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.

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

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.

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.

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.