Botticelli signed only one painting, and he signed it with a warning. The Mystic Nativity of 1500 mixes a joyful Christmas scene with angels, embraces and fleeing devils, painted in a Florence that thought the world was ending.

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.

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.

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

Michelangelo Buonarroti painted The Creation of Adam in 1511 as one of nine narrative panels along the central spine of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican palace, on commission from Pope Julius II. The 280 × 570 centimetre fresco shows the bearded God-the-Father reaching toward the reclining naked Adam across an approximately two-centimetre gap between their two extended forefingers.

Caravaggio painted Bacchus in approximately 1596 in his Rome workshop in the Palazzo Madama household of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, his first major Roman patron. The 95 × 85 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a teenage boy in classical Roman drape and an oversized ivy-and-grape garland, offering a glass of red wine directly out of the canvas. The 1922 conservation analysis found Caravaggio's own face in the mirror reflection on the carafe.

Titian painted the Venus of Urbino in 1538 in Venice on commission from Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the 24-year-old heir to the Duchy of Urbino, almost certainly as a wedding gift for his 10-year-old bride Giulia Varano. The 119 × 165 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a naked young woman lying on a red velvet daybed inside a Renaissance bedroom, looking directly out of the picture at the viewer with calm self-possession.

Pontormo painted the Deposition from the Cross 1525-1528 as the altarpiece for the small Capponi family chapel in the Florence church of Santa Felicita. The 313 × 192 cm panel is the canonical post-Raphael Mannerist break from High Renaissance composition: ten figures in an unstable vertical pyramid, no Cross visible anywhere, no landscape, no architecture, no perspectival depth.

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.

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.

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.

Two hundred years of Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture in the names that still matter — Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and the three painters who carried the late Renaissance into Venice and beyond.

After Raphael died in 1520, Italian painting got stranger. Necks lengthened, bodies twisted into spirals, colour grew acidic, space stopped behaving. Reading the painters who closed the High Renaissance — Pontormo, Parmigianino, Bronzino, El Greco — and the movement we now call Mannerism.

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.

Searching for Botticelli's Primavera? This is the painting: roughly 203 by 314 centimetres of tempera on poplar, painted in Florence around 1480 for the Medici family. Nine figures in a flowered orange grove. What the painting shows, why so many figures, and how to bring the fine print home.