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.

Six Adoration of the Magi paintings, from Gentile da Fabriano's gold-leaf procession of 1423 to Bruegel's snowfall of 1563, with what to look for in each.

Four Nativity paintings that shaped how the West pictures Christmas night: Giotto, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Botticelli and Gerard van Honthorst, read through light, scale and a single newborn child.

Three classic paintings that make good art print gifts, who each one suits, and what to check before you choose a size and a wall.

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.

Agnolo Bronzino painted Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, in a gold-brocaded gown beside her young son. The cool, flawless surface is the message: a dynasty that expected to last.

Parmigianino painted the Madonna with the Long Neck for a chapel in Parma and died before finishing it. Its stretched Virgin, sprawling child and columns going nowhere defined Mannerism.

Édouard Manet painted his wife Suzanne at the piano in 1868: a small, quiet picture of a trained musician at work, and very likely his answer to a Degas portrait he had cut in half.

A burial in the snow, a ruined Gothic church and a grove of dead oaks: Caspar David Friedrich painted The Abbey in the Oakwood as the dark companion to The Monk by the Sea.

Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa in 1503 in Florence on a poplar-wood panel approximately 77 × 53 cm. The sitter is Lisa Gherardini, the 24-year-old wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo worked on the painting for sixteen years across his moves from Florence to Milan to Rome to France — he carried the panel with him from 1503 until his 1519 death in the French Loire-valley castle of Clos Lucé, and he never delivered the painting to its com

Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night in June 1889 from the barred window of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum. The cypress is real; the night sky is not. A close reading of what he saw and what he invented.

The most reproduced image in Japanese art is also one of the most misread. Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa is not a painting — it is a woodblock print. The wave is not breaking onto a shore — it is breaking over three small fishing boats in open water. The mountain in the distance is not a hill — it is Mount Fuji. Read carefully, the print is a study in scale: an enormous force in nature, three workers continuing to row through it, and a sacred mountain holding still in the