over the last forty years. Here is what they painted, and why the survival was almost an accident.

Four techniques the old painters used to make paint do more than describe: chiaroscuro, sfumato, impasto, and velatura, and how to spot each one on a wall.

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.

Renaissance is order, balance, idealised calm — Botticelli, Da Vinci, Raphael. Baroque is drama, light, motion — Caravaggio, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt. A reader's guide to the two great European traditions, and a decor primer on when each one is the right print for the wall.

A pointing hand. A shaft of light through a tavern window. Five tax collectors at a table looking up. Caravaggio painted the founding scene of European Baroque in 1599, and every painter for the next forty years tried to figure out how.

Searching for Caravaggio's Narcissus? This is the painting: roughly 110 by 92 centimetres of oil on canvas, painted in Rome at the start of his career. A young man kneeling at a dark pool, looking at his own reflection. What the painting shows, why it is so dark, and how to bring the fine print home.

For roughly eighty years a small wet republic on the North Sea produced more great painters per square mile than any other place in history. A reader's guide to the Dutch Golden Age — Vermeer's silences, Rembrandt's shadows, Hals's laugh, and the still-life painters who turned a slice of ham into philosophy.