The Venus of Milo, displayed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, is an ancient Greek statue created between 130 and 100 BC. The artist is unknown, the statue is believed to depict Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty.

Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian renaissance artist, painted two different versions with the same subject. The two versions are almost identical except for several significant details. This one is generally considered the prime version, the earlier of the two and his placed in the Louvre, in Paris.

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian artist of the High Renaissance and he is considered one of the greatest painters of all time. One of his favorite areas of study was the area of aviation. He seemed truly excited by the possibility of people flying through the skies like birds.

Attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, this painting is dating from circa 1472-1475. It represents the angel Gabriel, sent by God to announce to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and give birth to a son named Jesus. This masterpiece is housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.

Jean-Baptiste Chardin was a French painter of the 18th-century. He is considered a master of still life and his work is characterized by soft diffusion of light and carefully balanced composition. He was one of the most admired painters of Henri Matisse. This painting, Still Life with Soup shows really well the particularity of his way to paint and play with the light.

Lucas van Valckenborch the Elder was a Flemish painter, famous for his landscapes. For this painting, The Tower of Babel, the artist took inspiration from the Rotterdam Tower of Babel by his contemporary artist Pieter Bruegel. To draw the tower, van Valckenborch used the model of the Colosseum in Rome. This masterpiece is now in Louvre Museum in Paris, France.

Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter. The Astronomer is an oil on canvas and is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The masterpiece shows a man touching the celestial globe. The astronomer’s profession is shown also by the book on the table, the Adriaan Metius’s Institutions Astronomicae Geographicae.

The only diurnal painting by Georges de La Tour in the Louvre along with the Saint Thomas, the Cheat illustrates a theme that was frequently taken up in the wake of Caravaggio. The young man is subjected here to three major temptations according to 17th-century moral standards: gambling, wine, and lust.

Theodore Géricault was a French Romantic painter and lithographer. The Raft of the Medusa is an oil on painting of 1818 and has become an icon of French Romanticism. This work shows the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania. Most of the people on the Méduse died and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism. This event became an international scandal because was attributed to the incompetence of the French captain.

Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni, best known as Michelangelo,was an Italian painter, architect and sculptor of the High Renaissance; Michelangelo painted this Holy Family for a Florentine merchant, Agnolo Doni. The ‘tondo’ by Michelangelo, which is the only finished panel painting by the artist to survive. Tis masterpiece can be found today at Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The Marriage of the Virgin, a painting by Perugino, the Italian Renaissance master, depicts the marriage between Mary and Joseph. It is now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Caen, France. Perugino finished the work initially commissioned to Pinturicchio around 1500-1504.

Credits: The Marriage of the Virgin, Perugino, c.1800-1876, Lithograph, 23.4 x 18.3 cm (sheet of paper)

A masterpiece of Renaissance art, the Annunciation that Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro) painted for the north corridor of the San Marco convent is arguably his finest version of this traditional theme. Painted in fresco, it formed part of the decorative scheme at the Dominican convent in Florence - one of the most important sets of murals from the Renaissance in Florence. Financed by the Florentine Medici family, the commission was awarded around 1440 and included the convent’s altarpiece together with more than fifty other frescoes.

This beautiful painting by Italian artist Bronzino can be found at the National Art Gallery in London. Born in Florence, Bronzino was the principal portraitist to the court, and one wonders how much his own coldly idealized, polished style of painting may, itself, have contributed to the taste for the marble-hard perfection and chilly hauteur of his models.

Located at The Getty Museum in Malibu, California, this work by Gentile painted for his native town, Fabriano in the Marches, probably for a confraternity associated with the church of San Francesco. Originally the panel was double-sided and served as a processional standard held aloft in parades that honored the Virgin Mary. Sometime prior to 1827, the panel was sawn down the middle to create two paintings; the reverse, depicting the Stigmatization of Saint Francis is now in the collection of the Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, Parma, Italy.

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