A mountain of hay on wheels, pulled towards hell while the crowd fights over every wisp. In The Haywain, Bosch turned greed into a procession, and put a calm angel and an empty-handed Christ above it all.

Hendrick Avercamp, a deaf and mute painter from Kampen, filled a frozen Dutch river with hundreds of people around 1608. Look closely and the crowd hides lovers, a dead horse and a man relieving himself.

Caspar David Friedrich treated snow as a language for faith, death and survival. From the discarded crutches of 1811 to a lone oak in 1829, here is a guide to his winter landscapes and the one that was lost.

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.

Fragonard's The Swing (1767) hides a lover in the bushes and sends a shoe flying. Who commissioned it, what the details mean, and why it defines the Rococo.

Bruegel, Botticelli, Honthorst, Monet, Carl Larsson and more: eight public-domain paintings that make a room feel like Christmas, with advice on scale, rooms and frames.

In 1566 Pieter Bruegel the Elder set the Roman census of the Nativity in a snowbound Flemish village at sundown. Mary and Joseph are easy to miss.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rembrandt painted his own face almost eighty times. The last ones — bankruptcy, widowhood, the death of his son — are the honest record of an old painter who had stopped polishing.