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.

A rowboat, a white figure, a coffin and a rock of cypresses: Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead became the most reproduced dark picture of its day.

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.